Lionel Shriver Should Have Written an Op-Ed Instead

Few novelists today can match Lionel Shriver for topical range. The author of 18 books, she is best known for her 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, about a teenager who murders several of his classmates. The nine novels that followed include a clever critique of the American health-care system (So Much for That, 2010), a family drama about the obesity epidemic (Big Brother, 2013), an economic dystopia (The Mandibles, 2016), a satiric look at the growing popularity of extreme endurance sports (The Motion of the Body Through Space, 2020), and an exploration of the social costs imposed by increased longevity (Should We Stay or Should We Go, 2021).

In her latest, A Better Life, Shriver tackles immigration and goes off the rails, which makes this an ideal moment to take stock of her novelistic gifts and ambitions. As her subjects suggest, she is not the kind of writer whose fiction features precious lyricism or pseudo-intellectual or solipsistic musings. She has a wry observational intelligence that propels her well beyond her personal orbit. She is also adept at unpacking psychological states and analyzing relationships with almost clinical incisiveness. Her writing is witty, and startlingly precise. We Need to Talk About Kevin describes a man as a “stringy cerebral type whose skittering metabolism burns chickpea concoctions at a ferocious rate.”

Shriver’s novels teem with well-chosen observations about ordinary life, the sort that some literary novels skip: whether characters watch what they eat; what exercise routine they favor (a disconcertingly large proportion of them do calisthenics daily); how long they stay when they visit; whether they dominate conversation or ask questions of others. She devises interesting plots too. Her protagonists do things, which is not to say they do outlandish or unbelievable things to facilitate crude plot twists.

Shriver tends to see the world as being divided between those who work hard and support others—both in their personal life and through the taxes they are forced to pay—and those who take advantage of such people. The characters who have her sympathy practice what the protagonist of her 2007 novel, The Post-Birthday World, calls “mental kindness.” That is, they try to be charitable in their assessments of others, even in the privacy of their thoughts. As a novelist, Shriver holds herself to the same standard. Her tone tends toward the caustic, and she doesn’t give central characters a pass when they behave badly, but she is fair to them. She shows us their reasons, even when they behave in ways that she clearly finds irritating, such as going all in on extreme endurance sports in their mid-60s.

Her more comic novels do, however, too often include one-dimensionally terrible minor characters (a pretentious filmmaker who mooches off her brother in So Much for That, a born-again woman who uses Christianity to feel superior to others in The Motion of the Body Through Space ); they seem to exist only so Shriver can skewer them. But these takedowns of generally easy targets are atypical. Shriver focuses most of her fictional energies on characters who are more generously, and more plausibly, drawn and thus more deserving of her—and our—interest.

In her non-novelist capacity as, among other things, a columnist for the British magazine The Spectator, Shriver enjoys a reputation as a provocateur and a contrarian: economically conservative (“unenthusiastic about widespread dependency on the state,” as she once put it) while progressive in her social views, though anti-“woke” and critical of the #MeToo movement. Her decision to briefly wear a sombrero at a writers’ festival in 2016, to signal her disapproval of the then-faddish concept of “cultural appropriation,” caused a stir in literary circles.

But however controversial Shriver is as a commentator, her novels have never been mere vehicles for her politics. Take The Mandibles, a book that revolves around the national debt, long a bugbear of hers. This might seem a particularly wonkish fixation, unlikely to inspire even passable fiction, but Shriver—whether or not you agree with her views on the underlying macroeconomics (I don’t)—delivers a clever pillorying of Americans’ belief that our place at the top of the international hierarchy is both deserved and permanent. In the novel’s near-future setting, the rest of the world abruptly decides that it will no longer underwrite the United States’ debt. By the end of the book, the U.S. is just like any other developing country, and Mexicans speak derisively of white Ameritrash. The granularity of Shriver’s vision reflects a mind as skilled at analyzing the reverberations of monetary policy in daily life as at depicting interiority. It also makes for a very entertaining read.

Which is to say that if any contemporary American novelist could write compelling fiction about immigration policy—perhaps the single most important issue in national politics—it would probably be Shriver. It’s certainly very much like her to try. And it is unlike her to fall short on just about every count I’ve described. A Better Life, her new novel, fails not because its politics are out of step with progressive opinion. If that were sufficient to doom a novel, The Mandibles wouldn’t have met with the praise it did a decade ago. Nor is the main problem that A Better Life reads like an op-ed column thinly disguised as a novel, although that’s part of the trouble.

A Better Life tackles what Shriver portrays as the ruinous immigration policies of the Biden years. Nico, the book’s 26-year-old protagonist, lives with his divorced mother, Gloria, rent-free in the well-appointed basement of his childhood home in Brooklyn (now worth $2.5 million). He hasn’t had a job since he graduated from college and spends his days scrolling through the right-coded precincts of the manosphere. An inheritance from his grandfather enables beer and takeout when the mood strikes. As the novel opens, he’s bitterly relocating to his old, cramped bedroom upstairs: Gloria has decided to house a female asylum seeker in his former lair, through a city-sponsored program that Shriver apparently modeled on a plan floated but never enacted under former New York Mayor Eric Adams.

Having an immigrant boarder suits both Gloria’s progressive politics and her pocketbook: The city will pay her more than $3,000 a month. An artist who spends most of her time volunteering at a nearby makeshift shelter for immigrants, she can use the money. Nico’s two sisters share their mother’s heartfelt pro-immigration views and support her decision. Nico does neither. But the step Gloria takes at least gives him a sense of purpose; already leaning toward a keep-them-out position, he becomes fixated on it.

He rails about progressive-run cities, such as New York, that promise new arrivals “free digs, free grub, and free Wi-Fi,” perks guaranteed to ensure that yet more people keep coming. Sounding like a cranky 60-something, he complains about the state of bike lanes: “Their overwhelmingly Hispanic riders didn’t glance over their shoulders before overtaking or signal when they were making a turn.” Many of these bikers are out making deliveries, of course. (It’s unclear why Nico thinks so many immigrants work these jobs when they are, according to him, given so many freebies by the city.)

In outline, the premise seems primed for satire: A young man who lives off his mother is obsessed with immigrants who he thinks are living off hardworking American taxpayers. Indeed, A Better Life is full of passages that read as if they are meant to be send-ups of blinkered ideologues: “Over tequila shots, Vernon launched into a set piece about how, while populations in the West were heading into gradual decline, Africa was the exception, certain to rise from 1.4 billion this year to 2.5 billion by midcentury.”

But Vernon, a documentarian and a longtime friend of Nico’s parents, is not drawn as a satirical figure; rather, we are intended to see him as bombastic but appealing—warm, gregarious, freethinking, and probably correct in his concern about Western decline. This tone deafness is characteristic of the novel, which seems to want to operate as a work of realist fiction dealing with people whose fates we’re supposed to care about, no matter how thinly portrayed or unattractive they are.

Nico is the primary example, despite the twist Shriver offers on the stereotypical angry young male reactionary: He’s not a jobless flyover-country type; he’s a white man reared in the upper-middle-class meritocracy. A member of the coastal elite, he’s been at once coddled and academically driven, only to then fail (thanks to DEI policies) to get into even an Ivy-adjacent school. But this is sociology, not psychology—as characterization, it’s merely a starting point, as a novelist of Shriver’s skill certainly knows.

The book never goes deeper. Nico’s inner life is almost entirely devoted to thinking about immigration as a public crisis and about Martine, the Honduran asylum seeker who has moved into his mother’s basement. Nor do his daily interactions prompt any sort of lively reflection. The bulk of the book’s dialogue consists of long discussions of the issue initiated by Nico with whomever he encounters. Whatever merit the material might have as opinion-page filler, as conversation, it’s leaden.

The book’s plot is more compelling than its dialogue—but only because it’s melodramatic. Martine turns out to have some troubling associates, who first make themselves at home in the household and then commandeer it. As Martine taunts Nico: “Other people take your nice country, they take your nice soft life. Because you no fight.” The situation comes to a head when Nico does try to fight back.

Picture him in concert with a bunch of late-middle-age white men (including his father and Vernon) in ski masks, toting guns; a dead body; an unreliable witness to the crime—I’ll stop here, though there’s more. The climactic conclusion is action-packed, yes, but getting invested is hard when the characters are little more than mouthpieces in service to a pat homeland-in-danger metaphor—prolix zealots like Nico and Vernon, naive progressives like Gloria, and opportunistic new arrivals ready to seize their moment when she throws her doors wide open.

Perhaps Shriver envisioned the book’s exploration of Nico’s frustration as a warning to liberals—a novelization of one of those “this is how we got Trump” articles. But prescient it is not: In the current moment, A Better Life reads like a dour morality tale from a bygone civilization, one in which Americans never imagined they’d be reeling at images of masked ICE agents pulling day laborers off the streets. If you fed ChatGPT a Fox News segment about criminal immigrants and the progressive politicians who enable them and instructed it to come up with a Lionel Shriver novel, I’m not sure the result would be much worse. The book’s only mystery, really, is that a writer of Shriver’s talent bothered to churn it out, however up in arms she may have been about the nation’s immigration policies.

Though puncturing liberal pieties on a subject like this one is certainly on-brand for Shriver, the newsy subjects that have served as catalysts for her fiction have generally operated as springboards, not destinations—a way into stories that are fundamentally character-driven and focused on relationships. A Better Life doesn’t just call attention to the inadequacy of topicality on its own to propel a novel; its failure serves as a reminder of Shriver’s true strength.

She has excelled at more than the deft depiction of inner life, a staple of successful domestic fiction. She is one of the most astute portraitists of marriage working today. The long-term potential as well as the perils of intimacy were central themes even in her debut novel, The Female of the Species (1987). When Shriver wrote of The Post-Birthday World ’s protagonist that “having a man who loved her and whom she loved in return was the most important thing in Irina’s life,” she described a disposition shared by many of her main characters, most notably Eva Khatchadourian, the narrator of her signature work, We Need to Talk About Kevin. On its face a compassionate exploration of post-Columbine sociopathic darkness, it is also a brutally poignant story of a marriage.

Eva’s romance with her husband, Franklin Plaskett, delights and amazes her. Very mixed feelings about motherhood kick in when she gets pregnant—and it doesn’t help that Kevin is a difficult baby and then boy. For a good portion of the novel, readers are apt to tack back and forth on the questions that explicitly animate it: Is Eva’s ambivalence the reason Kevin turned out as he did? Was she not loving enough? Or was Kevin just born that way—and the social tendency to blame mothers prompts us to find fault in Eva?

What makes the novel so unusual, however, is that its most emotionally compelling drama is submerged, and is one that Eva herself never fully recognizes: Her attachment to the marriage is doing profound damage, forcing her to choose between Franklin’s affection and her ability to speak truthfully about what she sees, what she fears. If she isn’t a good mother, it’s not because she doesn’t love Kevin enough—it’s because she loves her husband too much, and he can’t or won’t acknowledge that there is anything worrisome about their son.

Subtle, painful, with central characters who are both slippery and beautifully drawn, the book manages one of fiction’s most elusive feats. It seduces us into viewing the world as Eva does, only to then show us that we, too, have fallen prey to a willful ignorance of the rot in a marriage she values so much.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

By Lionel Shriver

Shriver has written other original novels about marriage and family. But We Need to Talk About Kevin stands out for its elegant construction; the cool austerity of its prose, which is intimate without being cloying or chatty; and its sheer narrative power. Its artful evocation of self-deception recalls 20th-century classics about marriage such as Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?

To pull off something close to pure ventriloquism, leaving Eva’s perspective and mood to dictate the tone, as Shriver does, is the sort of imaginative triumph that is a rarity for any author, as she knows. In The Mandibles, a young man sees that his 90-something great-aunt, a formerly famous writer, is unhappy, and he speculates as to why. “You want to write with the same fire that lit you up when you were writing Better Late Than,” he says, naming her unmatched novel. And then he finishes the thought: “the kind of fire that hardly anyone gets to keep.”

* Lead image sources: Douglas Sacha / Getty; Herika Martinez / AFP / Getty; Eugene L. Armbruster / The New York Historical / Getty.

This article appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “The Novel as Extended Op-Ed.”