A Better Life, by Lionel Shriver (Harper, 304 pp., $30)
No one reads a Lionel Shriver novel expecting a cheerful ending, and her latest, A Better Life, will not disillusion readers in this respect. An expert in the depiction and skewering of middle-class vanity, Shriver is merciless in examining dainty liberal principles, then shredding them and the people who hold them.
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Shriver’s previous novels have dealt with school massacres, professional tennis, weight loss, the aging body, the collapse of the dollar, and marriage, among other trenchant topics. These books typically show their protagonists and other secondary characters slowly stripped first of material or physical possessions, then expensive self-illusions, and finally of any dignity at all, at which point they—and we—are forced to ask, “What more?” And there’s always more.
In A Better Life, the author turns to the topic of mass migration, specifically as it played out in New York City during the Biden administration, when the gates of the U.S.-Mexico border were literally welded open to accommodate a flow of perhaps 10 million people, forcing Americans to confront the meaning of boundaries, nations, and obligation. Shriver focuses her attention on one house in Brooklyn and the Bonaventura family who live there. They function as a metonym for American land and the debates over who gets to occupy it.
In June 2023, then-mayor Eric Adams suggested a solution to the problem of tens of thousands of migrants coming to New York City to take advantage of Gotham’s absurd guarantee of shelter on demand for anyone who asked for it: private individuals could house them. In the event, the idea never came to fruition, and the city wound up leasing or buying thousands of hotel rooms instead. In the fictive world of A Better Life, Adams’s proposal is actually launched, and Gloria Bonaventura—a well-meaning, house-poor, sixty-something divorcee who lives in a rambling, restored Queen Anne with her twentysomething slacker son Nico in leafy Ditmas Park, Brooklyn—enthusiastically signs up to take in one of our “newest New Yorkers,” as just-arrived illegal aliens are routinely called (in real life, not just in the novel).
Events quickly go from bad to worse. Nico spends his days browsing anti-immigration websites and lurking around migrant welcome hubs, much to the dismay of his mother, who devotes herself to liberal good works of the “In this house, we believe” variety. Gloria lavishes attention and praise on Martine, their cheery, hardworking Honduran boarder, whose vague backstory inspires skepticism in Nico. Various insalubrious compatriots of Martine soon turn up, and eventually the menage takes on a comic/horrifying claustrophobic and surreal quality reminiscent of Buñuel (The Exterminating Angel), Polanski (The Tenant, Cul-de-Sac), Sartre (No Exit), or Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Endgame).
Shriver shrewdly develops the characters through the maelstrom of their circumstances. Nico, who earned a respectable STEM degree from Fordham, has taken an inner vow to do nothing except drink fine beers, eat takeout, fume about immigration, and masturbate. When he is displaced from his basement granny flat (“man-cave”) to make room for Martine, he moves back into his childhood bedroom, where “the nostalgia that conventionally attends adult return to a boyhood bedroom might have kicked in more powerfully had he spent the last four years farther than two floors away.” Nico epitomizes the contemporary manchild: he wants to make his opinions count for something, but he has no income—and without that, no say.
To make Martine feel at home, his mother and sisters (Palermo and Vanessa, who live elsewhere in Brooklyn) go overboard in providing her with the accoutrements of gracious living a la TJ Maxx. “The shower stall was stocked with unopened bottles of volumizing Scots-pine shampoo, hydrating tea-rose conditioner, and Cornish-hedgerow bath gel. Arrayed beside the sink: a pot of moisturizer called ‘skin caviar,’ antibacterial lemongrass hand soap, Optic White Renewal toothpaste, two new Oral-B toothbrushes—soft and medium—as well as two dispensers of dental floss—waxed and unwaxed.”
Nico sneers at the effort.
“You’re furnishing the amenities of a five-star hotel’s minibar.”
“It’s a small outlay in our terms,” Palermo said. “No woman should plunge into a tailspin because she can’t afford shampoo. The pocket money for asylum seekers is a joke.”
“How do you know she’s an asylum seeker?”
“I think they’re pretty much all asylum seekers,” Vanessa said.
“Well, doesn’t that tell you something?”
Nico’s skepticism contrasts with his family’s credulous embrace of their sense of themselves as good people. The anxiety about race that paralyzes white liberals is fully on display when Martine finally arrives. Gloria “kept stooping and bobbing her head, as if she were in Japan. Nico’s otherwise articulate, self-respecting mother always got this way whenever interacting with people of color: oversolicitous and underdignified, all with an undercurrent of terror.”
Martine herself is an enigma. To all appearances bursting with gratitude at the largesse of these norteamericanos, she finds Nico a tough nut to crack. She confronts his negative attitude, displaying disarming insight into the family dynamics and his sense of entitlement.
“You no like inmigrantes.”
“I like some inmigrantes. But there are too many of you.”
“USA is big country. Big space everywhere.”
“But you didn’t come to the big spaces. You came to New York. Where it’s very crowded and expensive. The people who live here have to pay for you.”
“You pay?”
And of course that stumps him. As the plot unfolds, Martine maintains face, swearing love and devotion to Gloria, even as conditions change and unforeseen demands that flow from her presence are thrust upon the family as things spin out of control. Martine’s motives and good faith, or lack of it, form the hinge of the novel, and even at the climax we remain radically uncertain of who she is. Nico shares our uncertainty, even as he finally begins to grow up.
Immigration is arguably the main, if not only, issue of the twenty-first century. Hundreds of millions of people—mostly young men—are on the move, and generally in one direction. To pretend that this is an unalloyed good is like praising the wardrobe of a naked king, though several ostensibly free nations, including the U.K., are making concerted efforts to criminalize criticism of mass migration as an act of violence against migrants themselves.
Lionel Shriver says that she has long wondered why novelists have ignored this question, or looked at it only from the perspective of the migrants, as in Jeanine Cummins’s 2020 American Dirt, an Oprah’s Book Club selection that wound up partially cancelled because the author was white while her protagonist was Mexican. But why should it be off-limits to examine the effects of migration on the “hosts,” even if their feelings or experiences are complicated or hostile?
The idea of national and civilizational boundaries has become quaint in the minds of the discerning classes, and an outright offense against humanity to the staunchest progressives, such as Shriver’s Gloria Bonaventura. She embraces limitless compassion for her migratory brethren and gives them the benefit of every doubt. It is left to others to ask the nagging questions. Are their claims to asylum based on “credible fear” of persecution real, or coached? Did they undergo every imaginable hardship on the way here, or did they fly coach from Dakar to Managua, and then catch a bus to Juárez? Are they all eager to work the worst imaginable jobs that Americans “won’t do,” or are some of them opportunists—or straight-up criminals?
A Better Life demonstrates how liberal kindness masks contempt, because sanctifying immigrants as pure souls erases them as intelligent individuals looking for systemic openings to exploit—as individuals do in any market economy. The famous meme of a heat map of compassion, where conservatives reserve their strongest empathy for those closest to them, as opposed to liberals, whose hearts beat fastest for those farthest away, speaks to the contemporary idea of “suicidal empathy,” in the coinage of Canadian academic Gad Saad. Elsewhere, Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton wrote about the dangers of applying Christian ideals of charity and love without the guardrails of dogma and creed; Christian kindness devolves rapidly into mawkishness without structure. In Bleak House, Dickens coined the immortal term “telescopic philanthropy” to characterize do-gooders (mostly women) who concern themselves with distant, romantic causes while their own children flounder.
A Better Life is a splendidly paced satire that takes a jaundiced view of the idea that immigrants seeking “a better life” for themselves are inherently valorous for doing what every living creature does instinctively. Shriver asks us to consider what to do when their quest for a better life for themselves winds up making life worse for everyone else.
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