Christine Smallwood: Lionel Shriver's Speculative Fictions: The New Yorker It took the American novelist Lionel Shriver a long time to get our attention. Her first six books, published in the course of two decades, were met with a critical shrug and sales that Shriver later described as "in the toilet." Her seventh, an epistolary novel narrated by the mother of a school shooter, was rejected by thirty publishers before a small house in England (Shriver's adopted homeland) paid her all of two thousand pounds for the manuscript. The book made her name, and her fortune. Published in 2003, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" became a best-seller, won Britain's Orange Prize, and was turned into a vermillion-smeared film starring Tilda Swinton. Since then, Shriver has used her novels to explore the vicissitudes of recognition, and the fate of the almost-made-it that she herself almost became. "The Post-Birthday World," published in 2007, includes a fable along these lines. It describes a children's book, illustrated by the novel's protagonist, about a boy named Spacer, who very much wants to win the sack race at his school's Sports Day. Spacer practices diligently, but on race day he doesn't place. It is typical of Shriver, a writer who relishes delivering bad news, that the book's author "refused to wrap up his tale with any tried-and-true moral, like it's not whether you win or lose. He was adamant the story not suggest that Spacer just needed to try harder, or that Spacer might prevail next year. Rather, the narrative underscored that Spacer had tried as hard as he could but his best wasn't good enough. How we cope with the fact that life's resources - talent, beauty, wherewithal in the sack - are not evenly distributed is a concern to which Shriver's novels repeatedly address themselves. Many of her memorable characters - the mulishly dutiful Shep, in "So Much for That," whose dreams of absconding to a Third World paradise are delayed when his wife is diagnosed with a rare and incurable cancer; the frustrated, self-pitying Edgar, of "The New Republic," whose desire to stand out leads him to concoct an imaginary terrorist organization - can be seen as grownup versions of Spacer: also-rans, whose redemption, such as it is, hinges on how they bear the fact of their ordinariness. Her most memorable character is Kevin Khatchadourian, who, rather than accept the fate of being like everybody else, blows the whole sack race to bits. Shriver is a tart, unsanctimonious writer. Her characters like to joust and provoke. In "The New Republic," a privileged man named Henry Durham complains that there's nothing to spend money on that will make him happy. When another character suggests philanthropy, Henry scoffs, "People have to die of something." Henry's wife chimes in, sharing her dismay that no one can even fantasize about wealth properly: When I taught remedial English in the East End, I had my students compose their own best- and worst-case scenarios for ten years later. The nightmares were fabulous: lush with fantastic fears, hilarious with misadventure. The pipedreams were all the same: a string of products and brand names. They read like mail-order catalogs. My students" visions of the Good Life were so vapid and depressing that you could have got the two assignments confused. If this morbid exchange is indicative of Shriver's illusionless candor, it also points toward another one of her abiding preoccupations: the counterfactual. For a writer so insistent on an unvarnished apprehension of things as they are, Shriver often seems less concerned with the events that take place in her novels than with how her characters imagine, and mourn, the events that do not. "What possessed us?" the narrator of "We Need to Talk About Kevin" writes to her husband: We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? Of course you consider the very putting of that question profane. Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't. But a Pandoran perversity draws me to prize open what is forbidden. I have an imagination, and I like to dare myself. In "Kevin," Shriver takes the dare further than we at first realize: the book concludes with the revelation that the husband to whom Kevin's mother has been writing is dead - he was killed by their son on the day he murdered his classmates. "The Post-Birthday World" plays a more literal game, alternating between two story lines, one in which the protagonist stays with her partner of almost a decade and one in which she leaves him for a famous snooker player. The novel is not about which choice is right but about how both choices lead to lives haunted by unmet expectations and thwarted possibility. Shriver's new novel, "Big Brother" (Harper), is another ghost story, a broad, sometimes grotesque satire about how things might have turned out. The book is narrated by Pandora, a forty-something entrepreneur, who lives in quiet satisfaction with her husband, Fletcher, an unsuccessful maker of custom furniture. The action revolves around a visit that Pandora receives from her older brother Edison, an obnoxious jazz pianist who has recently gained a lot of weight: he now weighs three hundred and eighty-six pounds. Edison is another Spacer, of sorts. For a while, he had seemed destined to place first in life's sack race, or, at least, he talked that way. But lately the gigs have dried up, and his refrain - "I've played with some heavy cats" - has become pathetic. Biographical inference can be a mug's game, but readers of the English press, where Shriver moonlights as a waspish and galvanizing social commentator, will be aware that the author is herself the real-life sister of a fat older brother. In 2009, Shriver wrote a column for the magazine Standpoint, later republished in the Guardian, in which she reported his weight (three hundred and thirty pounds), height (once five feet seven, vertebrae compressed to five feet three), and "genius-level IQ." She accused the fat-pride movement of aiding and abetting, and declined to accept that obesity is "an unassailable state over which we have no control." At fifty-five, Shriver's brother was considering a gastric bypass, and his doctor had asked for her assistance in sticking to a post-surgery diet. She was still deciding what to do when she wrote the column. A few days after she sent it to her editor, her brother died of a heart attack. "Big Brother" explores the possibility that he might have been saved. Many of Shriver's plotlines trace a downward trajectory, in which one step off a straight and narrow path leads to chaos, often of the sexual kind. In her first novel, "The Female of the Species," a sixty-year-old virgin anthropologist falls in shattering love with a charismatic graduate student; "The Post-Birthday World" pivots on a kiss. This kind of deterministic plotting puts Shriver in the company of naturalists such as Zola and Dreiser. Like them, her characters are not so much free actors as they are socially conditioned animals, helplessly participating in their own demise. Naturalism came to the fore in the late nineteenth century, when human actions were increasingly chalked up to social and biological forces. In such periods - and we might include our own early-twenty-first-century moment of chronic debt and MRIs - we become interested in who controls us, and what happens when we get out of control. Shriver typically presents collapse as a loss of discipline over the body. When her characters reach for an extra glass of wine after dinner, or eat an extra slice of cake, trouble is usually afoot. In "Big Brother," the unravelling is not about gaining weight but about losing it. Pandora, who has put on some weight herself, assumes the role of Edison's sponsor and sergeant, and together they embark on a liquid diet. Whereas many recent novels about obesity abound with lavish inventories of consumption, "Big Brother" starves its two main characters, who limit themselves to protein powders and cups of tea. In short order, dieting becomes an obsession as dangerous as chocolate-chip pancakes and baby back ribs. Too much control, in Shriver's vision, is another form of anarchy. Both evade the responsibility of moderation. "Eating nothing is easy," Pandora says to Edison when she finally forces him to take down a spoonful of canned cream-of-chicken soup. Eating something but not very much is an ever-loving bitch. Shriver constructs her novels tightly around governing motifs; here Edison is opposed to Pandora's husband, Fletcher, a health nut named in honor of Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator of the late nineteenth century, who recommended chewing each bite of food thirty-two times before swallowing. Whereas Edison smashes a wineglass and breaks a chair with his "wide berth of shielding flab," Fletcher takes his whole-wheat toast dry, and avoids dairy. He and Pandora are serious, careful people, with no use for leisure time; she fell for Fletcher when she saw him shaking water from his hands in the sink to avoid splattering drops on the floor. They share a home with Fletcher's two teen-aged children from a previous marriage, which ended when his wife got addicted to crystal meth, a habit she finally kicked with the help of Christianity. In Shriver's world, characters must go it alone, even if their power over their own lives is tenuous. "Big Brother" suggests that Edison's quest is hopeless: more than once, Shriver tells us that, of those who manage to lose more than thirty pounds, the long-term average weight loss they maintain is only seven pounds. Whereas the psychological coup de théâtre of "Kevin" had a satisfying sense of inevitability, the twist ending of "Big Brother" is jarring. Shriver seems to suggest that Pandora is at once impotent and morally culpable. That might be a fine way to sum up the feeling of being in a family. For Pandora and Fletcher, Edison's obesity is a symptom not merely of his thwarted aspiration but of a broader cultural sickness that they are trying to inoculate their kids against: the fate of joining a nation of prima donnas who can't cope. Edison's obsession with making it turns him into a selfish monster, and, worse, a wanna-be "artist." Pandora, who has recently become wealthy from a custom-doll company, prefers an approach in which the daily, humble rounds of work and routine make living itself a form of craft. This is a politics, equal parts escapist and entrepreneurial, that turns inward for meaning. The medicine that the novel prescribes is a course of anonymous toil. "Only gradually do you come to appreciate that the occupation you aspire to is harder than you thought, that the supply of other young, self-anointed apples of their own eyes is inexhaustible, and that you're not as uniquely gifted as you'd thought," she says. Far better to spend ten years "fetching lattes" than fall victim to a big break: "It's surely a fine emotional art - dousing your hollow hauteur without quenching the fire in your belly altogether - but the kids who master it come out the other side both shit-hot at their professions and bearable as human beings." A theory of satisfaction slowly emerges from this novel about insatiable appetites. "However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse," Pandora thinks. We are meant to be hungry. Edison burned hot and young, and when things got tough he despaired, and pigged out. Unlike little Spacer, he never confronted his dashed hopes manfully. For Shriver, disappointments do not occur in spite of meaningful work - they are what make work meaningful, by giving us something to work for. This isn't to say that Shriver gives out gold stars just for showing up: her novels, far from dispensing with competition, welcome the tough knowledge that comes with both winning and losing. Having spent decades building a body of work in relative obscurity, she knows the virtue of keeping your head down and slogging it out. Still, what writer isn't ambitious when it comes to Sports Day? Shriver recently told a reporter that after fourteen years in the U.K., she is considering applying for citizenship. She wants to be eligible to win the Man Booker Prize. ♦