Lionel Shriver discusses her new novel, A Better Life, with Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Douglas Murray.

Audio Transcript

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Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks Podcast. This is Brian Anderson, editor of City Journal. On today’s special episode, we’re bringing you a live recording from a recent Manhattan Institute event featuring our own Douglas Murray in conversation with Lionel Shriver about her powerful new novel, A Better Life. In this wide-ranging discussion, Murray and Shriver explore the novel’s themes, Western self-doubt, the psychology of suicidal empathy, and the tension between moral aspiration and reality, while also reflecting on the cultural and political climate that make stories like this so resonant. Here’s that conversation.

Reihan Salam: At Manhattan Institute, we work to make America and its great cities, prosperous, safe, and free. We believe these are more than just policy goals. They are the foundations of a civilized society, but those foundations cannot rest on laws and policy alone. They require what Shirley Letwin called the vigorous virtues. Prosperity requires more than just capital. It requires a spirit of enterprise and adventure, a restless drive to improve one’s circumstances and a willingness to take risks. Safety requires more than just effective policing. It requires uprightness a sense of honor and decency and a shared commitment to civility and to the rule of law. And freedom requires more than just the absence of restraint. It requires a citizenry that prizes self-sufficiency and robustness the mental toughness to withstand hardship without looking for someone else to blame.

Our mission is to defend the institutions that make those virtues possible. Our scholars have spent years documenting and challenging ideas that threaten to undermine our institutions and degrade our quality of life. But journalism and policy analysis can only go so far to truly understand the stakes of these moral and cultural shifts and the cultural toll when our institutions lose their integrity, we need the clarity of great literature. That is why I’m so honored and delighted to introduce two of the most fearless writers in the English-speaking world. Lionel Shriver is a novelist of unsurpassed courage and a longtime friend of the institute. In her latest work, A Better Life, Lionel takes a sprawling civilizational crisis, the migrant crisis that has rocked New York City and societies throughout the western world and perfectly distills it within the walls of a single Queen Anne Victorian in a bourgeois Brooklyn neighborhood. She has a singular gift for showing us what happens when ideological illusions clash with reality. Joining her in conversation is my distinguished, brilliant colleague Douglas Murray, a prolific author and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Through his work, Douglas has provided the definitive account of the challenges mass migration poses to western societies. He possesses the rare ability to connect the granular details of policy and law to the grand sweep of history. There is no pair better equipped to discuss the question of migration, what fiction has teach us, and much else besides. Finally, I want to thank our trustees in attendance Ann Charters, Russell Pennoyer and Susie Edelman. Your stewardship makes our work and these important conversations possible. Now, please join me in welcoming Lionel Shriver and Douglas Murray.

Douglas Murray: Well, thank you very much, Reihan. Before we start, may I make a quick housekeeping point? I noticed that there’s a very dangerous thing going on, which is that there are some empty chairs, but there’s also an ongoing buffet. Now my experience of New York events is that these two things can’t happen at the same time. So anyone who is still tempted by the buffet, can I urge you away from it for the next hour? And if you haven’t yet found a seat, would you find one? Excellent. I’m Douglas Murray and it’s a great pleasure to be here. Lionel Shriver is not just one of my favorite writers, but one of my favorite people and certainly as a novelist is one of those I think rare novelists in our day who I read everything by the moment that it’s come out on this occasion. I’ve had the opportunity to read the book before it came out. She’s also a fellow columnist of mine at the Spectator in the U.K., where we vie with each other to say more and more…

Lionel Shriver: The same thing.

Douglas Murray: Sometimes in a rivalry to be saying the more unsayable thing than the other, but I grant that Lionel usually wins. She’s the author of numerous novels as well as columns. She is of course the author of, among other things, We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Mandibles, A Family, and most recently before this novel, the superb novel Mania. Today, we are here to talk about her new novel, A Better Life, which I hope all of you will get a copy of tonight if you haven’t already. And just to tee this off, this is a perfect city to talk about this book in because it’s a book set in this city in a not too parallel universe. And I’d just like to read first of all the author’s note at the beginning. Lionel, you say, “In 2023, the mayor of New York City proposed a program much along the lines of what I have christened, ‘Big Apple, Big Heart.’ The mayor’s program never materialized, but it has been made manifest in this novel.” Run us through a little of this for those of us who haven’t read it.

Lionel Shriver: Well, as I wrote in my little author’s note, I was watching TV in 2023 in New York and I heard Eric Adams propose this program that he wished to, through which he would pay regular New Yorkers to put up all these migrants in their own spare bedrooms. And my little fictional alarm bell rang. And I honestly was more motivated to act on this premise when it turns out that he didn’t end up actuating this program at all. So it was up to me to do the honors, and the very proposal was redolent with disaster and I thought that that was a disaster that I was uniquely skilled at bringing to life. So the book is about a very progressive woman in Ditmas Park who owns a large house partly by dint of divorce, and she’s living with her 26-year-old son who is dedicated to doing absolutely nothing, and partly to serve as a good example morally to her son, his mother Gloria bids to take in a migrant in one of her spare bedrooms and it doesn’t work out very well. Say no more.

Douglas Murray: Just to return to that moment, I’m, one of the things I find fascinating about you as a writer is that you managed to predominantly write in fiction, but of course you also write nonfiction. What is it about a story like that that ignites the fiction writing bit of your brain as opposed to, I don’t, the columning bit?

Lionel Shriver: It immediately suggests story. Someone has to participate in that program. This person would have to invite someone, and who is this? I mean, one of the most, I think realistic moments in the book is when the family is applying to participate and the host person is grilled mercilessly by the city, does your home have any kind of mold problem? Are all of your electrical outlets safely wired? Is the window in your spare bedroom of a particular set of dimensions? And meanwhile, the city doesn’t vet the total stranger from a foreign country coming into this person’s home at all. Right?

Douglas Murray: The bureaucracy overwhelms certainly that bit.

Lionel Shriver: The protection is all of the immigrant and not of the native, and I’m afraid that’s what is happening writ large.

Douglas Murray: Well, let’s get onto that straight away perhaps because the period you are writing about this parallel universe is in is that period in 2023 when Governor Abbott and other governors in the southern states decided that since they were being overwhelmed in numbers terms by the numbers of arrivals coming illegally across the border, the southern border, that they would send those migrants to so-called sanctuary cities in the us. Of course, everybody remembers the relatively small number of people who were sent to Martha’s Vineyard and swiftly overwhelmed the vineyard as I remember it, and I think the vineyard turned out not to be a sanctuary vineyard, but of course…

Lionel Shriver: I think the spirit of altruism in that community lasted about eight hours.

Douglas Murray: Yes, but of course New York was, and many people here will remember at that period, I mean it was an extraordinary period because hundreds of thousands of people were being bused into the city. The city was under this extraordinary amount of stress.

Lionel Shriver: I have to interrupt you because it was presented in the media often as if it was just all meanie Governor Abbott inflicting on New York what had been inflicted on his state, but actually the abundance of them were coming voluntarily and that’s partly because New York was advertising this nonsense about its right to shelter policy. So that was a big come hither.

Douglas Murray: And one of the interesting things in that period is of course very shortly, Mayor Adams, I remember, gave a set of remarks to the council in New York where he said this was an existential crisis for the city.

Lionel Shriver: Yeah. He said it was destroying New York.

Douglas Murray: Which putatively left-wing mayors don’t often say about issues to do with immigration.

Lionel Shriver: That’s right.

Douglas Murray: Which gets onto one of the things that those of you who know Lionel Shriver’s work will know is that you have among other things, an unerring ability to put your finger on very, very sensitive issues and then drill down onto them. I’m saying that as carefully as possible.

Lionel Shriver: Picture a dental drill.

Douglas Murray: With a somewhat pneumatic flavor. But one of the things that’s fascinating about the novel is you are addressing, and I haven’t seen this done, I can’t think of more than maybe one of your contemporaries as novelists, you are addressing perhaps the big issue of the century in the developed world.

Lionel Shriver: It’s astonishing that more novelists don’t address this issue. I predicted back around 1990 that immigration was the issue of this century, and sure enough, so why are there so few novels and in fact, there are plenty of novels about immigration, but they’re all the same in a way. They’re always told about the immigrant, the focus is on the immigrant and his or her story, and there are reasons for that beyond politics that the immigrant story is naturally sympathetic. The immigrant is usually portrayed as the disadvantaged party. That’s always fictionally attractive, presented with natural, many obstacles to overcome. The story is built on a natural quest structure. It’s been proposed that all novels are stories of the quest, so it makes a lot of sense that the story of the immigrant would be attractive and in the United States, that story plays to the national mythology, and it flatters the population. Ultimately, we infinitely absorb people from elsewhere. It portrays us as very cosmopolitan and open-minded and generous. What’s to lose? Why would you tell any story about immigration from the perspective of the host population, which is generally portrayed as a mere backdrop. It’s after all the host population by definition is just sitting there. They’re not on a journey, so what makes them interesting? Well, what makes them interesting to me is the amount of rage that I have picked up in the comments underneath of countless articles about immigration. This is not the experience of being the host population when you’re really dealing with millions and millions of people invading your territory who have not been invited. The experience is anything but passive. It often furious, but it is concurrently helpless and that’s dramatically true in the U.K. right now where people feel they have been voting repeatedly for parties that would cut back on legal immigration actually, which is the biggest problem in the U.K., and yet nobody does anything about it regardless of what they claim in their platform.

Douglas Murray: This might sound like a leading question because it probably is, but do you think there are any other reasons why your fellow novelists don’t write novels from this side of the story?

Lionel Shriver: Well, certainly almost all of my colleagues are either left or far left. I don’t quite get why. I am a little worried that it’s partly because writers these days come out of the university system. In the olden days it was just a bunch of weirdos who read books, and they were self-nominated and socially awkward and wrote their strange little tales. But now people go to school to become creative writers and I think it creates a uniformity, which in my case didn’t work.

Douglas Murray: Is it another leading question, but is it an issue for the industry itself in some way as well?

Lionel Shriver: Well, the industry itself…

Douglas Murray: The book publishing industry.

Lionel Shriver: The book publishing industry is overwhelmingly left wing, especially lately. I mean post 2020 publishing went nuts and Black Lives Matter up the bum and became crazed with DEI. And I was honestly very impressed with Harper Collins buying this book. When I wrote this book, I was aware of the fact that I was risking not being able to publish it or having to leave my publisher and find some obscure little upstart press that was willing to put it out or God forbid, self-publish, which for writers of my generation is still humiliating.

Douglas Murray: It does. I know we’ve spoken about this before, but my own nonfiction book on immigration, The Strange Death of Europe, I think I told you that when that book came out, it was when it hit number one in the bestseller charts, was told by a publisher that they had spoken to their boss who’d said and said to the boss, have you seen how well Douglas’s book is doing? And he said yes. And she said, do you remember I told you we should publish something about the immigration question? And his response was, “we don’t want those readers.” I said to her, you should say to your boss that at the next shareholder’s meeting, he must explain that the publishing house is a not-for-profit organization. But yes, I mean this has been the case in the publishing industry for a while.

Lionel Shriver: And I have to say the success of your book gave me courage to write this one. I think Douglas’s The Strange Death of Europe is one of the best nonfiction books ever written about immigration and it actually put his life in danger. But it showed in its commercial success that there is a huge audience out there that would like to hear about the negative side of immigration and therefore I’m making a bid for the same audience.

Douglas Murray: May you get it, but this book certainly deserves the widest possible audience. Let’s just get back to the main structure of it. One of the things that’s remarkable about it is in certain parts of the book I was thinking, I knew exactly how a not good novelist could address this question and then was constantly relieved that this subject was in your hands because the characters themselves are all in their own way complicated. They’ve all got different poles within them. Even the very liberal Gloria, the divorcee with the large house, even she feels tugs at certain points in the story between the different poles of, she’s pulled her son, the layabout, is pulled in his own way between the sympathy for the other and the desire to have some sympathy expressed to himself. And indeed the first woman who moves into the house has enormous, I mean there’s enormous humanity given to her of course. And we realize that she’s come from a poor country, she wants, to use the title of the book, a better life. She isn’t a baddie or anything like that.

Lionel Shriver: Or you don’t think so.

Douglas Murray: Now you’re giving away the plot of your own novel. I was trying not to give it away, but they’re all, it’s wonderful…

Lionel Shriver: We’ve already sold them copies,

Douglas Murray: But I found this constantly interesting that every one of the characters is in some way dancing around the same set of pulls, the desire to be generous to the other and the desire to also protect what is yours. Just lead me through a bit of this. As a fiction writer, how do you deal with that in your characters?

Lionel Shriver: Well, there’s a tension in the whole issue of immigration between self-interest and the desire to be charitable. And actually that tension you can find in many of my other novels, the desire to be good and to be dutiful versus to look out for yourself and your own. I think immigration is actually one of those real life issues where you shouldn’t have to choose. I think that the United States, for example, could be generous toward legal immigrants and especially legal immigrants who are going to improve this country. I want an immigration policy that is self-interested and it doesn’t mean it can’t still also be generous, but it should be self-serving. And I just think that we have evolved a culture of embarrassment around self-interest. And by the way, this is pathological in Europe. They’re ashamed. They cannot excuse any policy on the basis of self-interest. It always has to be caring about someone else, but systems in general work better when people are doing things that are good for themselves and their own. And there are ways of managing immigration that I think can satisfy our desire to do good and to do good for ourselves at the same time. All issues are not that easy. The character of Martine, I think I can go this far without diminishing the enjoyment of discovering the book for yourself, is something of a mystery, and it’s a mystery that the book deliberately refuses to solve for the reader. On the one hand, she seems like a paragon. She’s cheerful, she’s bubbly, she is affectionate. She cleans all the time. She’s

Douglas Murray: Very hardworking. Yeah,

Lionel Shriver: She’s very hardworking. Much more so than the slob live-in son. In fact, he resents for showing him up and why not take this person at face value? On the other hand, there are a sequence of incidents which it’s possible to interpret in more than one way. And Nico the protagonist through whose eyes you see, the whole story is very suspicious that she’s not what she seems, and he has a completely different version of her character, which is devious, duplicitous, and very smart. And actually Nico likes her better. Nico’s version of this person is more human and who knows who she really is and it’s up to you. And what I enjoyed about doing this is just fictionally, it was really entertaining to put together, but it’s also in some ways representative of the issue that I am addressing because you could take the same set of facts and either put together a pro-mass immigration policy or an anti- one.

Douglas Murray: On that subject. There’s a moment about a third of the way through the book where Nico’s in conversation with Martine, and it’s one of the many passages that stood out to me, and let me just share a bit of it with the audience. The two of them are speaking about effectively the issue of luck and where you are born, which is obviously one of the themes that runs underneath the whole novel. Nico is having a sort of argument with Martine about this, Martine being the recent arrival in the house, and says, “if you mean being born American is lucky, okay, yes, I’m lucky,” he says, and she replies, “Americans think born here, they better.” He says, “I don’t think I’m better than you or anyone else who wants to live here. Okay, maybe it’s not fair. Some people are born in bad countries, some people are born in good countries. It’s pure chance.” In the end, he’s not sure that this is being computed by her. And he says, “besides what good is luck if you throw it away.” And eventually he rephrases it and says to her, “I want to stay lucky.” This seemed to me to be one of the central things in the novel. You’re dealing with something that is such an important and difficult question, which is that all of us do know that a lot of this, all of it is an element of luck.

Lionel Shriver: Yes.

Douglas Murray: And at the same time, it can’t just be luck.

Lionel Shriver: Actually, there’s a passage in that same dialogue. Nico’s getting drunk in this scene, so he can’t actually express it in the conversation, but it says that this good country is actually the consequence of anything but luck. It is the result of generations of people who have been orderly and creative and disciplined. The country being good is not an accident. It is an effort of many generations and for people to come in at the end into the consequence of all that discipline and creativity and collect on it without their own people having gone through those generations of effort and purpose and unity is a kind of cheating.

Douglas Murray: Certainly. I mean when he can get to the point, that is the point he’s trying to get to, isn’t it?

Lionel Shriver: Yes.

Douglas Murray: He senses that deeply, but as you say, he can’t quite express it. Although there is one rather alarming bit when he’s in his bedroom watching Douglas Murray videos, which did slightly jolt me on the plane, I have to say, but…

Lionel Shriver: Nico would love your videos. I’m just being realistic.

Douglas Murray: The core demographic of mine is people living in their mother’s basements. I’m sure. Thank you for that booster, Lionel.

Lionel Shriver: I think I know your audience better than you do.

Douglas Murray: I’m not arguing with Lionel tonight, but he is putting his finger on something. Let’s just move for a moment from him to his mother because his mother is a remarkably drawn figure. Gloria Bonaventura, she may also be a character who some people in this audience can recognize. Could you just give us a slight character sketch of her? This is Nico’s mother who decides to volunteer perhaps first of all in the scheme of A Bigger Heart For The Bigger Apple.

Lionel Shriver: Well, as Nico would say, his mother is someone who’s capable of great compassion, but overwhelmingly for people she’s never met. And there is something a little perverse. I mean this is currently a commonplace kind of person. It’s the kind of people, and they are women, who are out on those anti-ICE protests, in comparison to whom actually my character Gloria is quite rational and conservative. She has divorced her husband partly for political reasons that her husband became in as the Woke era approached, he got out in front of the anti-woke movement. And I should tell you that this outfit that he established, called sanity.com, is actually based on the Manhattan Institute.

Douglas Murray: There’s a little scoop for you all.

Lionel Shriver: I mean the stuff that he publishes is described as fact, fact- and data-driven, very well-written. I’m a huge fan of Manhattan Institute. I’ve only written for City Journal once and I will confide that. The reason I haven’t done it again is that it’s too much work.

Douglas Murray: So yes, she’s fallen out with her husband, she’s got this large house, she’s got a considerable amount of luck. But is she doing it for, I mean is it display? Is it self-fulfillment, some sense of purpose? All of these things more,

Lionel Shriver: I mean there’s always an element of display and I think this is realistic. The display is partly for the self, right? It is a performance for the self. It is an identity thing, identity in the old sense of the word, the kind of person you think you are. And it is, she wants to be good, she wants to be seen to be good, she wants to be caring. She doesn’t have enough to do. She runs a small, not very successful online business, knitting little animals that make nice stocking stuffers. But what really sells is the cashmere packers for transgender boys.

Douglas Murray: I did like that detail, I have to say. Yes. So the business isn’t thriving.

Lionel Shriver: I didn’t make them up.

Douglas Murray: No, her business isn’t thriving, but there’s a sense of, as you say, purpose, fulfillment, personal self-display and much more. But there are times, again, being careful with giving her too much of the plot of the novel. But there are times clearly when she must have realized, and you’ve got her along the way of the novel realizing this, albeit she’s trying not to let anyone know that maybe this incredibly sort of performative altruism may have a downside, but she seems to want to learn that last.

Lionel Shriver: Oh, she does learn that last.

Douglas Murray: Again, I am trying not to give away the plot. For readers, you’ll be able to see that when things start to spin out of control, they spin further and further than I think even this reader expected. But what’s sort of fascinating about as a character, it’s almost if she would literally rather die than be thought of badly by her peers. Is that right?

Lionel Shriver: Well, I think beyond performing for the self, there’s a lot of peer performance and I think one of the things that drives this whole progressive movement is a competition, intragroup competition for who’s the more righteous, and it drives people to become more and more radical and to display even more wildly what good people they are. I mean, my next-door neighbors in Brooklyn are running out of space for all their signs about ICE. My favorite, oh, I hope she’s not listening. My favorite is the bedraggled Black Lives Matter poster that’s starting to look like this. Yeah, I mean these people, we live amongst them.

Douglas Murray: My favorite from that era is still Barclays Bank, which had the rainbow flag with “Love Happens Here.” I used to say, I don’t want love to happen here. I’d like you to be able to have a cashier when I need one and find my back statements at the end of the tax year, but the love thing somebody else can deal with. But yes, essentially these are the people where, this the milieu we’re talking about here is the sort of yard sign dwellers and so on. Just tell me once more back to the people who have arrived though, because our immigrant heroine turns out not to be entirely alone in the world that she’s come from and is gradually joined by people who, again, you can be looked at through various ways, but she’s joined by somebody who is meant to be her brother. And then we discover in one scene that they’re doing something that brothers and sisters tend not to do. And then the brother or other has a lot of male friends who have ever less respect, I think it’s safe to say…

Lionel Shriver: For property rights.

Douglas Murray: For property rights. And this seems to be very skillfully and interestingly done in the book because when Martine first comes in, as you say, we’ve got a hardworking rather sympathetic figure, but that as the sort of conga chain of people follows after her, every part of that gets worse and worse. It’s almost like a sort of a play in this one household of the larger picture. Am I right?

Lionel Shriver: Yes. And there’s plenty of metaphor going on in terms of the house as country, but one of the things that I found usefully interesting in that section was my need in this book is basically to get my protagonist off his ass. And it was really hard, but when these Central American thugs invade the house, he feels emasculated and he has previously not cared about the masculine virtues. In fact, he has aggressively rejected them for, he wouldn’t think of himself as feminized, but the kind of passivity that he has embraced is if it has a gender, is more feminine than masculine because I think of masculinity as primarily about action, and he does feel a responsibility. In a classically masculine way, he’s the only son to protect his mother, and he can’t, and he feels humiliated and he feels finally lacking in something and desirous of the kind of masculinity that the thugs that have invaded his house have embraced and embody. They are all about action. You don’t know exactly what they’re up to, but they’re clearly, they’re probably running drugs. They might be involved in people smuggling. They’re all up to no good, but they’re up to a lot. And they are in good shape. They are quite frightening. They’re aggressive. They take what they want and they want something. And he has previously in the book expressly renounced wanting anything. To me that’s perfectly anti-masculine and I’m challenging my character. Look, this is maybe not a hundred percent attractive, but it sure beats cowering in the corner watching your own mother humiliated.

Douglas Murray: I have to say, and I’m not just saying this because you’re here, I think the character of Nico is one we’ve read a lot about the sort of lost young men in our society. I’ve never read a better actual depiction of what that looks like than the character of Nico in this.

Lionel Shriver: And I should add that I surprised myself. I found myself incredibly sympathetic with him. And so this is not written from an especially critical perspective. I consider his condition tragic, But at the same time, I could see why he wanted to give adulthood a miss. It took me back to being in my twenties, wanting to become a novelist, knowing how ridiculously unrealistic that was, how likely I was to fail, not quite sure how to go about it, not making enough money sometimes making very poor decisions about who I went out with or drinking too much or whatever, feeling somehow on a precipice all the time, going wildly back and forth between being exhilarated with the sense of possibility and freedom that you discover in young adulthood and being terrified and depressed and oppressed by a sense of doom and a responsibility that I was in no place to handle. And it really, I mean, I’ve got some nieces and nephews in this decade right now, and I fantastically feel for them, it is a real make or break time. You’re not really a kid anymore, but you’re not fully an adult. You don’t know what you are. And I think it’s terrifying, and I understand someone who just wants to opt out, opt out just to say, I just don’t want any of it. I didn’t ask to be here and I don’t know what to do with this life. I figured out how to fill my time. I’ve discovered YouTube. The number of Victor Davis Hanson videos out there are almost infinite.

Douglas Murray: There’s Deliveroo.

Lionel Shriver: Yes, there’s Deliveroo. I like that character. I feel enormous affection for that character. And I think it’s one of the things that makes the book work.

Douglas Murray: This is a writerly question, but when you said there that you gained more sympathy for him as it was going along, just can you explain a little bit about how that works in the creative process? I think some of us might think that a novelist would have a character set and drive them through the novel, but what you are describing is a different type of process, which is that you set them up and you yourself as the creator of them, find sides to them as you are going along or sympathies with them that evolve.

Lionel Shriver: Yeah, so I think that when you inhabit someone else’s consciousness that you need to do it with a certain kindness. I mean, one instinctively starts feeling with them and talking. I ended up talking myself into, I practically talked myself into not having any ambitions on my own account. I thought he’s right. That’s incredibly relaxing, getting up in the morning and not having to do shit.

Douglas Murray: Yes, yes. He has literally no plan for his life.

Lionel Shriver: And there’s that kind of anti-ambition. It’s an absolute refusal that becomes its own sense of purpose

Douglas Murray: Almost monk-like renunciation of the world. Yes. Which of the other characters in the novel most stood out to you that you found as you were creating them, drew on bits of you that you were surprised by?

Lionel Shriver: I mean, all these people are products of myself, so I guess they have some bit of me anyway, but one of my favorite characters, I have to say my editor wanted me to eliminate him, is Alonzo. Which is, it’s the third person who shows up at the house. He’s also from Honduras. He’s obviously an operator. He has much better English than any of the other Central American characters. In fact, he loves English and he likes to be corrected. He wants to master it. And he’s very upfront about various scams that he’s running, and he makes it clear that you think we’re all grateful. We’re not all grateful for being allowed to be in your wonderful country. Actually, we have contempt for you. And one of the reasons we have contempt for you is that you let us in. He said, if I had a country, if it was my country, and these people are crossing the border without permission, I’d shoot them, and then they and their friends wouldn’t come back. And it is a character through which I can express a much savvier version of what it feels like to be a migrant to this country. And I think that we tend to put together a treacly, sentimental version of what’s going on here.

I mean, it seems to me that an awful lot of people who came in during the Biden administration were fundamentally transactional in their relationship to the United States, and they know perfectly well that if you go to New York, you can get on Medicaid. They’re far better educated about what is on offer than we are. I think this is giving people credit for being human, for being smart, for using the internet, and this innocent idea that we have that the only reason that immigrants come into the United States is that they’ve fallen in love with our country and they just want to be part of this successful multicultural democratic experience. Really. Alonzo tells Nico all about how at the Roosevelt Hotel where the intake is, he and his friends play up all this star-spangled-banner, we love McDonald’s, go Joe Biden. It’s very parodic pro-Americanism, and it’s all a joke, and I find him a very persuasive character, and that’s a character I like very much.

Douglas Murray: We’re going to go to audience questions shortly. Just two very quick questions before we do. Firstly, one of the things that also comes up throughout the book is the almost complete failure of all the authorities. I’m thinking in particular of the NYPD in this situation who have absolutely no ability to do anything when everything falls apart.

Lionel Shriver: That’s correct.

Douglas Murray: Is this an entirely something from your imagination?

Lionel Shriver: Oh no. That part is meticulously researched.

Douglas Murray: Secondly, when I read this and your publishers kindly got it to me in proof, apart from ripping through it in a couple of sittings and thinking about it for a long time after my overriding thought about the reception of this book was that it’s either going to be an enormous scandalous success as certainly a success as it should be, or that the critics are going to try to kill it with silence. And pretend that you didn’t write this book. What’s your experience been so far?

Lionel Shriver: Oh, the critics are definitely trying to kill it as loudly as possible, and I’m hoping that that will backfire. I think one thing this book has going for it is all the right people hate it.

Douglas Murray: Good. I always say you’ve got to be careful, always in your choice of friends, but much more careful in your choice of enemies. So

Lionel Shriver: You would know,

Douglas Murray: I’m going to point to some people in the audience. We’ve got three mics, and if you can make sure that we remember the old rule that a question is one sentence with a question mark at the end. The lady there.

Speaker 5: Alonso seems crucial to your story. Very important. Why did your editor want you to get rid of Alonso?

Lionel Shriver: A lot of the editorial suggestions were hard to interpret because the suggestions were artisti,c framed as artistic. I think she thought he was irrelevant, although he does play an increasingly big part in the plot as it goes on, so that’s not really true. But I think that she was probably uncomfortable with what he was saying. That pattern repeated itself. Now again, I did give Harper Collins credit for buying this book, but I think it was a little frightening to edit and coming to the point where it actually is going to go into print, my editor wanted to pare it back and make it a little less dangerous, and maybe she had my best interest at heart, but I figure in for a penny in for a pound.

Douglas Murray: The lady here.

Lionel Shriver: Thank you. I can’t wait to read it. Hello, Douglas. Who plays Nico in the movie?

Lionel Shriver: I don’t know. I’m taking tryouts now.

Douglas Murray: That’s a very good question. Seriously, we should ponder that. That’s a very good question. I’d love to know who played Gloria In the movie. We have lot of candidates who could be quite a lot of people and no acting required, the gentlemen there.

Speaker 6: So this is at least your third book that depicts some form of home invasion. And I wonder if this is a microcosm of the larger invasion that we’re talking about, or is it a portent for people who are for the most part, very secure in their homes right now?

Lionel Shriver: I think I’m probably obsessed with territory. I hate subletting, and that is a theme that repeats. I mean, I did a short story collection called Property, and that’s not a coincidence. I think I’m very piggy. I’m into boundaries. This is mine. This is yours. It is a very protestant attitude actually, but it’s probably ungenerous.

Douglas Murray: Right at the back there.

Speaker 7: Thank you. I wanted to ask you if you’d had in mind another big metaphor that stood out for me when I was reading the book, and that is the transition to adulthood that the young people, Nico and his sisters have made in various ways, successful or unsuccessful, and the country and the polity not being quite adult about this issue. Am I reading too much?

Douglas Murray: Maybe give the microphone the gentleman behind you next.

Lionel Shriver: Yeah. It’s hard to tell whether we should characterize the United States right now as not adult or senescent. There is a lot of criticism of our culture in this book, and there’s a way in which it’s suggestive that we deserve to be invaded. We are not defending ourselves, we are acting helpless. We don’t act as if we are the leading power of the world and we have lost our confidence in ourselves. And most conspicuously, we are failing to reproduce, which expresses a loss of faith in the future. And it is also a rejection of the responsibility that we all have to continually recreate a future and we’re not doing our job. And by the way, I have to say I’m guilty. I didn’t have any kids. Now I don’t feel, especially that I made a mistake in my personal little life. I had the life that I wanted, but in at least a floating, abstract way, I’ve come to feel a little guilty about it. I did not do one of my primary jobs, and I have a lot of company in that department.

Douglas Murray: That’s not on.

Speaker 8: I’ll speak louder. With immigration as a backdrop, would either or both you like to comment on whether the right response would be to run from or run into the label of reactionary?

Douglas Murray: Run into or away from the label reactionary?

Lionel Shriver: Well, people are going to call you names if you say things they don’t like. I mean, you can’t control the labels that are going to get thrown at you. So I’m sure I can be called a reactionary. I’ve been saddled with, I’m advocating great replacement theory. We know all the terms and we can’t get hung up on them. I mean, they don’t matter. What matters is the integrity of your position.

Douglas Murray: Lady at the front here, and then gentlemen there,

Speaker 9: You haven’t said anything so far about the father, the divorced father, and I’m wondering if you could comment on him, and maybe this is a bit of a spoiler, but he seems to have had some role in bringing Nico to maturity. He’s also a right-leaning figure. Do you equate maturity with being in the right-sphere?

Lionel Shriver: Yes.

Douglas Murray: That was an easy one. The lady here.

Speaker 9: Hello. I’m just curious why, I mean, there are all the political reasons. There are all cultural reasons. The culture is coming from somewhere. Why do you think so many people are so interested in the other whatever the other is? In a sense, almost existentially, people are drawn to glorify something that they’re not other cultures, gender transition, like people from other parts of the world, like other forms of being. And it seems to me that there’s something about our time that dissatisfies people with themselves and their life and it is really something that they want to escape from because obviously the left has a great network, but the fervor is just a little stronger than governments or nonprofits telling people what to do. And it’s very sad because there isn’t really a political fix to that.

Lionel Shriver: Yeah, I have to agree. There’s something odd about the obsession on the left with this other, as you say. There seems to be a void in the sense of self that expresses. Even the ideology is all about shame, right? Of unworthiness.

Speaker 9: A lack.

Lionel Shriver: Yeah, a lack of all this business about privilege and how terrible it is to be white and how your background is nothing but shame. It’s all negative. And I think the whole progressive project is in some ways an effort to no longer be American, to remove the self from the country to say, I can deplore this so much in order to not be of it. It’s a way of exempting yourself from being American. And that’s no answer to a country’s problems, to simply disappear yourself. And even if you are concerned that the country does have problems and what country doesn’t, an answer is not simply to deplore the place and everyone who lives there. That’s not an answer. And in actually slightly less facile response to Amy’s question, I believe that the progressive left is stuck in an adolescent mindset. I remember being 15 years old and I was full of political passion and it was around 1972 and I was against the war. And I remember declaring to my parents, I don’t understand why we even have a defense department. And even my liberal, Democratic parents said, well, I don’t know about that. And I look back on that and I think thank God they weren’t completely crazy. But that 15-year-old thing, I felt very self-righteous and full of myself and driven and proud of my opinions and out to display them. And I just see it in these middle-aged women in these ICE protests. That’s me. That’s me at 15.

Douglas Murray: We’ve got time for one more question, lady here.

Speaker 10: First, I’m recommending that everybody go to their library and request this book because it will make the libraries purchase the book. But you’ve diagnosed the illness, but what is the cure? This is my concern. And a very brief example, this terrible tragedy that just happened in British Columbia, I heard, oh, it was a student in a dress. I thought, oh, okay, well, let’s get the information. And we kept hearing it was a girl. In fact, it was some…

Lionel Shriver: Whenever they say it’s a female in a dress, you knew, no, it’s a man

Speaker 10: Right? But my point is this is the tragedy that even when confronted with this, they’re still not willing to take necessary steps. So if we have any thoughts on the cure, I think we’re all in agreement with what this terrible self-loathing sickness is.

Lionel Shriver: Well, on the trans thing, you’ll have to wait for the next book. I don’t think there’s any simple answer. I did try to pose the question as well as I knew how in this book. And the real question is Nico, right? That’s the question that’s being posed. Are you going to pick yourself up and be the next generation of Americans? And are you going to be a real man? I know I’m old fashioned, but I still believe in real men.

Douglas Murray: I would just say very quickly to the lady who asked that question, of course, Lionel is a novelist. And when you asked that question of what to do next, I was reminded of the famous BBC interview with Evelyn Waugh at his most curmudgeonly when they were trying to prod him into policy proposals. Ask him at one point whether he supports capital punishment. He says, yes, of course. And one of the interviewers in the BBC says, “and you’d be willing to do it yourself, would you, Mr. Waugh? You’d be willing to do it yourself.” And he says, “I should think it very strange if they asked a novelist to perform the task.”

But I just wanted to state Lionel several things. First of all, thank you for spending this evening with us. Secondly, thank you to all of you, and thank you also for your excellent and terse questions. And thirdly, let me just say again, congratulations on the book. When I wrote about this subject in non-fiction some years ago, I said that this issue of migration, the 21st century was being presented facilely as a question of good and bad or good and evil or right and wrong. And I said, then really, it’s much harder than that. And among other things, as I said, it’s like an Aristotelian struggle where two virtues are in competition. The struggle for the virtue of fairness and the struggle of generosity and kindness. And these things are not on one side of the ledger of bad or evil, but are in terrible, terrible conflict on this question that there is a question of fairness to people who are already in a country like this one. And there’s also a necessity to kindness. But these two things are warring it out, and they’re warring it out inside every one of us, as well as in this nation. I was hoping for years that a novel would bring that out, and you’ve more than done that and done far more. So congratulations and may it be the success it deserves. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and have a good night.

Speaker 6: Thanks for joining us for the weekly 10 Blocks Podcast featuring urban policy and cultural commentary with City Journal editors, contributors, and special guests.

Photo: Manhattan Institute