She is tiny and androgynous, with a thin, hard body, fierce eyebrows, muscled arms, calloused hands.
She is simultaneously shocked and thrilled by the comparison, 'George Eliot! I'll certainly take that as a compliment!' It is a choice most women will recognise - is it better to be safe than sorry? Do you stay with the good but slightly dull partner you know or go for the sexual allure of the dark, handsome stranger you don't? But, as always with Shriver, the possibilities are considered with a moral seriousness worthy of George Eliot. she does kiss him back, leaves Lawrence, and marries him. she doesn't kiss him back, and goes home to her regular partner, Lawrence or 2. The novel then pursues two possible outcomes - 1. In the first chapter the heroine Irina, a children's book illustrator, has dinner with an acquaintance, snooker player Ramsey, and he kisses her. It's a what-if story, exploring two alternative narratives. Print runs of her early novels were so small that they are now collectors' items - a tatty copy of her first novel, The Female of the Species, will set you back £83 on AbeBooks.Īnyway, the arrival of The Post-Birthday World, her first novel after Kevin, is a huge publishing event. But it turned out to be the usual story of overnight success - Kevin was actually her seventh novel, or eighth if you count one that was never published she was 48 and had been writing for 20 'very lean and very hard' years before she found recognition. When her novel won the Orange Prize in 2005, having been rejected by 30 publishers, the big question was: Who is Lionel Shriver? A woman with a man's name, an American who had lived for years, unknown, in London, she seemed to arrive from nowhere to become overnight a literary star. It is a mark of how deeply Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin has penetrated that Kevin has become almost the generic term for campus killers. As I was interviewing Lionel Shriver in Foyles jazz cafe in London, a student was shooting 32 of his classmates and staff at Virginia Tech, and sure enough, next day, I heard someone say 'Another Kevin'.
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