Bestselling author Lionel Shriver says her latest novel intentionally thumbs its nose at identity politics and political correctness, which she says is continuing to drive people further apart.
US journalist and writer Lionel Shriver. Photo: AFP / FILE
She tells Jesse Mulligan the book offers her critics a chance to berate her after the inclusion of a female African-American character who is, in effect, an affirmative-action villainess.
The Motion of the Body Through Space – her 15th novel - takes on a trifecta of hot-button topics, including chasing immortality, gender and race.
It depicts a marriage strained when the husband Remington becomes obsessed with exercise, his path to winning back a sense of masculinity after a clash at work forces his resignation
A reviewer writing in the Washington Post describes the book as “a fitness industry satire weighed down by its own heavy-handedness”.
The novel includes a flashback where we see Remington passed over for a promotion that goes instead to an incompetent young black woman who goes on to hound him out of his department.
Similarly, his wife Serenata finds that her career as a voice-over actress is snuffed out by over-sensitive management who hold that a white woman shouldn’t be “mimicking” minorities’ accents.
Shriver recognises as “dangerous” both her portrayal of PC administrative zealotry and the book's suggestions that members of historically-oppressed groups are beneficiaries of identity politics, accruing power they wouldn’t otherwise attain on merit.
But she stands unapologetic, viewing any criticism as merely the price of breaking an unreasonable and restricting cultural taboo.
“There’s an element of mischief. There’s a little section in the book where I knew my critics would go crazy over – I couldn’t resist,” she says.
“It’s there for a reason. Remington needs to be motivated to get into this exercise fanaticism and this is a classic use of a back story. What I did that was most dangerous was that I created an unattractive black character and there’s now an unwritten rule that white writers may not write unattractive characters of other races.
“There are a lot of people who now think white writers should not be allowed to write any characters of any race or different gender or sexual orientation than the author.
“But if you are going to create characters that are different from yourself they have to be nice. That’s the understanding. Now, I reject that out of hand.
“I actually think this anxiety about if you’re going to make a minority character they have to be terribly attractive - I think that’s kind of racism, as it’s condescending. We’re all people, we all have flaws. There are dislikeable people in every race and therefore to treat your minority characters with kid gloves it is like not treating those characters as real people.”
Shriver caused controversy as a keynote speaker at the Australian writers’ festival in Brisbane in 2016, when she defended her right to depict characters of minority groups in any situation if it served her artistic purposes. Organisers were so upset with the address that they publicly disavowed her remarks.
The writer had been billed as speaking on “community and belonging” but focused on her views about cultural appropriation, saying she hoped the concern would be a passing fad.
She says today’s focus on political correctness and the agenda of identity politics is helping to further polarise society.
“The whole identity politics movement seems to be leading us towards a more antagonistic and adversarial world, which I regret. I’m old enough to remember the civil rights movement in the US and the idea at that time was ‘look, we are all people, we are all basically the same and have the same rights and we let’s break down these barriers… and now the ambition seems quite the opposite.
“It’s all about drawing strict distinctions and clinging to your group, whatever group you were born into as the centre-most aspect of your identity. I find that reductive. I find it regrettable.
“I mean what would you think of me if I told you the most important thing about my life is that I was born white.
“That would be incredibly offensive. So, I think it’s offensive on behalf of anybody. Just in general, all the categories to which I was born I’ve always tried to get out of, or to at least expand the boundaries of.
“I’ve happened to be born female, but I really enjoy in my work exploring being men and being boys in the fiction and that’s a way of getting out. I was born American, I didn’t chose to be American… but now I live in the UK. I like the idea of people getting outside of these boxes and themselves and in terms of the way they look at other people. The identity politics movement is all about the preservation of boxes.
“It also means that it’s encouraging us to think of ourselves primarily in terms of the characteristics with which we were born. That doesn’t go well for personal growth and it leads to stereotypes and atomised society. That atomisation we have enough of already and I'd like us to feel more united. I would like to break down barriers among people and I’d like us to get a lot less sensitive about matters relating to gender and race, etc.”
Lionel Shriver Photo: Harper Collins
Another controversial aspect of the book is a reference to the #MeToo movement. In the book, Serenata is given the line: “Women can claim to be traumatised by a hand on our knee, when helplessness is politically useful.”
Shriver says she has an ambivalent relationship to the #MeToo movement, because of the way she sees it devolving into pettiness, creating generalised hostility between the sexes.
“When it first came along with the whole Harvey Weinstein thing, of course I was supportive. He was a creep and there were other creeps that were exposed and I thought that was good. I’m certainly not any kind of supporter of sexual harassment in the workplace. But it seemed to progress to a pettier realm quickly.
“These are related to the identity politics thing. I would like us to break down the barriers between men and women and I’m not someone who claims very much to being female, regarding how I think of myself.
“I found that the #MeToo movement was encouraging women to have an adversarial relationship to men. I’m happily married and I don’t have an adversarial relationship to men and it makes for a happier life.”
Politics aside, as an exploration on the worth and status of exercise in an increasingly fragmented, narcissistic world, her new novel does address its limitations.
‘I think Remington has something to prove. He left his job in ignominious circumstances and he was humiliated, so he’s trying to get his manhood back. The book is questioning whether this is the right way to go about it,” she says.
“He not only runs a marathon but then he gets involved in the triathlon movement, which is even more extreme and that movement is classically one that exults traditionally masculine values of stoicism, a refusal to give into pain and defying your limits and it’s all about strength and power.
“So, you can see why someone who feels unmanned would be attracted to that movement, but the book and the wife are suspicious that this method of self-redemption is not going to work.”
His wife characterises the movement as a cult, something the writer suspects is indeed the case. She suggests, for some, it is a temporal spirituality of self, incorporating aspects of religious fervour in a vain battle to redeem the fallen state of our flesh.
“It definitely does have cult-like aspects. I was interested in this book to look at the whole phenomenon of our increasing obsession with exercise and fitness. I think it has religious aspects. There is a way in which the adulation of suffering is very much like traditional religion, Catholicism in particular and the vilification of the flesh, the overcoming the tawdry body with the greater powers of the spirit.
“There is a kind of religious dedication that people who get really fanatical about exercise tend to display. It is a type of devotion and the concern is that, as a religion, it’s kind of impoverished and it’s very narcissistic. It’s about the adulation of the self and, even in more deductive terms, it’s about the adulation of the body. It’s turning the body into a kind of idol.”
She is at pains to emphasize that it isn’t an anti-exercise book, but an exploration of how proportionate it should be to our lives.
“I regard exercise as a mechanical business. It’s an important mechanical business in the same way of keeping oil in your car is important… but it’s not a noble calling. It’s selfish in a good way. It allows your body to let you do other things besides exercise.”
Shriver has been busy during lockdown in the UK, banging out a manuscript in record time. But she says, while the lockdown has benefited her writing, she is gravely concerned about its economic implications and the prospects for the future.
“I went for a walk today in London and I was looking at all these businesses and I had no idea how many of them were ever going to ever be back. Many of them have plywood over the windows and I just wonder whether it is, if not permanent, semi-permanent or long-term.
“I’m also worried about a whole generation graduating from university with few prospects.”
Her last novel The Mandibles was a work of dystopian fiction, looking at life amidst the economic collapse of United States after the fall of the dollar. The book even predicts a rush on bog roll.
“One of the first signs of popular panic is they start hoarding toilet paper, you can’t find it in any shop my character goes 50 miles out from New York City looking for loo roll and can’t find it,” she says.
“Having written a whole book on what economic collapse is like and I tried to look it as detailed, as personal and as on-the-ground as possible. It’s not an abstraction, it was about a family who used to have some real wealth that they were waiting to receive from an elderly relative and that just vanishes.
“Somehow having gone through that exercise makes the prospect of economic collapse all the more real and there’s just nothing good about it.
“I suppose if you’re some kind of Marxist ... you might get gratification watching all the rich people be poor too. But it’s dismal and eventless, it’s not exciting. It’s deadening and sad and you just watch people who have talent - and in another situation they'd be thriving - doing manual labour and only surviving… I enjoyed writing the book, but I don’t want it to manifest itself in real life.”
The sense of disorientation amid the pandemic is something that concerns her too, and particularly the political support for the US lockdowns.
“The ‘left’ in the United States supports the lockdowns. Well, it’s crazy on a whole host of levels. It used to be that the left was supportive of liberty and furthermore, the lockdowns are hardest on the very communities that the left is most concerned about and rightly so. So, it’s crazy, right.”
She says the same phenomena can be observed in the UK, where those opposed to Brexit support the lockdown, which she finds equally crazy. “There is no connection to the optimal social response to this particular disease and membership of the European Union.”
Shriver is not concerned about losing readers because of her politics, but she admits that would be disappointing. She says her books stand alone and can be appreciated without an adherence to any political or cultural positioning.
“The politics definitely take a backseat to the emotional relationship between the characters and the story and so, if you have a somewhat different perspective on the world than I do, which is fine, that doesn’t mean you are necessarily not going to enjoy my novels,” she says.
“Novels can often take on an issue with multiple perspectives. I think fiction is capable of looking at current affairs with more complexity than non-fiction can.”
