Thought-provoking essays. With humour, intelligence and erudition Shriver says what I wish I had the courage to say as a ‘pre-dead person’ in this no-platform age. ( )

Known until recently primarily as a fiction writer, Shriver has of late entered the cultural fray, with a series of essays speaking to the current zeitgeist which includes wokeism and its evils, self-contradictions, illogic, racism, and other various bugbears. In this volume, Shriver has assembled a selection of her best, touching on topics ranging from the personal (the death of one of her friendships, her late brother's obesity problems, her parents' religion), the political (identity politics, gender ideology, diversity hires), and including some laugh-out-loud humor ("Lionel Shriver is Grateful for Pandemic Quarantine (No She Isn't)"

Shriver has a robust and energetic voice, and a zesty style. She holds no punches here, calling them as she sees them. She doesn't easily fit into a political box, espousing liberal, libertarian, and sometimes even conservative positions on a range of topics, and that makes for very interesting reading, as it's pretty boring reading someone you know you're going to agree with on every topic. She can articulate her positions with clarity and insight, often presenting her arguments with basic questions that distill down the issue at hand to its very core kernel of truth. I appreciated the introductions to several of the essays, which gave some necessary historical and social context to the writings. ( )

Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction by Lionel Shriver is a very highly recommended collection of thirty-five opinion pieces.

Shriver is known for her sharp intellect, well-supported opinions, and perfectly chosen vocabulary. This is a superb collection covering more than two decades of some of her nonfiction selected from the Spectator, Guardian, New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Wall Street Journal, as well as speeches, reviews, and unpublished pieces. Whether you agree with her on everything or nothing, Shriver clearly and succinctly makes her case and doesn't particularly care what others think about her opinion.

She is citizen of the U.S.A. who has lived in the U.K. for 30 years (12 years in Belfast), and shares opinions and thoughts on culture and politics concerning both countries. She does not shy away from opinions and thoughts that will be controversial. I appreciate this enormously. She clearly indicates which essays resulted in people trying to cancel her, not that she cares. Some of the pieces are lighter in tone than others, providing a nice mix.

As a proponent of free speech, she writes about what she thinks and would extend the same right to you. Topics covered include, in part: Brexit, religion, friends, fitness, taxes, cancel culture, wokeness, gender politics, semantics, trends in literature, the lockdown, tennis, cycling, nationalism, diversity, feelings, and more. Abominations is going to thrill fans of her fiction when she provides some insight into some of her novels, Big Brother being one example. I'm an ardent fan of her fiction and as I read these pieces I couldn't help but think, "Good for her." It is always refreshing to read someone expressing their firmly held personal beliefs in a logical, well-written manner and not care if any mob comes after them for it.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2022/09/abominations.html ( )

A hundred years ago, short articles exploding a subject was a craft, seemingly perfected by Robert Benchley and James Thurber. Benchley covered pretty much everything there was to cover, from the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I, to train travel with children. Thurber said he always feared that what he was writing in the 1940s had already been written by Robert Benchley 20 years earlier – and better. Now comes Lionel Shriver, who covers a lot of the same ground, and while usually not as funny, brings another terrific quality to it – attitude. It makes Abominations, a collection of her non-fiction articles, positively sparkle.

Here’s what I mean, from a speech she gave to fellow fiction writers: “Most writing sucks. Most things that people make of any sort suck. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make anything. The answer is that modern cliché: to keep trying to fail better. Anything but be obliged to designate my every character an aging five-foot-two smart-ass, and have to set every novel in North Carolina. We fiction writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats [put on hat]—including sombreros.” (She had the gall to put on a sombrero at the end of the speech, and a social media ruckus ensued, mostly by people who were not there and had no access to her script – no one else did.)

These articles usually follow a straightforward formula – find everything you can about the topic and organize it to make it clever and fascinating, even if no one else would normally consider it such. She tackles identity politics, living in Belfast, the death of her brother, healthcare, the ongoing malignancy within fiction (her main pursuit), and friendship’s foibles, among others (There are 37 articles, including an unusually good introduction that sets the tone). She is right up to date, dealing with trolls, pronouns, and the “right” not to be offended. There’s even a two-faced diary of the pandemic.

Naturally, readers will also piece together her own story, like changing her name from Margaret to Lionel, a choice few others would claim, and how to deal with lifelong soulmates who suddenly turn on her. Or the ugly deterioration of her parents. She has managed to distance herself from such things, and put them squarely and fairly in perspective. This has the effect of making the reader want to read it all right away, even if the stories sometimes go on for too long.

She lives in London and Brooklyn, and she lives hard. Bicycling everywhere all over Europe long before it became fashionable, tennis always, wearing what she likes – and that does not include makeup – and partying. Lots of partying, with a lot of politics. She lived in Belfast for a decade when it was not a global stopping point, and was always an outsider there, despite intimate friendships and dedication to the town and life there. (Everywhere she goes, she says, she is an American, except in America.) So no one will mind how personal the stories of poverty, publishing or income tax regimes get. Shriver keeps it all moving at a swift pace.

Shriver is nothing if not opinionated:

On taxes, she believes the rich pay too much, and the poor not enough. Somehow she has come to the conclusion the rich “do not pull in enough to cover an entire nation’s bills,” despite all the evidence to the contrary.

She’s against diversity if it is only for the sake of diversity, pointing to ridiculous policies of replicating the diversity of the UK, hiring exactly two people of one nationality because that would be the same proportion as in the general population. She is far more interested in lifting restrictions on talent.

On healthcare, she thinks people whine too much: “Reject fee-for-service and put physicians on salary. Return to a medical model that treats injury and disease, not dissatisfaction—thus relegating redress of infertility, erectile dysfunction, and gender reassignment, for example, to elective procedures that the disgruntled are obliged to finance on their own dime. On a popular level: resign ourselves that some physical discomfort comes with the territory for us animals; recognize that medicine cannot ameliorate our every ache and pain. Accept that with aging comes deterioration, which mountain-biking baby boomers will have especial difficulty accommodating.”

And despite her bold stances, she is not of much use to feminists: “I do not experience myself first and foremost as a woman. I do not walk around all day contemplating labia and breasts and ovaries, much less determining to get my nails done or to make an appointment for highlights. For me, my very self has no sex.” At the same time, she would not restrict pornography, or abortion.

Unbelievably, at least to me, she identifies best with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the obstreperous blocker of legislation and nominations, a man whose neighbors can’t stand him, and who appointed himself an opthalmologist by petition, not certification, taking advantage of an age-old loophole in state law. She says she is forced to vote Democratic because Republican platforms verge on the lunatic. She is totally offended by Donald Trump.

It helps that her politics are all over the place, because they add to the fun. She does her best to reason things out for the reader. She is firmly in the Brexit camp (she calls the Northern Ireland border a “fake predicament”), and favors the unionist camp in Northern Ireland, leaving the island split.

Possibly the best examples are in her main line of work, novels. She has written nine, and one, We Need to Talk About Kevin, was made into a film. Her writing is attacked for cultural appropriation, meaning she has no right to even try to write for other races or nationalities or even the opposite sex. Which rather limits potential story lines, she says. Fiction writers are similarly criticized for adjusting language to reflect a character’s background, race or education. Anything at all that can identify a character as different from the writer is suspected cultural appropriation in this new cancel culture. Asked how she thought she could write well from a male perspective, she replied: “… the crucial constituents of our characters have little to do with sex, unless we insist on labeling clumps of qualities—forcefulness, violence, inability to cry; tenderness, consideration, inability to drive—as exclusively male and female, which they are not.” She says they are her characters. She invented them, and she can have them say or do whatever she wants.

Shriver is concise, direct and clear. Refreshingly so throughout the book.

However.

She’s not always thorough or reliable. In a story all about monuments, she focuses on the Civil War statues of Richmond Virginia, where she was born. She says they’re really just for the tourists and that locals don’t even know who the statues represent. This is not true, as locals tried long and hard to protect their secessionist heroes from removal. And one glaring fact is missing from her story. She does not notice their illegality. Putting up a statue to Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis is treason, as is flying the rebel flag. In war, the first thing the winning side always does is tear down the traitors’ flag, and never lets it appear again. Statues to traitors is a uniquely bizarre American malaise. Even in her other home, England, where they often celebrate dismal failures in statues, they draw the line at treason. None of this occurred to Shriver in her otherwise expansive article.

Other times, she’s out of her depth and flat out wrong. In an article on inflation, Shriver attacks Modern Monetary Theory this way: “According to ‘magic money tree’ thinking, a.k.a. modern monetary theory, a government that controls its own currency can print money to cover its expenses without limit.”

But MMT does not say that, largely nullifying everything that comes after. Unless the reader doesn’t know MMT (which is likely), in which case her whole argument is brilliant.

In attacking progressives, she says “’Progress’ merely means go forward, and you can go forward into a pit.” But that’s not true. Progress implies improvement over past failures. Otherwise it is just dumb movement, not actual progress. But conservatives don’t want to hear such nonsense.

Several pieces, unfortunately, deal with English language editing. I say unfortunately because it is a rite of passage, a seemingly safe topic every writer/editor feels empowered to publish. Benchley and especially Thurber fulfilled their weekly deadlines far too often just picking a letter of the alphabet and having at it. These here are mostly about things like writers abjuring quotation marks, which is clearly not an improvement on anything. And catchphrases and fashions in word choice. Plus, there’s the usual, tedious mourning for the changing meaning of words. At least she doesn’t trace word origins back to the ancient Greek, which is just too tiresome, but the fact she somehow ignores is that languages are living things. They constantly change, as does everything. The meaning of a word can change overnight, and there’s nothing neither she nor anyone else can or even should try to do about it. Shriver is not bringing English back to the apparently glorious 1980s any more than EB White brought it back to the more correct 1900s.

She is also less than pleased with jargon, the memes of every era. She lists them and belittles them. To no real effect. Bitterness and resentment are simply a waste of time. Go with the flow or be left behind.

These are not quibbles; they are features. They all contribute to the complex being Lionel Shriver presents in her nonfiction writing. It is very different from the punditry of this era, and she is the first to recognize it. And still not change a word. After all, she has called it Abominations for a reason. Thank you, Lionel Shriver.

David Wineberg ( )