A Perfectly Good Family (37 page)

Though returning regularly to New York, I’ve lived in London ever since. I’m not sure if I’ve chosen this city so much as run out of wanderlust here. London is conventional for me, and I’m a bit disappointed in myself. But I’ve less appetite for travel than I once did. I’m not sure if this is from some larger grasp that people are the same everywhere and so why not save the plane fare, or from having just gotten lazy. My bets are on the latter.

At least the novels are still thematically peripatetic. Their disparate subject matter lines up like the fruit on slot machines when you do not win the jackpot: anthropology and a May-December love affair (
The Female of the Species
), rock-and-roll drumming and jealousy (
Checker and the Derailleurs
), the Northern Irish troubles and my once dreadful taste in men (
Ordinary Decent Criminals
), demography and AIDS in Africa (
Game Control
), inheritance (
A Perfectly Good Family
), professional tennis and career competition in marriage (
Double Fault
), terrorism and cults of personality (
The New Republic
, my
real
seventh novel, which has never seen the light of day), and high school massacres and motherhood (
We Need to Talk About Kevin
). My latest,
The Post-Birthday World
, is a romance—about the trade-offs of one man versus another and
snooker
, believe it or not—whose nature seems in context almost alarmingly innocent.

For the nosey: I am married, to an accomplished jazz drummer from New York. Perhaps mercifully for any prospective progeny, I have no children. I am confessedly and unashamedly fifty years old, and never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.

Lesser known facts:
I have sometimes been labeled a “feminist”—a term that never sits well with me, if only because connotatively you have no sense of humor. Nevertheless, I am an excellent cook, if one inclined to lace every dish with such a malice of fresh chilis that nobody but I can eat it. Indeed, I have been told more than once that I am “extreme.” As I run through my preferences—for
dark
roast coffee,
dark
sesame oil,
dark
chocolate,
dark
meat chicken, even
dark
chili beans—a pattern emerges that, while it may not put me on the outer edges of human experience, does exude a faint whiff of the unsavory.
Illustrating the old saw that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I cycle everywhere, though I expect that eventually this perverse Luddite habit will kill me, period. I am a deplorable tennis player, which doesn’t stop me from inflicting my crap net-game and cowardly refusal to play formal matches on anyone I can corner on a court.
I am a pedant. I insist that people pronounce “flaccid”
flak-sid
, which is dictionary-correct but defies onomatopoeic instinct; when I force them to look it up, they grow enraged and vow to keep saying
flassid
anyway. I never let anyone get away with using “enervated” to mean “energized,” when the word means without energy, thank you very much. Not only am I, apparently, the last remaining American citizen who knows the difference between “like” and “as,” but I freely alienate everyone in my surround by interrupting, “You mean,
as
I said.” Or, “You mean, you gave it to
whom
,” or “You mean, that’s just between you and
me
.” I am a lone champion of the accusative case, and so—obviously—have no friends.
I read every article I can find that commends the nutritional benefits of red wine; if they’re right, I will live to 110. Though raised by Adlai Stevenson Democrats, I have a violent, retrograde right-wing streak that alarms and horrifies my acquaintances in London and New York.
Those twelve years in Northern Ireland have left a peculiar residual warp in my accent—house = hyse, shower = shar; now = nye. Since an Ulster accent bears little relation to the more familiar mincing of a Dublin brogue, these aberrations are often misinterpreted as holdovers from my North Carolinian childhood. Because this handful of mangled vowels is one of the only souvenirs I took from Belfast, my wonky pronunciation is a point of pride (or, if you will, vanity), and when my “Hye nye bryne cye” (= how now brown cow) is mistaken for a bogstandard southern American drawl I get mad.

A Perfectly Good Family
is about inheritance—in the general sense of what our parents bequeath to us genetically, psychologically, and morally. How much do we have a choice in what we would keep, what we would discard? Yet the novel is also about a literal, nitty-gritty inheritance, the disposition of goods—likewise, what we would keep, what we would discard. Most of all, this is a book about a house.

A house, and who gets it. In my experience, a house is never a mere building. According to standard Jungian interpretation, in dreams a house is a standin for the self. The house where you grew up must have more power to evoke that house = self formula than any other. An inheritance dispute between siblings over the family home often grows so nasty because you are inevitably fighting not just over title to a property, but title to parental preference, or title to the past itself.

“
Most of all, this is a book about a house.
”

A Perfectly Good Family
—which my mother prefers tellingly to misremember as
The Perfect Family
—is the only novel I’ve ever written set in North Carolina, where I was raised. When I was a kid, it wasn’t yet fashionable to hail from the American South, and once I came of age I fled my Tarheel heritage—as well as my accent—for New York. I never looked back until I wrote this book. When I returned to Raleigh to do the research (and how odd, to discover that you still need to do “research” on a town where you lived for ten years), I was surprised to find Raleigh a much more fascinating, particular place than I remembered, with a rich Civil War history; why, it was a lovely city in which to live, and I was lucky to have grown up there. In fact, I located an entire neighborhood called Oakwood, in the very center of downtown, of which I’d been utterly unaware as a teenager—full of fabulous Reconstruction mansions that were being restored to their original splendor by the wealthy gays who had recently colonized the area.

I fell in love. Specifically, I developed a crush on a massive threestory manor on Blount Street replete with widow’s walk, wrap-around porch, and carriage house. Yes, HeckAndrews is a real historical home, and in the novel I kept its name. But when I came upon it, the place was a shambles. The windows were boarded up; the roof was dropping slates. It hadn’t been painted in decades. Digging through local records, I learned that the old girl had been inhabited for years by another old girl—an agoraphobic who was bats. Charitable neighbors used to leave casseroles on her steps. When she’d ceased to retrieve these offerings for weeks, the police finally broke in to find not only the owner’s corpse, but bin liners bulging full of newspapers and bric-a-brac that so filled the first floor and on up the stairway that the cops could barely push in the door. You know the type: she never threw anything away.

With no living relatives, this old woman had willed HeckAndrews to the State, but North Carolina couldn’t afford to do the place up, so the poor house was falling to bits. Well, this once-grand manor captured my imagination, which for me is the same thing as capturing my heart. With the help of photos of the house from better days, I duplicated the same endeavor of those wealthy gays, albeit the low-budget version: I renovated the house on paper.

Of course, this novel isn’t only about a house; it’s also about a love triangle. The fact that the triangle is between siblings makes it no less charged than the romantic sort.

Like Corlis, I grew up sandwiched between two brothers. Only in retrospect have I appreciated the political complexity of growing up between two boys. During most of my childhood, I was pressured—sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly—to ally myself with one brother against the other. Thus our household was forever teeming with subterfuge, capricious betrayals, and ongoing seductions to switch camps, of which my parents were blissfully unaware. When there had been only two kids in the family, life was simple: my older brother and I were a team. But once my younger brother entered the picture, ultimately I switched sides. For years, my older brother was scheming to win me back. Perhaps he still is.

While the structure of the McCrea family mirrors my own, I would hope that these characters live and breathe independent of my real relations, to whom they bear only modest resemblance. The story is fictional. At this writing, my parents are—touch wood—still alive and well. Thus I have never wrangled with my brothers over real estate, and we weren’t raised in a house anything like HeckAndrews—more’s the pity. Nevertheless, underpinning this sometimes sour, sometimes comical story is gratitude for much of what I have inherited from my own parents, like an aptitude for language and an awareness of the world outside the United States. As the dedication notes, ultimately I came into “more strengths than foibles, which is the most parents could hope for any child.”

While I do believe that the profound affection that underlies these retouched portraits is obvious in the text, when this novel was first published some members of my family took offense. So just in case one of them trips across this edition, I would append a truism that should be self-evident to anyone who’s ever been a member of a family: We are not always loved for the reasons for which we want to be loved. That is, we are often loved not so much
for
who we are as
in spite of
who we are, making the experience of being “loved” at points rather unpleasant. Rest assured that my family loves me in spite of myself as well. But hey, when it comes to love, I take what I can get.

Oh, and I am pleased to report that when I returned to Raleigh a few years after this novel was first published, North Carolina had mobilized funds and was then putting the finishing touches on a complete restoration of the HeckAndrews house. I was ambivalent; I had enjoyed having sole proprietorship of that house at my keyboard. But Truman would be delighted.

Can the course of life hinge on a single kiss? That is the question that Lionel Shriver’s
Post-Birthday World
seeks to answer with all the subtlety, perceptiveness, and drama that made her last novel
, We Need to Talk About Kevin,
an international bestseller and winner of the 2005 Orange Prize. Whether the American expatriate Irina McGovern does or doesn’t lean into a certain pair of lips in London will determine whether she stays with her smart, disciplined, intellectual American partner, Lawrence, or runs off with Ramsey—a wild, exuberant British snooker star the couple has known for years. Employing a parallel-universe structure, Shriver follows Irina’s life as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men. In a tour de force that, remarkably, has no villains, Shriver explores the implications, both large and small, of our choice of mate—a subject of timeless, universal fascination for both sexes
.

Chapter One

What began as coincidence had crystallized into tradition: on the sixth of July, they would have dinner with Ramsey Acton on his birthday.

Five years earlier, Irina had been collaborating with Ramsey’s thenwife Jude Hartford on a children’s book. Jude had made social overtures. Abjuring the airy we-really-must-get-together-sometime feints common to London, which can carry on indefinitely
without threatening to clutter your diary with a real time and place, Jude had seemed driven to nail down a foursome so that her illustrator could meet her husband Ramsey. Or, no—she’d said, “My husband, Ramsey Acton.” The locution had stood out. Irina assumed that Jude was prideful in that wearing feminist way about the fact that she’d not taken her husband’s surname.

But then, it is always difficult to impress the ignorant. When negotiating with Lawrence over the prospective dinner back in 1992, Irina didn’t know enough to mention, “Believe it or not, Jude’s married to
Ramsey Acton
.” For once Lawrence might have bolted for his
Economist
day-planner, instead of grumbling that if she had to schmooze for professional reasons, could she at least schedule an early dinner so that he could get back in time for
NYPD Blue
. Not realizing that she had been bequeathed two magic words that would vanquish Lawrence’s broad hostility to social engagements, Irina had said instead, “Jude wants me to meet her husband, Raymond or something.”

Yet when the date she proposed turned out to be
Raymond or something’s
birthday, Jude insisted that more would be merrier. Once returned to bachelorhood, Ramsey let slip enough details about his marriage for Irina to reconstruct: After a couple of years, they could not carry a conversation for longer than five minutes. Jude had leapt at the chance to avoid a sullen, silent dinner just the two of them.

“
It is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
”

Which Irina found baffling. Ramsey always seemed pleasant enough company, and the strange unease he always engendered in Irina herself would surely abate if you were married to the man. Maybe Jude had loved dragging Ramsey out to impress colleagues,
but was not sufficiently impressed on her own behalf. One-on-one he had bored her silly.

“
When you cocked only half an ear to her uproarious discourse, it was hard to tell if she was laughing or crying.
”

Besides, Jude’s exhausting gaiety had a funny edge of hysteria about it, and simply wouldn’t fly—would slide inevitably to the despair that lay beneath it—without that quorum of four. When you cocked only half an ear to her uproarious discourse, it was hard to tell if she was laughing or crying. Though she did laugh a great deal, including through most of her sentences, her voice rising in pitch as she drove herself into ever accelerating hilarity when nothing she had said was funny. It was a compulsive, deflective laughter, born of nerves more than humor, a masking device and therefore a little dishonest. Yet her impulse to put a brave, bearable face on what must have been a profound unhappiness was sympathetic. Her breathless mirth pushed Irina in the opposite direction—to speak soberly, to keep her voice deep and quiet, if only to demonstrate that it was acceptable to be serious. Thus if Irina was sometimes put off by Jude’s manner, in the woman’s presence she at least liked herself.