Lionel Shriver on ageing, covid-19 and the purpose of fiction

LIONEL SHRIVER spends around two hours a day pushing her body to its limit. She used to run ten miles several times a week, but stopped when her knees “started blowing up like grapefruits”. She switched to running in place in her living room but that aggravated a back problem. She now sweats over an array of calisthenics while watching television every evening, eager to keep decay at bay.

Is it possible to age with dignity? This question lies at the heart of Ms Shriver’s 14th novel, “Should We Stay or Should We Go”, published this week. The book follows Kay and Cyril Wilkinson, a British couple who decide in their 50s to commit suicide when they both turn 80. “This is the best possible way out,” insists Cyril to Kay. “On our terms, in our home, when we’re still sane and recognisable to each other. When we’re able to embrace and say goodbye. Before we’re put through untold degradation and indignity.”

Yet on the morning of Kay’s 80th birthday, she is startled to note that “various bits hurt, but otherwise she did not feel appreciably different now than when she was ten.” Cyril, too, is a relatively hale octogenarian. Should they snuff out their lives before they start suffering? Why end it all when the imminence of death merely makes life feel more precious?

Instead of offering clear answers, Ms Shriver supplies 12 possible trajectories for Cyril and Kay. In one, Kay rejects the suicide plan, happily remarries and then dies swiftly while taking a joyride on her mobility scooter at 92. In another, the couple call off the pact and sensibly move into a swanky assisted-living facility in their early 70s, only to end up feeling “irrelevant”, having “sidelined themselves, perhaps prematurely”. A chapter in which scientists find a cure for ageing leaves Cyril and Kay living endlessly but apathetically, wistful for the “old urgency” they felt under the pressures of mortality.

These concerns “are not altogether abstract for me,” Ms Shriver says. “Once you hit your 60s, it starts staring you in the face.” Her parents are still alive, but she has mixed feelings about their longevity. At 93, her father remains as alert as ever, but his body is failing and he needs live-in care. Her nearly 90-year-old mother spends her days sitting wordlessly in a wheelchair after a stroke in 2015. “I look at her and I don’t see how I can prevent myself from ending up the same way,” says Ms Shriver.

Born Margaret Ann and brought up largely in Raleigh, North Carolina, Ms Shriver renamed herself Lionel as a teenager—in part, she has said, because she “experienced being female as an imposition”. She always wanted to be a writer, but worked in semi-obscurity for over a decade, supplementing the “hand-to-mouth” income from her novels with work as a journalist, including a stint covering Northern Irish politics. (She liked Belfast so much that she stayed for 12 years, and has lived in Britain ever since.)

Ms Shriver found fame in 2003 with her seventh novel, “We Need to Talk about Kevin”. Written from the perspective of the mother of a boy who commits a school shooting, the book was initially rejected by 30 publishers but became a bestseller. In 2011 it was turned into a film starring Tilda Swinton. This success made it easier for Ms Shriver to do what she had always done: wrestle with thorny political and social concerns through characters who are often unlikeable yet oddly sympathetic.

When Ms Shriver began writing “Should We Stay or Should We Go” in late 2019, she set the planned suicide for March 29th 2020. “I wanted the book to be super contemporary when it was published,” she says. Having churned out a first draft faster than any other book she has ever written, she revised the manuscript to incorporate the pandemic, relishing having “another element to play with”.

Readers familiar with Ms Shriver’s other life as a controversy-courting columnist for the Spectator may recognise some of her opinions in Cyril, who fumes that the coronavirus lockdowns are a sign of government “malfeasance on an incomprehensible scale”. Ms Shriver has made no secret of her views that “locking up healthy people” was “a grotesque mistake”. She still expresses alarm for the way these measures not only hurt small businesses in the two cities she calls home—London and New York—but also undermine civil liberties. “We’ve given governments power over our physical bodies and responsibility for our physical health. I don’t think we’ll ever quite be the same again.”

Cyril is “sometimes a parody of my own tendency to go off on rants,” Ms Shriver says, but he is hardly a repository for her political views—“fiction readers don’t want to be lectured to.” Although she has been an outspoken advocate for Brexit, arguing in Harper’s that the European Union “is a bloated bureaucracy packed with pampered timeservers”, she makes Cyril a fierce advocate for remaining in the Union. “At its best, fiction needs opinions on both sides of polarising issues,” she says. “Since the truth lies somewhere in the middle.”

Her opinions do still filter into her novels. Her antipathy to identity politics animated her previous novel, “The Motion of the Body Through Space” (2020), in which an ageing white man finds a manic sense of purpose in exercise after a black woman displaces him at work. Her aversion to ballooning tax-and-spend government took shape in “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047” (2016), a dystopic vision of a highly indebted American future in which cabbage costs $38 and Mexico has built a wall to keep poor Americans out.

But though she has earned notoriety as a flame-throwing critic of everything from the #MeToo movement (it uses “weakness as a weapon”) to Black Lives Matter (“Right now if you’re not in the oppressed group you have no power”), she approaches her novels with more humility. Fiction, she says, is where she can indulge her “more confused, more uncertain, more exploratory” side. “Part of the joy of writing books is thinking aloud, trying to decide what you think.”