A Perfectly Good Family (38 page)

Irina hadn’t been familiar with the name of Jude’s husband, consciously. Nevertheless, that first birthday, when Jude had bounced into the Savoy Grill with Ramsey gliding beside her—it was already late enough in a marriage that was really just a big, well-meaning mistake that her clasp of his hand could only have been for show—Irina met the tall man’s grey-blue eyes with a jolt, a tiny touching of live wires that she subsequently interpreted as visual recognition, and later—much later—as recognition of another kind….

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
, by Edith Wharton

I love virtually all of Edith Wharton, but this one’s my favorite. Why Wharton, in general? I admire her prose style, which is lucid, intelligent, and artful rather than arty; she is eloquent but never fussy, and always clear. She never seems to be writing well to show off. As for
The Age of Innocence
, it’s a poignant story that, typically for Wharton, illustrates the bind women found themselves in when trapped hazily between a demeaning if relaxing servitude and dignified if frightening independence, and that both sexes find themselves in when trapped between the demands of morality and the demands of the heart. The novel is romantic but not sentimental, and I’m a sucker for unhappy endings.

FLAG FOR SUNRISE
, by Robert Stone

I’m a big fan of most of Stone’s work. This one’s the best, though—grim and brutal. Stone has a feel for politics in the gritty, ugly way they play out on the ground. His cynicism about what makes people tick, and his portrayal of how badly they behave when either desperate or given free rein to do what they like, jibes—alas—with my own experience of the species.

“
[
The Age of Innocence
] is romantic but not sentimental, and I’m a sucker for unhappy endings.
”
AS MEAT LOVES SALT
, by Maria McCann

I include this more recent title if only because, especially in the U.S., it didn’t get the attention it deserved. A historical novel—which I don’t usually read—set in Cromwellian England, it’s about a
homosexual affair in the days when same-sex marriage was hardly in the headlines; rather, man-meets-man was a hanging offense. I relished the radical sexual tension McCann created, without ever becoming sordid or even very blow-by-blow (so to speak), and the story is sexy even for hetero readers like me. In fact, this riveting story works partly because it’s told by a straight woman, and so isn’t tainted by the faint self-justification of many gay authors’ work.

“
I’d recommend all of Dexter’s books, but he may never have topped [
Paris Trout
].
”
PARIS TROUT
, by Pete Dexter

I’d recommend all of Dexter’s books, but he may never have topped this one. He writes about race and bigotry without the moral obviousness that this subject matter often elicits. His prose is terse and muscular, but not posy and tough-guy.

ATONEMENT
, by Ian McEwan

A terrific examination of guilt and exculpation—or, as for the latter, lack thereof. He writes about childhood in a way that isn’t whitewashingly sweet, and he doesn’t endorse cheap forgiveness, of yourself or anyone else. There’s a powerful sense in this book that sometimes seemingly small sins have enormous and permanently dire consequences, with which you’re condemned to live for the rest of your life. I read this while writing
Kevin
, and I think some of McEwan’s and my themes must intersect.

ENGLISH PASSENGERS
, by Matthew Kneale

Once again, I include this novel for its relative commercial obscurity in the U.S.—
though it did, justly, win the Whitbread in the UK (and should have won the Booker). Seven years in the writing,
English Passengers
follows the hapless journey of a ship bound for Tasmania in the mid-nineteenth century to find the original Garden of Eden. The novel demonstrates the value of good research, which is seamlessly integrated into the text, and it’s hilarious.

HAVE THE MEN HAD ENOUGH
?,
by Margaret Forster

Forster is underappreciated even in the UK, and shamefully neglected in the U.S. This book takes on subject matter from which most novelists have shied: the increasing decrepitude and dementia of an aging relative. Given the demographic future, this is material that most of us will soon have to contend with, like it or not.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
, by Richard Yates

Yates was able to look at the disturbing underside of so-called ordinary life, and even more successfully than John Cheever exposed the angst and dissatisfaction that teem beneath the placid suburbs. I don’t think anyone’s life is simple or easy, even with enough food on the table, and Yates was depressive enough as a person to appreciate this fact.

“
[Richard] Yates even more successfully than John Cheever exposed the angst and dissatisfaction that teem beneath the placid suburbs.
”

THE IDIOT
, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Of Dostoevsky’s novels, most writers would cite
The Brothers Karamazov
. Which I also adored in latter adolescence, but found I
could not bear when I tried to read it again in my thirties. I hadn’t the patience. By contrast, re-reading
The Idiot
as an adult rewarded the return. At that time, I was writing my second novel,
Checker and the Derailleurs
, and also grappling with how difficult it is to write about goodness. Virtue in literature, as it is often in real people, can be downright offputting. The secret, I discovered, was to put virtue at risk—thus guaranteeing that our hero is misunderstood and persecuted. I preferred to confirm this with Dostoevsky, though if I hadn’t acquired an allergy to all things religious during my Presbyterian childhood, I might also have located the same ingenious fictional strategy in the New Testament.

ALL THE KING’S MEN
, by Robert Penn Warren

As I scan these (hopelessly arbitrary) selections, I note that a number of novels that have made a big impression on me have somehow managed to incorporate a political element—without being tiresome or polemical. In my own work, I’ve often tried to do the same. Penn Warren’s loose fictionalized biography of Huey Long has stayed with me for so intertwining the personal and the political as to expose the distinction as artificial. Unfortunately, when I tracked down his other books—and there are not many—they were all disappointing in comparison. Read
All the King’s Men
and forget the rest. Years hence folks may be dismissing most of my own novels in just this manner, but if they’re still touting one title, and it’s as good as this one, then I’ll still be very lucky.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
(winner of the 2005 Orange Prize for fiction)

In this gripping novel of motherhood gone awry, Lionel Shriver approaches the tragedy of a high-school massacre from the point of view of the killer’s mother. In letters written to the boy’s father, Eva probes the upbringing of this more-than-difficult child and reveals herself to have been the reluctant mother of an unsavory son. As the schisms in her family unfold, we draw closer to an unexpected climax that holds breathtaking surprises and its own hard-won redemption. In Eva, Shriver has created a narrator who is touching, sad, funny, and reflective. A spellbinding read,
We Need to Talk About Kevin
is as original as it is timely.

“Impossible to put down.”

—
Boston Globe

“In crisply crafted sentences that cut to the bone of her feelings about motherhood, career, family, and what it is about American culture that produces child killers, Shriver yanks the reader back and forth between blame and empathy, retribution and forgiveness.”

—
Booklist
(starred review)

GAME CONTROL

Do-gooding American family-planning worker Eleanor Merritt was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. To her dismay, she falls in love with Calvin Piper, a beguiling misanthropic demographer with chilling theories about population control. Surely, Calvin whispers in Eleanor’s ear, if the poor are a responsibility, they are also an imposition.

Set against the vivid backdrop of shambolic modern-day Africa, Lionel Shriver’s
Game Control
is a wry, grimly comic tale of bad ideas and good intentions. With a deft, droll touch, Shriver highlights the hypocrisy of lofty intellectuals who would “save” humanity but who don’t like people.

“[O]ne of the best works of fiction about Africa.”

—
The New Statesman
D
on’t miss the next book by your favorite author. Sign up now for AuthorTracker by visiting www.AuthorTracker.com.

LIONEL SHRIVER
's books include
The Post-Birthday World, Game Control,
and the Orange Prize-winning
We Need to Talk About Kevin.
She writes frequently for the
Wall Street Journal, The Guardian,
and
The Independent.
She lives in London.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

A Perfectly Good Family

“[
A Perfectly Good Family
] is refreshingly free of the confining narcissism that marks so many contemporary ‘domestic’ novels. Moreover, Shriver evinces a far sharper sense of irony than, say, Anne Tyler, but much greater subtlety than, say, Jane Smiley. There is no contrived warmth…but there is no incest, either. The end result is a novel with a plausibly familiar moral center, perfectly balanced between satire and melodrama—in short, the literary ideal.”

—
The Scotsman
“Shriver’s style is as comfortable as that of Anne Tyler, that other great chronicler of the American family.”

—
Dublin Sunday Tribune

“Often funny and always intelligent, this is a sharply observed history of the redoubtable McCrea family, shot through with sardonic wit and black comedy.”

—
Independent on Sunday

“Choice is the driving force behind this eloquent and painstaking novel by Lionel Shriver, author of the much praised
Ordinary Decent Criminals
and
Game Control
…. Shriver sets up and controls a tense triumvirate with admirable precision and a keen understanding of the hastily formed alliances and subtly accorded trade-offs involved in family exchanges…. Choice, Shriver underlines, is enslavement as well as liberation, and
A Perfectly Good Family
is a fine illustration of that point.”

—
The Guardian
We Need to Talk About Kevin
“Powerful…harrowing.” —
Entertainment Weekly

“Sometimes searing…impossible to put down…brutally honest…. The novel holds a mirror up to the whole culture. Who, in the end, needs to talk about Kevin? Maybe we all do.”

—
Boston Globe
“It is
Desperate Housewives
as written by Euripides…. A powerful, gripping, and original meditation on evil.”

—
New Statesman

“Impressive…. It’s always a challenge for a novelist to take on front-page events. A guilt-stricken Eva Khatchadourian digs into her own history, her son’s, and the nation’s in her search for the responsible party, and her fierceness and honesty sustain the narrative.”

—
New York Times
Game Control

“
Game Control
mixes dark comedy, intellectual sparring, doomsday thrills, and psychological scrutiny in a bold and bracing cocktail…. Shriver skirts the edge of tragedy with superb aplomb. Her speculations chill the blood; her language glistens with a diamond-hard wit.”

—
New Statesman and Society

“Every now and then a modern novel about Africa comes along that neither trades on the continent as ‘exotica’ nor piously makes literary capital out of human misery—that doesn’t go woozy at the sight of a wildebeest, that might be more cruel than caring, but in fact isn’t. John Updike’s
Coup
was one such, as was Paul Theroux’s
Jungle Lovers
; Lionel Shriver, an American woman already praised for
Ordinary Decent Criminals
, has produced another.”

—
Times Literary Supplement

“Her work is all the more valuable for its flagrant defiance of political correctness.”

—
London Times

“This is allegory on an urgent, nonmythical level, expressed in contemporary terms and speaking in a fresh and intelligent way to the reader….
Game Control
moves towards an enjoyable and deft conclusion with the same tact and wit that makes Shriver an able and human commentator on our poor muddled white guilt.”

—
Dublin Sunday Tribune
“Impossible to put down.” —
Philadelphia Inquirer
“An awesomely smart, stylish, and pitiless achievement.” —
Independent
(London) “Terribly honest. Ms. Shriver takes a calculated risk…but the gamble pays off as she strikes a tone of compelling intimacy.” —
Wall Street Journal
“Furiously imagined…. A pleasure to read.” —
Seattle Times
“A slow, magnetic descent into hell that is as fascinating as it is disturbing.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

The Post-Birthday World We Need to Talk About Kevin Double Fault
A Perfectly Good Family Game Control
The Bleeding Heart Checker and the Derailleurs The Female of the Species

A PERFECTLY GOOD FAMILY
. Copyright © 2007 by Lionel Shriver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.