Lionel Shriver Is Looking for Trouble
writers novelists books novels literature fiction lionel shriver england
Ariel Levy Christine Smallwood Alexandra Schwartz Clare Malone Condé Nast
The author’s contrarianism has made her famous, but fiction is what she believes changes minds, Ariel Levy writes.
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The New Yorker
In Lionel Shriver’s novel “The Mandibles,” it’s 2029, the United States has defaulted on its loans, and the country is plunging into an economic abyss. Suddenly, a cabbage costs thirty-eight dollars. Savings accumulated over a lifetime evaporate in an hour. Former hedge-fund managers compete for jobs as waiters. (Their new patrons are foreigners; America, like other failed states, has become a magnet for tourists who can afford luxuries that the natives can only dream of.) Everyone is grimy, because water shortages have rendered showers brief and infrequent. This is made particularly troublesome by another post-apocalyptic issue: there’s not enough toilet paper.

“I found that really gratifying,” Shriver said, as she considered her prescience, one recent afternoon in London. Since the lockdown went into effect, she has been sequestered with her husband, Jeff Williams, at their row house in Bermondsey. It is a modest, comfortable place, decorated with thrift-store finds and small ceramic sculptures—smooth, faceless figures—that Shriver made, along with memorabilia that Williams has gathered in his decades as a jazz drummer. But Shriver was not feeling cozy. “Truth is, I’ve never been this shaken,” she told me. She wasn’t worried about getting sick. “The virus doesn’t faze me,” she said. She was afraid that she would prove oracular about more than toilet paper, and that we are hurtling toward global financial cataclysm—what she described in “The Mandibles” as “an ongoing, borderless nightmare ended only by death.”

Reviewing the book for the Times, in 2016, Ruth Franklin called Shriver, who is originally from North Carolina, the “Cassandra of American letters,” and reminded readers that “the curse of Cassandra, after all, was that she told the truth.” Shriver has often been convinced that we are freaking out about the wrong things—focussing on climate change, for instance, instead of contemplating the population explosion that fuels it. The coronavirus, she believes, will ultimately prove less destructive than the international fiscal contraction that it has provoked. “There’s reference in the media all the time now to ‘monetizing the debt,’ as if that’s the most normal thing in the world. But there’s no real difference between monetizing the debt and defaulting on it—it just takes longer,” she said. “We’re now in such an interconnected and complex financial world that we don’t know what we’re playing with.” Shriver, who is sixty-three, thinks people are ridiculous for congratulating themselves on enduring quarantine, when the worst is yet to come. “This is not the bad part,” she said. “This is the nothing part—as long as you’re not one of the people who are gravely ill, or have lost someone who became gravely ill. Obviously, I wouldn’t diminish that. Given that I would be characterized as a lockdown skeptic, one of the pitfalls of that role is to be cast as someone who thinks that the virus is trivial, and I wouldn’t want to be stuck with that.”

Regular readers of Shriver’s column in The Spectator—the magazine that Boris Johnson edited before he became a politician—might be surprised to learn of that last concern. In April, Shriver wrote that even the shocking fatalities in Italy and Spain seemed not so distressing, compared with other dangers: “I shout at the TV: ‘These numbers are ridiculously low!’ ” A month later, she added, “Covid deaths will barely register in the big picture even if their total multiplies by several times.” She is unmoved by the possibility that the death tolls aren’t higher because quarantine is working.

Instead of worrying about the virus, she argues, you should worry about your bank account—and your neighbor’s, your employer’s, and your country’s. “There’s going to be a rash of defaults across every single kind of loan,” she predicted. “Car loans, houses, defaults on credit cards.” Devastating inflation will follow, and finally money will be drained of value. If you want a tomato, you will have to trade something for it that is actually useful—like toilet paper. “I do not believe you can get away with conjuring value from nothing to an infinite degree,” Shriver said. “We came so close to things just going completely to hell in 2008 that I don’t think any of us who kept up even slightly during that period can pretend that that’s not a possibility. And it scares the living shit out of me.”

All of this might be keeping Shriver up at night, if it weren’t for the fact that she doesn’t sleep at night anyway. She usually goes to bed at about 5 A.M. Shriver is relentlessly contrarian, not only in her political positions—she is a pro-Brexit, anti-woke, #MeToo-skeptical Democrat—but in most aspects of life. She eats only one meal a day: dinner, usually around midnight, often featuring “burn your face off” quantities of chili pepper. She dislikes babies. Before moving to England, in 1999, she elected to live in Belfast for a dozen years during the Troubles. She and Williams leave London every summer, but not for the beach: they have a place in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, with no air-conditioning. She rarely uses the subway or taxis, preferring to ride a bicycle, no matter the distance, the weather, or the time of day. She is a woman with a man’s name that she chose for herself at the age of fifteen. Shriver has always been constitutionally inclined toward defiance.

Fittingly, her novels tend to explore almost perversely unappealing issues. “Game Control” is about demography and AIDS, “Big Brother” about morbid obesity and filial duty. “So Much for That” (a National Book Award finalist) describes a slow death by cancer, made even more miserable by the failing American health-care system. In “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” Shriver’s breakout hit, a mother comes to terms with her son’s committing mass murder at school. (The book, which won the Orange Prize in 2005, is chillingly effective. I found myself keeping Shriver’s hours when I read it, because I was too hooked to sleep.) “I tackle precisely the subjects that everyone yearns to avoid,” Shriver has said. Her new novel, “The Motion of the Body Through Space,” is notionally about fitness fanaticism, but it’s really about physical decline and mortality: “One of the biggest transformations of aging was the way that healing grew horribly slow, as if your cells were reluctant to waste the energy of replacement on an organism en route to the scrap heap.”

Shriver has a leathery imperviousness to conflict, which could be either the cause or the effect of her impulse to provoke. Last fall, back in the old world of congregating and speaking to people with uncovered faces, I met Shriver late one night at a crowded bar in Manhattan. She got into an argument about Brexit with an English acquaintance of mine, which culminated in actual screaming. He left outraged, and e-mailed me the next morning, still upset. When I asked Shriver if the dispute had bothered her, she had no memory of it. She is so accustomed to scrapping that it registers for her as little more than small talk.

If the coronavirus has made us all warier of our fellow-humans and more pessimistic about the future, then Shriver has spent a lifetime preparing for it. “I am a type. I don’t like groups. I maintain few memberships,” Shriver wrote in a recent column, titled “I Have Herd Immunity.” “I’m leery of orthodoxy. I hold back from shared cultural enthusiasms. Everyone’s met such obstreperous specimens—the original self-isolators.”

Last month, in the Los Angeles Times, Shriver described her quarantine schedule: “Jeff and I arise at dawn, so we can sit out back and watch the sunrise. London is so much more peaceful when no one is doing anything unnecessarily productive in it.” It was a time of intense focus, she reported. She was reading Proust; Williams was learning the sitar; they’d both decided to forgo alcohol until normal life resumed. Then she wrote, “I lied. We got up at noon. I read the Telegraph, the New York Times and The Spectator, then maniacally worked on my new manuscript, the only fiction I can stand to read. We watched the Channel 4 News, Newsnight, Sky News, PBS NewsHour and one more car-crash presidential press briefing on CNN. We killed a second bottle of wine. We made a fumbling stab at sex but Jeff was too drunk.”

Shriver likes to describe her relationship with Williams by saying that they are both “divorced from the same woman.” His first wife was Shriver’s agent, and for years they had dinner together every summer. Then Williams and his wife split up, in 2000, and the tradition dissolved. A year later, Shriver gave her agent a draft of “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” The agent was “horrified,” Shriver said, believing that it was too dark to sell, and they parted ways soon afterward. (The novel was turned down by a dozen other agents and some thirty British publishers before it was bought by Serpent’s Tail, for four figures. It has sold almost two million copies.)

Williams recalled a consequential reconnection the following summer: “I had a gig in New York, and Lionel came by herself, and we had our annual dinner. It went from there.” First, though, Shriver had to extricate herself from a nine-year relationship, with an American journalist she’d lived with in Belfast. “Feeling really pulled in two different directions, between two completely different men—it’s an embarrassment of riches, and also the worst thing that can ever happen to you,” she told me. The experience inspired her next novel, “The Post-Birthday World,” a book that is as comforting as “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is disturbing. “The Post-Birthday World” tracks two realities: one in which the protagonist, Irina, has a passionate affair with a snooker player (starting when they stumble into having dinner together on his birthday), and one in which Irina withstands temptation. Shriver renders her characters’ emotions with exquisite specificity and empathy. Irina’s irresolute yearning, in both scenarios, is agonizing and yet oddly reassuring. The message of the book is: It doesn’t matter. Whatever decision you make will have its rewards and its costs, and you will sometimes be tormented by the alternative, because to be human is to doubt.

What’s remarkable is that Shriver, who is at her most lyrical and compelling when contemplating her characters’ ambivalence, is so inordinately assured of her positions on real-world issues that many of us find confounding. Immigration, for example. “I’m willing to admit that strict policies are potentially good for ‘us’ and bad for ‘them,’ ” Shriver told me last fall, when she was at home in London, preparing dinner for some friends. “But the European sensibility is very uncomfortable with self-interest. You would never do something just because it’s good for you—it has to be good. And I reject that!” She banged a pan of homemade cannelloni into the oven. (Shriver was a caterer before she was a writer.) “My whole sensibility is pretty brutal,” she said. “I believe that it is the right of countries to decide that, even though all these people want to come to your country and work in nail salons and send a bunch of money home, that doesn’t mean you necessarily let them in.” That day, the London papers had led with the story of thirty-nine Vietnamese people who died trying to sneak into England in a refrigerated container truck. “The coverage has been incredibly sentimental,” Shriver continued, as Williams, a lanky man of sixty-nine, poured wine. “I mean, I’m sorry for their sake that they are dead, but insofar as it instigates yet another conversation about immigration—‘Well, it’s our fault, because we don’t let people come in by regular channels, so they’re forced to come in the freezer containers’—if you advance that argument, you let everybody in, and then the country they’re coming for no longer exists.” She had argued strenuously for Brexit in her columns and on numerous television programs and podcasts. She was unable to vote for it, however, because she is not a British citizen: she is an immigrant.

Shriver had her hair up in a clip, and she was wearing a red dress under a black overcoat, which she did not take off all night. Williams had on a flannel shirt under a heavy wool cardigan. It was unbelievably cold in their house, because Shriver refuses to turn the heat on unless the alternative is genuinely dangerous. She has shared this quirk with several of her characters: in “The Mandibles,” her protagonists are too apocalyptically broke to warm up the house; in “The Post-Birthday World,” Irina’s imperious Russian mother keeps her apartment in Brighton Beach so chilly that Irina has to wear gloves. Irina—like Shriver—suffers from Raynaud’s syndrome, a circulatory condition that causes painful sensitivity to cold. Shriver eschews heat partly for pragmatic reasons: “I’m cheap!” But she is also fascinated by testing her own toughness.

Like the characters in her new novel, Shriver is a lifelong fitness fanatic: trim and muscular and bristling with strength. “I don’t have to use it,” she said. “You just like knowing you’ve got it in reserve.” In her thirties, she sometimes fasted for three weeks at a time. She is proud of facing even the worst things in life with fortitude. In a column around the time of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, she wrote, “I have my own sexual abuse story, and it’s way worse than Christine Ford’s. . . . What happened to me does not haunt my adulthood unduly, does not explain all my problems, and did not result in a host of ineradicable neuroses. I don’t mean that others who still battle demons as a consequence of sexual trauma simply need to suck it up. I mean only to establish that moving on is possible, and to suggest that we start celebrating resilience as well as baring our scars.”

The bell rang, and, as Williams went to answer the door, Shriver whispered conspiratorially, “Our guests are Remainers.” Her own sentiments about Brexit began with political pique (“The EU is a bloated bureaucracy packed with pampered timeservers,” she wrote in Harper’s) and escalated to moral outrage (“If unintended consequences were grounds for invalidating a vote, we’d have to nullify most elections, or simply stop bothering to hold them”). But the topic was carefully avoided until about 1 A.M., when everyone was a little drunk, and digging into Shriver’s apple-raspberry pie. By that point, she was in no mood to argue about the deficiencies of the European Union. She was in her other mode: entertaining, self-deprecating, training her relentlessness on a good time instead of on a good point. “Sometimes I wonder: Why do I give a shit?” Shriver asked merrily from the head of the table, puffing on an e-cigarette that resembled a tiny blowtorch. “I think I have an addictive personality, and it doesn’t just extend to drinking a little too much red wine. It’s also a narrative addiction. I do think there is a principle involved with Brexit, but it’s not going to make any big economic difference one way or the other, and everything will plod along in either case! So why do I care so much? I can’t quite answer it, aside from the fact that these stories have a momentum. And, once you have aligned yourself with one side or the other, then it’s like a sport.”

Shriver’s highest-profile moments in the past few years have been as an ideological competitor. Depending on your point of view, the stakes of the game were either profound insensitivity to racial and cultural traumas or a hat and a mailbox, respectively. In the first instance, Shriver gave a keynote address at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival, in which she argued against the concept of cultural appropriation. She briefly donned a sombrero, in solidarity with students at Bowdoin College who had been censured for hosting a tequila party at which revellers wore the hats. “The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: You’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats,” Shriver said, and cautioned, “The ultimate end point of keeping our mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction.” People walked out in protest. A piece in the Guardian said that the speech “drips of racial supremacy.” The festival disavowed Shriver and her perspective. Two weeks later, Francine Prose wrote, in The New York Review of Books, “Shriver takes a familiar tack often used on Fox News: trivializing valid concerns by ridiculing their most absurd manifestations.” She added, “It’s worth noting that Shriver’s own visibility has greatly increased in the aftermath of her Brisbane lecture.”

More recently, Shriver appeared on the popular British talk show “Question Time,” and told a live audience that she didn’t understand what the big deal was about Boris Johnson writing, in the Telegraph, that women in burqas look like mailboxes. “Why is that so insulting?” Shriver asked. The audience booed, and a woman in a hijab shouted, “I’m from here! From that rhetoric I get told to get back to my own country! Take responsibility!”

“Did you read the original op-ed?” Shriver asked, and the woman rolled her eyes, disgusted. (The piece, which Johnson wrote before he became Prime Minister, was introduced with the line “Yes, the burka is oppressive and ridiculous—but that’s still no reason to ban it.”) When the interaction began, Shriver had seemed to be barely containing a smirk, but now her tone shifted to pleading: “He was standing up for Muslim women’s right to wear whatever they want!”

A week later, she wrote to me, “I have managed to get myself into trouble again,” adding that she’d appeared on the program “against my better judgment—and I have to say that my better judgment doesn’t get a lot of exercise these days.” After a clip of the spat went viral, an old friend of Shriver’s ended their relationship. “All over a difference of opinion about whether ‘letter box’ has pejorative qualities. For pity’s sake, one could as well be vilified for saying, ‘You look like a chair.’ ”

Shriver argues that her detractors engage in “malicious misinterpretation,” hunting for the worst—the most racist, sexist, homophobic—possible reading of whatever they encounter. In one column, for example, Shriver expressed distaste for a Penguin Random House plan to make its authors and staff members reflect the U.K.’s demographic breakdown by “ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.” She was accused of being a literary white supremacist, and she responded indignantly. “In a polarised and broadly illiterate digital universe, full of predators gorging on animosity who are determined to read whatever they wish to, words cease to function,” she wrote. “All nuance out the window, the language no longer serves to communicate, and what we writers do for a living is worse than pointless.”

Sure. But it is hard to believe that Shriver wasn’t spoiling for a fight when she predicted that soon, even if a book is “incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible,” it will matter less than the identity of the writer: “If an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published.”

Last November, during a talk at the Oxford Union, Shriver was asked about the difference between writing fiction and columns. “Fiction is much more subtle,” she replied. “It’s more evasive, it’s more circuitous, it should be a little harder to discern what the message is—not that it shouldn’t have a message, but that message is usually complex and sometimes contradictory.” Asked which was more likely to change people’s minds, she answered immediately, “Fiction.”

But, as the cultural status of novelists has declined, the power of the provocateur, the Twitter warrior, and the political combatant has risen. Shriver is perpetually in demand as a commentator for the other side—of pretty much any issue. Ultimately, she prefers fiction to fighting: her new novel is her fourteenth. For Shriver, the problem with being both a pugilist and a novelist is that the first role tends to overshadow the second.

“All this stuff you’re doing is a distraction from writing another novel, which you’re intent on, man,” Williams said, once their Remainer guests had gone home. It was quite late, jazz was sliding out of the speakers, and the air was so cloudy with nicotine vapor it was almost like being in a tiny, extremely cold club. (After years of playing with such jazz greats as Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie, Williams peppers his speech with words like “dig” and “cats” and “vibe.” Shriver lent his lexicon—and his vocation—to the title character in “Big Brother,” who defends it by saying, “Every profession got its patois.”)

Shriver had been asked to compile a book of her columns, and she was torn about whether to proceed. “You can’t write fiction if you spend the next year and a half on that!” Williams continued. “Between your appearances and the new book coming out? These are processes, man, you know what I mean?” Williams argued that someone else ought to go through Shriver’s nonfiction to cull the best work. “If it’s me, O.K.”

“It just takes so long to reread this shit,” Shriver said. “You don’t really want to do that. You’d find it degrading.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to—I have my own commitments,” he said. “Then I’m saying you’re more important than I am.”

“See?” Shriver said, laughing. “Case closed.”

“Which you probably are,” Williams said, puffing on his e-cigarette. “In fact, you definitely are.”

Williams told me that, during the years when he and Shriver were friends, he’d never thought about their becoming a couple. “I didn’t think I was good enough for her,” he said. “She was so intelligent—oh, my God! But it turned out that we were actually a perfect match.” Shriver’s new novel is dedicated to Williams, with the note “Added together and divided by two, we make a perfectly balanced person.” Asked if they disagreed much about politics, Williams replied, “Not fundamentally. She’s a little more extreme than I am. I’m more of a diplomat type—I can see both sides. Sometimes we argue about that.”

Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, Shriver was known as Margaret Ann, and not known as a troublemaker. She remembers being raised in a “real top-down family—a nineteen-fifties family in the nineteen-sixties.” Her mother, Peggy, stayed home with the kids when they were young, and her father, Donald, was a Presbyterian minister and an academic. Though he was politically progressive—active in the antiwar and civil-rights movements—Shriver describes him as a “natural autocrat.”

From early on, Shriver’s older brother, Gregory, who had a genius I.Q. and a larger-than-life charisma, was engaged in a power struggle with their parents. It culminated in his dropping out of school and leaving home when he was fourteen, to live with two women with whom he’d become involved. “He was the one who stood up to my parents—he stood up to everyone,” Shriver told me. “I really admired him. He didn’t do what he was told. And I guess I’ve been copying him ever since.”

“There was a kind of mythology that my parents built up around him,” Shriver’s younger brother, Tim, a peach farmer in Iowa, told me. “They had a favorite phrase, that Gregory was ‘too smart for his own good’—which is kind of a weird construction. Lionel and I did not act up, and it could sometimes feel like by behaving well we were not as smart as he was.” On the British radio program “My Teenage Diary,” Shriver read from a journal entry she’d written at age twelve, describing her resentment at being eclipsed by her older brother. “Everywhere I go: ‘Are you Gregory’s sister?’ ” she wrote. She wanted to be known as herself—or, rather, as Tony Shriver, one of many pseudonyms she tried on. “I was already drawn to a male nomenclature,” she said, “inclined toward a masculine identity.” It was only logical, she suggested: “I grew up between two brothers. And it was very clear to me in my family that my father had the better deal.”

Her given name, Margaret Ann, represented everything that she despised about being a girl. “From childhood, I experienced being female as an imposition,” Shriver wrote, in a piece called “Gender—Good for Nothing.” “Periods were hideous. Did my brothers get puffy once a month, suffer terrible back aches and go back to wearing smelly de facto diapers? I was the one, too, who had the fear of God put in her about getting pregnant. In comparison to their sons, my parents clearly had reduced expectations for my career prospects. Ruefully, at eighty-seven, my father finally conceded last year: ‘You know, we may have underestimated you.’ He still hasn’t quite brought himself to admit why: I was the girl.”

The family moved to Atlanta when Shriver was fifteen, and she entered her new high school as Lionel. “I just liked the sound of it,” she said. “It was kind of arbitrary and out of the air.” (Shriver seems to employ a similar strategy for naming her characters: Serenata Terpsichore, Nollie Mandible, Goog Stackhouse, Mordecai McCrea.) Donald Shriver, who is now ninety-two, believes that his daughter was making a career move. She had announced her decision to become a writer when she was seven. “I think she chose a first name that might give readers some question as to whether she was a man or a woman,” he told me.

After high school, Shriver attended Emory University for a year, and then transferred to Barnard, in New York. Her parents had recently moved to the city, when Donald was hired as the president of Union Theological Seminary. The Shrivers still live on the Upper West Side, in a big, crowded apartment near the Hudson. When I went to see them, last spring, a photograph of Lionel at twenty-five sat on a table: she had the same intense, assured, faintly smug look that she has in many of her author photos, but the effect is different on a very young woman. (“The thing about being that age,” Shriver told me, “you’re just so . . . penetrable.”)

Donald sat in a leather chair. Peggy, who suffered a stroke a few years ago, sat next to him, silently holding his hand. “Peggy and I met in a church organization, so we have a great debt to them; we’ll be married sixty-seven years on August the ninth,” Donald said, and his wife gave a little smile. “She’s from the Midwest, and one of the trials of moving from Iowa to Virginia was having to adjust to Southern race relations. I marched in Selma with Martin Luther King, and I was grateful for that, because it gave me a touch of what the movement was about. My father and I had big conflicts over the civil-rights movement. I’m sure Lionel is conscious of that. The fact that I marched for voting rights—I could’ve lost my job as a university pastor.”

Shriver and her siblings turned away from the church; like the rest of their cohort, they were challenging orthodoxies. On a more personal level, they felt that the humility their father preached was at odds with his true nature: ambitious, individualistic, and self-regarding. Shriver told me, “I grew up in a household that believed it was just mind-blowingly altruistic. And that’s a formula for being cynical about altruism.”

In one of her early novels, “Game Control,” an American do-gooder goes to Kenya to promote family planning among the poor. She falls in love with a misanthropic demographer, who chides her: “Your dowdy sympathy is not helping them, and it is certainly not helping you.” (The character was informed by the photographer Peter Beard, whom Shriver got to know during a year she spent in Nairobi. In her thirties, she thought that she’d move from country to country, exploring settings for her novels—looking for cultures to appropriate, as it were. But when she got to Belfast she didn’t want to leave.) In some ways, the demographer is Shriver’s proxy: only too eager to scandalize earnest colleagues with his hard-heartedness. “Why are we still trying to reduce infant mortality?” he asks at a conference. “We keep more children alive to starve and suffer.” Shriver told me, “The trouble with fake altruism is that it doesn’t necessarily do good, because it’s designed to draw attention to the do-gooder. I don’t think I believe in the possibility of real altruism.”

She contemplated charity, self-interest, and resentment in her novel “A Perfectly Good Family,” about a young woman from the South who moves to London to become an artist, then returns home to settle affairs with her two brothers after her parents die. Their late father was a grandiose civil-rights lawyer who was overly proud of his progressiveness. “My brothers may have resented their father’s staking claim to the big liberal issues not just because these were used to bludgeon the boys into submission, but because so little largesse was left for them,” the protagonist says. Their mother is also judged insufficiently authentic. “If the stagy fakery that invaded my mother’s behaviour had been restricted to her ‘telephone voice,’ ” Shriver wrote, “and that fossilized smile for strangers, I could have forgiven her as a socially formal woman covering for the fact that she was shy. But it was in private she was at her most false.”

Shriver dedicated the book to her parents. When they read it, they were furious. “I was threatened with basically being ejected from the family,” Shriver said. The portraits were both unmistakable and unflattering; along with the insincere parents, the younger brother is fastidious and tightly wound. “There was plenty to be upset about, and it was perplexing to us sometimes why she didn’t understand that,” Tim told me. He conceded that her depiction of their mother was dead-on: “She had a formal way of speaking, and you hungered for something to come out off the cuff, straight out of her gut.”

The only family member who liked the book was Gregory. The older brother in the novel, Mordecai, is wily, selfish, self-made, and self-destructive—a magnetic figure who, after years of hard drinking, gets in a motorcycle accident and ends up in a wheelchair, cared for by his siblings. Shriver’s novel proved prophetic: Gregory, too, drank heavily, and years after it was published he got T-boned on his moped and became reliant on painkillers. “That’s when he started eating too much,” Shriver said. He became obese and dependent on his parents, in a way that he’d rejected as a fourteen-year-old. He died of heart failure at the age of fifty-five.

On the radio, Shriver read a letter that she’d written to her younger self: “Gregory will cease to overshadow you. At length, you will overshadow him to a degree that makes you embarrassed, until you yearn to give him some of your spare limelight to illuminate his cheerless evenings.” She wrote about their relationship in “Big Brother,” which hovers around an investigation of duty. When the protagonist, Pandora, goes to pick up her sibling at the airport, he has grown so large that she does not recognize him. “Looking at that man was like falling into a hole,” Shriver writes, “and I had to look away because it was rude to stare, and even ruder to cry.” This helpless agony suffuses the book, as Pandora nearly destroys her marriage trying to save her brother from himself.

“She’s not a devotee of happy endings,” Donald Shriver told me. “Sometimes I think her skepticism is too deep. I wish she’d write about some people where you could say at the end, ‘I think she truly admired those characters.’ ”

One night in October, an m.c. stood onstage at Central Hall Westminster and recounted the building’s history. The U.N. General Assembly first sat there. Past speakers had included Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Winston Churchill—all of whom, the host said, were “fitting warmup acts for tonight.”

Shriver walked onstage with a jaunty, jockish swagger, accompanied by Douglas Murray, the author of “The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity.” The house was sold out, some two thousand seats filled with people eager for some live iconoclasm. “We’re here to talk about identity politics,” Shriver said. “If you know anything about our work, you know we’re here to talk about what’s wrong with it.”

“Or leave now,” Murray said, and got a big laugh.

Shriver inherited some of her father’s gift for leading the faithful down familiar ideological pathways. She described a culture engaged in an Olympics of victimhood—“categories of people who are implicitly pitted against each other for your sympathy”—and the crowd broke into applause. “It is not about becoming powerful. It’s about seeing your powerlessness as your power,” she went on. “We are encouraging people to embrace their own fragility and their own difficulties as the source of their very identity.”

Murray said, “I don’t disagree,” and Shriver replied, “I don’t imagine we’re going to disagree on anything.”

They had a friendly exchange about activism. “The worst thing that can happen to any liberation movement is getting what it wants,” Shriver said.

“There was a time when gay-rights groups, civil-rights groups in America, and so on, had a point,” Murray, who is gay, added. “Now what is the point of these entities?”

But then Murray suggested that the real agenda behind identity politics is the overthrow of capitalism. “They’re using trans as a battering ram,” he posited, with the goal of “smuggling in Marxism.”

Shriver looked pained—triggered, you might say. “The way you keep talking about ‘they,’ I don’t know who you’re talking about,” she said. The audience laughed, but she wasn’t joking. Here, among her most devoted fans, Shriver found the only conceivable way to be contrary: she defended her antagonists. “Most of the people who have got caught up in this way of thinking, they’re not malign,” she said. “They’re responding to a natural human need for purpose, for meaning, and even for justice.” For a moment, Shriver the novelist, the lover of complexity, emerged. The people on the other side of the argument suggest that you come “pre-made,” she said. “And that is not my experience of being a person. My experience—and I don’t want to go too New Age on you—but it is a continual act of becoming, of creation. If nothing else, you continually have to be another day older. . . . To instead focus on the things that are never going to change—from the day that you are born—is like locking yourself in a room.”

Windsor Terrace, on the southern edge of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, is so verdant and leafy in August that it feels almost bucolic. One night, Shriver and Williams sat on their front porch with the door and all the windows open, hanging out with Tony Sarowitz, Shriver’s best friend. Sarowitz, who has longish, grayish hair and lives part time in Woodstock, recently completed a science-fiction novel and writes financial copy as a day job. He and Shriver met in the seventies, as students in Columbia’s M.F.A. program. “It’s the main thing I got out of it,” Shriver said. “Which, I have to say, is a lot. They have yet to invite me to teach there, by the way. I hate teaching creative writing, but . . .”

“It’s a little odd that they haven’t asked you,” Sarowitz finished for her.

“I get the best of both worlds,” Shriver said. “I don’t have to teach creative writing, and I can be resentful!”

Shriver and Sarowitz play tennis three times a week during the summer—one of the main reasons that she comes to Brooklyn. (They don’t keep score; they’re too competitive to handle losing.) Shriver’s knees have been giving her trouble, though, and she is terrified of having surgery, because she won’t be able to exercise during the recovery period. “My father’s been saying, for the last ten years, he’s a little bit worried he’s not going to be able to play tennis anymore,” Shriver said. “That just pains me. I am genuinely sympathetic with the travails of being ninety-two years old.” (In “The Motion of the Body Through Space,” Shriver writes, “How much kinder it would have been, to turn off, like an appliance. The gradual, drawn-out corruption of the body while its host was still trapped inside was a torture of a sort they would have contrived at Guantanamo, or Bergen-Belsen. Every old age was an Edgar Allan Poe story.”)

“You’re going to be the same way, man,” Williams said.

“Except you’ll still be playing,” Sarowitz added. “You’ll have a stroke. You’ll lose an arm, but you’ll still be playing.”

As the men talked about music and books, Shriver watched them and puffed on her blowtorch. She has known Sarowitz since they were young, but she met Williams when they were well into middle age. “I missed the absolute prime, which I feel annoyed by,” she told me. “When you really know someone, you keep in your perception who they have been, and you’re able to see them in a fuller sense, but that also means a blurring of the present. I like concentrating sometimes on Jeff’s younger visage.” She exhaled vapor. “Fucking good-looking guy,” she said, in a tone that you don’t often hear women use to talk about their husbands: more wolf whistle than reminiscence.

Williams brought her back into the conversation. “You resent being a woman,” he said.

“I hate being a woman,” Shriver corrected. “What’s to like?”

“But you get to enjoy it for a few extra years,” Sarowitz said.

Much of Shriver’s value system revolves around tough-mindedness. Stop borrowing money you can’t pay back—and stop lending it, too, while you’re at it. Don’t dwell on your traumas, recover from them. Rejoice in your power, not in your oppression, and never, ever start a sentence with “As a . . .” Shriver has changed her name, her country, her accent, her religious affiliation, and the definition of “female” that she was raised to embody, in order to become a self-created, self-interested oddity, distinct from the mores of literary society. But you can’t outwit everything. The body inevitably gets the last word, forcing us all to accept an identity that there’s no escaping: mortal.

I FaceTimed with Shriver on a chilly morning in May, the day after she finished the first draft of a new novel. It’s about a couple who decide in middle age that they’ll kill themselves when they turn eighty; they’ll have a quick, clean death, skip all the suffering, turn off like appliances. Shriver was in no mood to celebrate its completion. “One of the gross things about the tranquillity and the comparative silence outside the window is that, at the same time, horrible things are happening, and we can’t hear them,” she told me, sitting in her red-walled study, wearing a thick, black faux-shearling jacket against the cold. “If failing businesses happened in a physical realm, like a building falling down, then it would be deafening out there. And we’re not just talking about greedy fat cats. It’s regular people who are losing their jobs.”

Long before the pandemic, I had asked Shriver if she felt that it was her job as a columnist to propose antidotes to the world’s ills. “Solutions are no fun,” she replied. “Problems are really fun and apocalyptic, and they have a kind of gorgeousness—there’s a wallowing there in the awfulness. These prissy little solutions don’t get me going.” This problem, though, was not so gorgeous. For the moment, she didn’t even want to fight about it.

“I would love to be wrong—it would be wonderful,” Shriver said. “We can talk a year or two from now and you can make fun of me.” She gave a half smile. “We can get together in fancy restaurants and talk about how stupid I am. That would be brilliant.” ♦

An earlier version of the photo caption misidentified the building behind Lionel Shriver.