Publishers Weekly
08/08/2022
Novelist Shriver (Should We Stay or Should We Go) collects more than two decades’ worth of her nonfiction writing in this hit-or-miss compendium. Topics range from the personal, such as the death of the author’s brother, to the pedantic—as with a look at Shriver’s “battle” against comma splices. Shriver also navigates a slew of professional controversies: in her opening address at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival, she said she hoped “the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a passing fad (albeit one not passing fast enough),” and goes on, in “a slight expansion” of a New York Times op-ed (rather than the “the crimped, eviscerated” version that the paper published), to respond to a writer who was upset by the address: “This is a performance of injury, an opportunistic and even triumphant display of injury.” While her prose is reliably strong, some of the stances she takes in service of being a self-proclaimed iconoclast can be a slog to get through, especially when they near condescension. (Of a diversity questionnaire sent to Penguin Random House authors, she writes “You can self-classify as disabled, and three sequential questions obviously hope to elicit that you’ve been as badly educated as humanly possible.”) Shriver’s fans, though, will make room on their shelves for it. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Shriver’s roving curiosity, her libertarian inclinations and her trans-Atlantic orientation (she resides mostly in England and lived for more than a decade in Northern Ireland) make her a rare voice, someone who challenges orthodoxies in the way that many journalists and public intellectuals claim to do but don’t. It is bracing to spend time in the company of such a smart, plain-spoken and unpredictable person.” — Wall Street Journal
"Should be mandatory reading for college freshmen." — Bret Stephens, New York Times
"Lionel Shriver is oddly unpredictable—and that’s what keeps her interesting. She seems to actively resist satisfying expectations." — Washington Post
"A razor-sharp observer of contemporary life who brings an acutely personal viewpoint to global issues in ways that feel both intimate and universal." — Booklist
"Spirited, incendiary, entertaining, and sure to ruffle some feathers." — Kirkus Reviews
"Shriver's fans . . . will make room on their shelves for it." — Publishers Weekly
“Shriver has always been constitutionally inclined toward defiance.” — Ariel Levy, The New Yorker
“Shriver is an incisive social satirist with a clear grip on the ironies of our contemporary age.” — Los Angeles Times
"Shriver is a master of the misanthrope.” — Time
“Shriver has always seemed to be at least a few steps ahead of the rest of us.” — New York Times Book Review
New York Times Book Review
Shriver has always seemed to be at least a few steps ahead of the rest of us.
|Los Angeles Times
Shriver is an incisive social satirist with a clear grip on the ironies of our contemporary age.
Time
"Shriver is a master of the misanthrope.
Ariel Levy
Shriver has always been constitutionally inclined toward defiance.
Los Angeles Times
Shriver is an incisive social satirist with a clear grip on the ironies of our contemporary age.
Time
"Shriver is a master of the misanthrope.
Kirkus Reviews
2022-06-29
Sharp, witty contrarian views.
Journalist and novelist Shriver gathers 35 pieces from her copious output of essays, columns, talks, and opinion pieces, many from the Spectator, where she has been a columnist since 2017, and Harper’s, where she inhabited the “Easy Chair” for a year. A preacher’s daughter born in the U.S., Shriver has lived in the U.K. for more than 30 years, 12 of them in Belfast, and has strong, cranky, shrewd opinions on culture and politics on both sides of the Atlantic. A supporter of Brexit, she “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.” Describing herself as a “socially liberal economic conservative,” her views on issues such as cultural appropriation, #MeToo, and the left’s “preening sanctimony” have generated vehement criticism and led, she admits proudly, to her being canceled three different times. Her wide range of topics includes tennis, urban cycling, fitness, the quality of Ikea furniture, happiness, friendship, and the use—or not—of quotation marks in fiction. In a sermon about her alienation from religious faith, she characterizes religion as “flattening and anthropocentric; it makes the world too known and so too small.” In a memorial tribute, she praises her older brother for having been an iconoclast, “naturally disobedient, defiant, and headstrong.” Many pieces reflect Shriver’s dismay at the “weaponized sensitivity” that has created “an oppressively gendered world, in which identity is more bound up in one’s sex than ever before.” As a straight, White, female novelist, she rails against the idea that creating characters of different ethnicity, race, disability, sexual identity, religion, or class opens her work “to forensic examination” and derision. “The contrived taboo of so-called cultural appropriation,” she asserts, “means we can safely write only autobiography.”
Spirited, incendiary, entertaining, and sure to ruffle some feathers.
