The Post-Birthday World by
Lionel Shriver. Murphy's Law + Chaos Theory +
Run Lola Run. Surprisingly, it's very, very good.
Bonus — How to write a really cool autobiography in less than a thousand words:
Meet Lionel ShriverAH WAN OW! It took a while for my mother to decode the first words from my crib as “I want out.” Since,
Ah wan ow has become something of a running theme.
I wanted out of North Carolina, where I was born. I wanted out of my given name (“Margaret Ann” — the whole double-barrel; can you blame me?), and at fifteen chose another one. I wanted out of New York, where I went to university at Columbia. I wanted out of the United States.
In 1985, I cycled around Europe for six months; one hundred miles a day in wretched weather fortified a lifetime appetite for unnecessary suffering. The next year, I spent six months in Israel, including three on a kibbutz in the Galilee helping to manufacture waterproof plastic boots. Thereafter, I shifted “temporarily” to Belfast, where I remained based for twelve years. Within that time, I also spent a year in Nairobi, and several months in Bangkok. Yet only my partner’s getting a job in London in 1999 tore me decisively from Belfast, a town that in those days addictively commanded equal parts love and loathing. As
We Need to Talk About Kevin attests, I’m a sucker for ambivalence.
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 chicken meat, 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 ready 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 brine cye” ( = how now brown cow) is mistaken for a bog-standard southern American drawl I get mad.
