"When we met in her South London home for a profile in 2013, she warned me to keep my coat on because she wasn't giving the "price gougers" at the gas company any more money for heat. Her husband, who sat nearby, complained jovially about her habit of yelling at the TV news. Her thoughts on the U.S. budget deficit ate up half an hour of our precious time together."
"she has also continued writing books that lend extraordinary sympathy to characters she wouldn't agree with, and "her novels have never been mere vehicles for her politics." The exception, Waldman writes, is Shriver's scathing new book about Biden-era immigration policies, A Better Life. It "fails not because its politics are out of step with progressive opinion," she writes, "but because, among other things, it "reads like an op-ed thinly disguised as a novel," and its characters are rendered through "sociology, not psychology.""
Lionel Shriver is famously cranky and outspoken: she once refused extra heat to “price gougers,” yells at TV news, and discusses the U.S. budget deficit at length. That self-aware crankiness coexists with an ability to create complex, sympathetic characters. Shriver gained notoriety for outspoken political views, contributing columns to The Spectator on taxes and immigration and mocking cultural appropriation at a 2016 festival by wearing a sombrero. Her novels often show sympathy toward characters she disagrees with, but A Better Life, a scathing treatment of Biden-era immigration policy, has been criticized for reading like an op-ed and rendering characters through sociology rather than psychology.
Read at The Atlantic
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