Abominations, page 1
Dedication
To Fraser Nelson and all my other courageous colleagues at The Spectator, whose editors never delete my jokes.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Part I: The Private Sector Women of Letters Talk for Ubud Readers and Writers Festival
“Putting Away Childish Things”
“Terminal Friendship”
“My Teenage Diary”
“The Big Story”
Greg Shriver’s Memorial Tribute
Part II: “What Did You Do in the War, Mommy?” “Fiction and Identity Politics”
“Liberals Now Defy the Etymology of the Word”
“Writers Blocked”
“Cruel and Unusual Punishment”
“Lefty Lingo”
Part III: Confessions of an Expat “Bye-Bye Belfast”
“No Exit”
“Patrios”
Part IV: Getting the Blood Running “Ode to the Hacker”
“London’s Unofficial Olympic Sport”
“Your Gym Routine Is Worthless”
Part V: Against the Grain “I Am Not a Kook”
“Ikea’s Real Genius”
“Our Institutions No Longer Understand What They Are For”
“Dear WriteNow”
“He, She, and It”
“A Monumental Matter”
“Would You Want London to Be Overrun by Americans like Me?”
“The Criminalization of Making Money”
“Quote-Unquote”
“Lionel Shriver Is Grateful for Pandemic Quarantine (No She Isn’t)”
Part VI: End Papers “In Defense of Death”
“I Was Poor, but I Was Happy”
“Friendship Agonistes”
“‘I’ll Never Put Up with Life in a Care Home,’ and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves”
“Just Because We’ve Been OK Doesn’t Mean We’ll Stay That Way”
“Catastrophizing Is My Idea of a Good Time”
“The Nobody at Cannes”
“Semantic Drift”
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Lionel Shriver
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
When I first dove into this project, I was no little horrified to discover what a vast clatter of nonfiction cluttered my hard drive. I could fill out dozens of volumes this size—though don’t worry, I’m not that sadistic.
The standards I’ve applied to the selection of these essays are loose: these pieces have stuck in my mind; they continue to pertain to the present; I can still stand to read them. Regarding three picks in particular, a fourth stipulation: after publication, they brought hell and damnation down on my head.
I came to journalism through the back door. I needed to augment meager earnings as a novelist. To that end, I recorded three-minute editorials for BBC Radio Ulster for several years in Belfast, where I also became point woman for op-eds on the Troubles for The Wall Street Journal. The latter comment pieces led to two three-month full-time stints on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal Europe. Yet early on, it was obvious I wasn’t just doing this stuff for money. I was enjoying myself. I was developing a new muscle. From the start, I especially relished supporting points of view that were underexpressed, unpopular, or downright dangerous.
Thus I was a monthly columnist for the British magazine Standpoint for five years, and with great pleasure I’ve written a fortnightly column for the London-based weekly The Spectator from 2017 onward. Journalism has been good discipline for me. Meeting tight deadlines has meant learning not to faff about, as the Brits would say. Filing to exact wordage—subjugating content to the geometrical demands of the rectangle—can often entail slaying favorite passages. Journalists can’t afford to be precious.
I’ve been warned that my parallel nonfiction career has probably done my reputation as a fiction writer no favors, especially since my opinions often lie several bricks wide of the Overton window. But it’s too late for regrets. The fact that Shriver supported Brexit, dislikes affirmative action, opposes lockdowns for the suppression of disease, abhors soaring national debts, defends free speech even when people use it to say something unpleasant, and resists uncontrolled mass immigration is already lodged in the public record. Readers who don’t share these views could credibly enjoy my novels, which I hope don’t err on the polemical side, as they might also appreciate large sections of this collection that address other matters. Still, I don’t apologize for these positions, especially as the preponderance of my literary colleagues lean far to the political left, and the world of letters could sorely use counterbalance.
I’m not a natural activist. I don’t go to protests or join advocacy groups. Yet in the last several years, holding the line on a range of issues has achieved a sense of urgency. In standing up to the illiberalism that has gripped so many Western institutions during the last decade, I have plenty of stalwart company in the nonfiction realm. But fellow fiction writers who’ve stuck their necks out to defend the freedoms on which our occupation depends have been disappointingly thin on the ground.
American by birth, I’ve lived the majority of my adult life in the United Kingdom, so numerous pieces here were written for British publications. I’ve regularized the spelling (American), but I’ve retained any number of British expressions and locutions (“in future”; “in hospital”), as over the years they’ve become my expressions and locutions. The topics these essays address should be broadly germane to readers in both countries. While most of this collection was previously published, readers would have considerable difficulty locating these thirty-five best-of essays in the morass of nearly a million Google hits on my name. I’ve clawed through the crammed closet of my hard drive, so you don’t have to.
Part I
The Private Sector
Women of Letters Talk for Ubud Readers and Writers Festival
Indonesia, 2013
Dear Lionel,
I bet you’re surprised to hear from me. But I’m at a literary festival in Bali—yes, Bali—and I’ve been asked to address the “time it didn’t work out.” In your case, it “didn’t work out” for twelve solid years. “It,” of course, being your career.
You’re sure to find it astonishing that I look back on the murky period in which you’re still mired with nostalgia. After all, you’re often depressed. You’ve written book after book, and no one cares. Barely a soul has ever heard of you. In the rare instances that you attend social occasions, then claim you’re a novelist, you often invite the withering inquiry, “Oh? Have you published anything?”
It’s humiliating. But you suck at socializing, so you’re better off staying home. Granted, it’s naive to encourage anyone to ignore what other people think; everyone cares what people think. But from childhood, you’ve cared a smidgeon less about others’ opinions of you than your peers do, and comparative obliviousness lends you an advantage. Indeed, a word of warning: in future, you will be awash in other people’s opinions of you, not all of them kind, and even the fawning variety will become a curse. For now, glory in your anonymity. Being a nobody is fabulous. Other people stay out of your business. They leave you alone.
We now own a small house in London. By contrast, for most of our personal Dark Ages, you’ve been ensconced in the attic of a grand but disheveled Victorian manor in Northern Ireland. The Belfast flat is funky, furnished with motley castoffs from Oxfam, with slanted ceilings and lousy little gas room heaters that give off a funny smell. But though you’re only renting, you have a more profound sense of ownership of 19 Notting Hill than we now have of the London semidetached to which we hold the deed. Your garret on Notting Hill is a weird nest in a weird city, but you have fully possessed both house and town. You give loud dinner parties for good friends, served on chipped, charity shop Victorian crockery. Mornings, you close your study door, switch on the reeking gas fire, draw the drapes, and pull up a chair to your tiny Toshiba laptop—to crawl into your own little world within your own little world. You realize that we still have dreams about Notting Hill? Because it was deeply our house. Now we’re that much closer to death, it’s now that we feel we’re only renting.
OK, you’re just short of broke, but you get by, even if you sometimes resort to Bulgarian wine. Your rent is derisory. Sod restaurants; you’d rather grill your own fish and not overcook it. You’ve no interest in clothes. You cobble together plane fare if there’s somewhere you need to go. So what exactly must you do without?
I’ll let you in on a secret: our income is more “comfortable” now, but nothing’s changed. We still prefer to eat at home. We still buy quick-sale vegetables at the supermarket, because frugality is a state of mind—one suspicious of haughty entitlement and realistic about self-indulgence, since most pampering doesn’t work. Our pleasures will remain simple, like most true pleasures: other writers’ novels; three hours of tennis on affordable courts; popcorn, as close as a snack can get to free; sleep, which is free. With more money, you’d just be flummoxed, as we are now, by what to buy. Enjoy, then, your ingenious scrimping, the game of it. Know that in time you will be better rewarded for the fruits of your labors, and it won’t matter.
Let’s not forget, either, that during your slog in the literary trenches you have also fallen deeply in love at last. After squandering your affections on a string of cads, you finally love a man for who he is, and not some silly simulacrum you mad
So blissful is your duo that I’m reluctant to share the news that after nine delightful years you’ll part. I worry that I just broke your heart. Worse, you will break his heart, and even now I may never have forgiven us for this carelessness, which continues to cast doubt on whether we constitute a “good person.” But a measure of self-mistrust has served us well. Besides, many years ago our father announced that love is the one arena in which it pays to be selfish. There, permission to be a complete jerk from your own dad. Trust that your current paramour’s successor will reap the benefit of your self-reproach. You will prove a loyal wife. And falling in love twice is a lot of times.
Most of all, you have your work. That may sound pretentious, but aside from finding a hand to hold all you’ve really ever cared about is writing books. You can concentrate. Those rejections your agent keeps faxing may be disagreeable, but the writing of the novels themselves is still a joy. The life you signed up for is private.
Oh, you’ll doubtless greet advance notice that your career will soon pick up as good news—and I’m glad if being wise to a little impending recognition cheers you up. But hold the champagne. We will merely swap one set of problems for another. The new problems aren’t superior to the old ones, either. On the contrary, the problems that confront a so-called successful author may be grimmer than the travails you face now.
For these days we’re constantly interrupted. We’re ceaselessly asked to write book reviews, support charities, appear in festivals, or open libraries. To give interviews or do photo shoots. If that sounds glamorous, it’s not. It’s a pain in the arse. Where before we floated on a sea of solitude, now we’re jostled by a crowd every morning we access our email queue. (What is email? Oh, my dear, you’ll find out all too well in time.) It’s official: We’re incredibly lucky. We’re not allowed to feel sorry for ourselves. But the right to self-pity should be enshrined in the Constitution.
As a consequence of this distraction, it now takes twice as long to write a book. Half of our time is consumed by selling it.
It really is better, if we’re going to bother to write the things, for other people to read them. It’s probably better not to live in such near destitution that a broken toaster plunges the household into hysteria. And it’s nice to have a bit more to do with other people; we feel like part of something larger now. It’s even good for our work that from time to time we talk to someone else.
But because all that comes later, you need to appreciate what you already have. You may be embarrassed at parties because no one has ever heard of you, and repeated rejection of your manuscripts is tough. Still, looking back on the years you’re living now, I realize that they constituted our prime. Why, in a novel you haven’t written yet, you will craft the following passage: “Happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something—when not a lie—the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.”
In other words: you’re far less miserable than you think.
Warmly,
Lionel
“Putting Away Childish Things”
Sermon in Manchester, England, 2013
[In recent times, secularism has become a standard default and no longer seems especially rebellious, much less brave. But in my childhood and adolescence of the 1960s and early ’70s, pushing back against the indoctrination of organized religion still required guts—especially as I was a “PK,” or Preacher’s Kid. Because resistance trains the soul just as it develops muscles in athletics, being raised in a faith I came to reject probably did me a favor. This early practice in challenging received wisdom later proved a useful rehearsal for challenging some of the left-wing truisms in which I was also marinated growing up.
Thus I hesitated when approached to give a sermon, of all things. But delivering this oration, I discovered that the cadences of theological exhortation run in my blood: the rises and descents, the pauses, the elongations of vowels, the incantatory repetitions, the landings of sentences in a plaintive minor key. Although I’m usually a second-rate mimic, impersonation of my father at the pulpit turned out to be effortless, not to mention hilarious. Lo and behold, I made a cracking minister! Yet rather than go for parody, I found myself employing that liturgical lilt in all sincerity. Moving that congregation with rhetorical tools that were my birthright, I started to realize what my father got out of delivering all those sermons. Even in a deconsecrated church, uplifting that audience provided a sensation of enormous power, but a power to all appearances not derived from ego. Quite a trick, that.]
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Who has become a “man”? In this instance, a woman. And what “childish thing” might we put away today? The very vehicle driving the survival of this passage by the apostle Paul for two thousand years: religion. Behold, then, the antisermon sermon.
Truthfully, I put away the “childish thing” of the Presbyterian Church when still a child. As I grew more vocal in my family about not sharing my parents’ religious convictions, my mother chided that on occasion it was normal—if always upsetting—to “question your faith.” But I’m not sure I ever had a faith to question. I cannot recall ever swallowing without reservation the creed that I was fed from toddlerhood. I never sensed the presence of a Being looking out for me who was not one of my parents, any more than I ever believed in Santa Claus, who was my parents. There was always a little confusion about deity in our household anyway—where in practical and emotional terms, “God the Father” usually went by the shorter appellation “Father.”
I do not understand religious faith. When it has been explained to me, I have been able to construe only that “belief” distinguishes itself from “knowledge” by being something you realize is far-fetched and unsupported by any evidence, and you profess it anyway. Mind, I won’t try to sell you on the idea that I’m still profoundly “spiritual”—not a word I quite understand either, except as a lower grade of “religious” that commits you to nothing in particular while still making you unaccountably annoying at dinner parties. Ardent believers might pity me for this hole in my soul, which impoverishes my inner world, separates me from the communion of the devout, and denies me the comforts of a personal relationship with God and the promise of life everlasting. There may be none so blind as those who will not see, but so far I haven’t felt deprived.
As well as a philosophical position, my alienation from religious faith is a personal matter. Both my parents have dedicated themselves professionally to Christianity. My mother was a researcher for the Presbyterian Church and later an executive in America’s National Council of Churches. My father graduated from a seminary in Richmond, Virginia, and earned a doctorate from Harvard Divinity School—though it jars on my ear now that Harvard would have a school of God. He was a pastor in the small town where I was born, then an assistant minister at the church where my family worshipped. He became an academic in the religion department of North Carolina State, then in the divinity school at Emory University in Atlanta. The pinnacle of his career was becoming the president of a storied, liberally minded ecumenical institution in New York City, Union Theological Seminary, for sixteen years. I relate these achievements with a conflicted mixture of bewilderment and pride.
