Lionel Shriver

The bibliophiles turned out last night in their zip-up fleeces to hear Lionel Shriver say: ‘Poetry bores the shit out of me’. She doesn’t like the fact that form in poetry is often more important than the content.

Content is king, for Shriver. ‘Craft follows content,’ she said. She is inspired when she writes about something that matters to her. It’s the subject that makes her want to write well, that drives her to create characters that can explore the topic.

She is known as a writer of ‘issues’, especially after tackling school massacres in We Need to Talk About Kevin, and now health care in her latest novel, So Much For That. She feels it’s important that novels have a theme. There are already so many books out there, she said, that you really should have a reason before you give the world another.

She is aware, though, that issues can be as tedious to write as they are to read. So she is careful to give her work broader appeal. The latest novel is about a man who has planned to retire to a tropical country with his wife when they have enough money. That moment arrives when they are in their 40s, but at the same time his wife is diagnosed with terminal cancer, and his savings gradually dwindle away on her medical bills.

Shriver has made the story about more than just health care reform in the States. She considers death, and the idea that so many people die miserably. There is no enjoyment in death anymore, she said. In fact, she says she’s seriously considering becoming politically opposed to longevity. People present a long life as a purely positive thing, she says, and nobody considers the negative side, such as whether those extra years are always pleasant for the person. A few grey-haired heads in the audience shook when she said that.

As well as being provocative and extremely articulate, Shriver is also an excellent storyteller. She was very easy to listen to when she read an extract from her book. Her deep voice for the male character even worked. But there was something about that scene that just didn’t ring true.

She read the novel’s only sex scene, which is told from the main character’s point of view – Shep, a man. But from my male point of view it didn’t work. It felt a little too much like this was how a woman who’d just had cancer surgery and was dying would like her husband to look at her while they made love. I just didn’t believe it. A good few women in the audience did like it, and said she had captured a man’s thoughts perfectly. So, I suppose, from a woman’s point of view, Shriver does a man’s point of view very well.

Judging only by that short piece she read, and what she said about the novel, I don’t think this is a book for me. Although it was certainly well-written, the subject matter didn’t appeal. Which just goes to show that content is just as important for the reader as the writer.

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Tags: Arts, author, book, creative, fiction, Lionel Shriver, Literature, novel, So Much For That, We Need To Talk About Kevin, writer, writing

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