Lionel Shriver needs an editor

[SnoopyPajamas]

Just that, really. I'd never read anything by her before and recently started Mania. It might be one of the most frustrating books I've read in a while. My hands itch with how badly I want to pick up a red pen and edit this book. I can't make it through more than a page without wishing I could pick up the phone and hash it out with her. It's one of those books where you just keep thinking: where was the editor? Are they afraid to challenge an author of her prestige?

The frustrating thing is that the basic idea is good, and there are some flashes of sharp, spiky satire in there, that feel all too real. The problem is, Shriver's got swallowed-a-thesaurus syndrome, and never learned the art of understatement. Just because you've got a big fancy word in your arsenal, doesn't mean you have to deploy it. Sometimes simpler is better. Sometimes you can cut five words out of a sentence, and it's all the stronger for it.

A writer as celebrated as Shriver shouldn't have to be told all this. But even if the lesson passed her by . . . isn't this the job of the editor? Shriver is obviously a strong-willed person, and I imagine she's tough to wrangle. But, come on. The book is so much weaker as a result. The flashes of brilliance are swamped by boggy, overwritten surrounding paragraphs. The story could zip along at a much faster pace, and let the satire fly, but it doesn't. Every sentence is twice as long as it needs to be, and stuffed with information the reader doesn't actually need, dragging the whole thing down to the depths of the ocean.

In addition, every character is unrealistically verbose, and speaks with the same essential 'voice'. The main character's children, husband, and best friend all sound just like her. Which is just silly. A child shouldn't sound like a middle aged adult, no matter how clever they're supposed to be. I'm actually starting to wonder if Shriver knows that the world is full of clever people, who don't talk like Ivy League English professors? I can't shake the feeling she doesn't. I get the feeling we're supposed to be impressed by the way her characters talk, and agog at their cleverness. But it all feels so laboured.

I've never read any of Shriver's other books, but I'm struggling to make it through this one. It makes me quite angry to think she probably got a whacking great advance for this, and someone else was paid good money to edit it, and this is the finished product that made it to market.

But she's a big name author, and fancy words bamboozle people, so that's alright then 🙄

Yes, I just wondered why you had mentioned the copy edit at all.

Perhaps writers who are very successful may seem untouchable? Editors might feel braver about making recommendations to someone relatively unknown, but once someone is very famous it could be trickier. JKR is possibly an example - the later Harry Potter books are much longer and less tightly written (edited?) than the early ones.
I really didn't enjoy Kevin so haven't been tempted to try any others by Lionel Shriver.

Agree. I also enjoyed Double Fault and The Female of the Species.

I think Shriver had one book in her, and that was “Kevin”.

I liked Big Brother and Should we stay or should we go, very much. Agree about the prose style. I also find her idea of British English very peculiar.

I really enjoyed Mania, and I love Shriver's strong but not very likeable female protagonists generally. But I also agree that it would have been even better if some of the displays of cleverness, both in the dialogue and in the dollops of factual information with which the reader is presented, had been allowed to fall on to the literary equivalent of the cutting room floor. There were quite a few instances of, "You've already told us about this/shown us that this is how things are, please don't go on about it again, get on with what happened next." But I wonder, from what's disclosed in the last section, if this pseudo-intellectual prolixity is actually Pearson Converse writing in character.

"Kevin" grabbed me hard and I'm glad I didn't read it until my own children were adults, but even there I found myself thinking that the conversations Eva and Franklin have as a matter of course seemed unrealistically profound and abstract.

I loved Big Brother and The Mandibles.

I enjoyed Game Control which was the first book of hers I read. Just the right amounts of weird and dark and satire. Kevin was brilliant, and that's what she is rightly known for. Hated the Post Birthday World, loved loved loved The Mandibles. One of the things I like about Lionel Shriver is that she provokes a strong reaction in me as a reader!

Yes, as a PP said, We Need To Talk About Kevin was riveting. I read it a long time ago, but I don't remember feeling as you describe about the writing.

Bullied by her characters, that's brilliant 😂

I've always found it interesting, the hold some characters have over their authors. Makes me think of Arthur Conan Doyle trying to kill off Sherlock Holmes. It was the only way! Until he realised Holmes just wouldn't stay dead.

The whole book is more of the same, feeling quite repetitive around the main theme of the book & the same characters having essentially the same discussions. I would say it is worth persevering with on balance - it is not a long book and the way the events play out is an interesting read. I think the things happening to the characters tell the story as well as the conversations so I wish there had been less of those. If you haven’t read Kevin it is definitely her best work but Big Brother and The Mandibles are also worth a look

The Mandibles has continued to haunt me years after reading it. I did skim over some of the longer expository conversations about economics.
The book about ageing (sorry forgot its name) was very astringent, just as I was dealing with my own mother's decline.

With all due respect towards her, have you ever listened to her? I have only read her articles, but the way you describe her writing in the book sounds exactly like the way she speaks.
Ironically, she reminds me of Judith Butler sometimes 😂

I agree with the hit and miss - have Mania on Kindle and started it, but it irritated me too much.

Went back and re-read The Mandibles (again). My personal favourite and ever more relevant.

I think so. I can understand it on the one hand. Once a writer has proven themselves a success, they've earned a publisher's trust. That's fair. But I don't think a little bit of oversight hurts, especially as writers are fickle creatures. They can turn a bit funny and lose their touch unexpectedly. Television example here, but just look at Doctor Who. Russell T Davies was the man with the Midas touch back in 2005, but when the BBC gave him free rein for his return twenty years later, it was a disaster. You wouldn't think it was the same man.

JK Rowling is a funny case. Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix could have been tightened up considerably, I agree. I'd have cut the whole subplot with Hagrid's giant half-brother, who is never seen again and doesn't add much to the story. But I'll go to bat for the current size of the Strike books, which some people complain about. I think she's one of those writers who expands the books as the story grows. The world grows with her and you would lose valuable additions, and time to decompress with the characters, if you were to rein her in too much. The Strike books are doorstoppers now, but they never feel like it in the reading.

That's the difference, I think. Rowling's prose is very tight and she knows how to keep the action moving. A satire like Mania should have a lightness to it. It should hit you like a boxer, jabbing and weaving to catch you off guard. Not trundle over you like a determined freight train. (Which occasionally clunks into reverse for no reason.) Maybe it'll pick up as it goes along, but it feels like there's a lighter, sharper work trying to rise up right now, that can't quite get free of the mud. It's frustrating.

I dread to think how she'd do British English, actually 😬

Reading Diana Athill on Philip Roth and generally about editing, she is pragmatic that sometimes a publishing house needs to keep a big author sweet and still with them more than they need to make the best possible version of one book.

When I see badly written books by well-known authors, i start off thinking, 'What was the editor thinking?' but end up thinking 'I wonder how much worse it was before the editor got their hands on it.' If the editor has already tactfully had to persuade the author to cut fifty pages, they may have to just nod and smile when some flab gets left in.

I've heard her speak here and there. Not much, I'll admit. Lots of um's and ah's and long pauses, I found her a bit slow going to listen to. Very dry. But then, writing is a different medium, and she gets so much praise!

In the book, her characters barely pause for breath before rattling off another sermon. No gathering thought for them. There's not much human interaction between them at all. They just regurgitate talking points at each other, like a bunch of Twitter handles going at it in real life. It's distractingly inorganic. Even people who talk like that on Twitter rarely talk that way in real life.

It could be great if she was making a point about how chronically online these characters are supposed to be. But so far the internet hasn't really come up. We're supposed to believe these characters are getting all their discourse through books and dinner parties. They fear cancellation, but they're not active participants in online discourse. Sorry, but there's just no way. The Twitter speak from all of them is terminal. Even the husband seems like he'd have a dozen "AITA?" threads going about his wife on Reddit.

I found Big Brother to be an eminently readable and zippy-along type of novel although I know a lot of people had a problem with the ending.

WNTTAK was also pretty easy to digest, I don't remember feelings of "this is too much, she's just being pretentious here". I do remember the subtle humour in her characterisation of Kevin's mother. But generally I'm terrible for wanting to edit pratically everything I'm reading.

Maybe she made a conscious choice to write in a verbose style for this particular novel?

Oh, yes. I can see Pearson is supposed to be flawed, and I'm fine with that. She pushes too hard, she's in her own head too much. All fine by me. I don't have to like her to enjoy the book.

It's the stuff that feels like it's not supposed to be a character flaw that irks me. The book is in Pearson's point of view and that's fair enough. Maybe all the waffle is her inner voice. I can take that. But all the other characters talk the same way. Even the child! That's what makes me think it's just Shriver's idea of what clever people sound like. It's not true to life, and not very interesting to read. No variety. Even when they argue the conversations feel so samey.

I'll stick with it. I'd love if it was all the character, and building to a point. But I suspect it's the voice of the author that's annoying me.

Maybe this was a bad one to start with. It's hard to judge when I have no point of comparison for her writing

This is interesting. Maybe she's trying a new style with this one and it's a bit of a misfire? It could be a bad introduction to her work. There's always that one book you tell people not to start with, that needs a bit more goodwill

You need to move this to AIBU. The reply would be yes. She’s an awful person with horrible opinions.

Yes, but her editor didn’t agree with you. She will have gone through several rounds of edits on it, and thought that this version would sell. I think Mania (which I haven’t read, not being a particular LS fan) would probably have been edited by Suzie Dooré (at Borough Press, a HarperCollins imprint) who is very experienced, and was the head fiction buyer for Waterstones before that — she also edits Tracy Chevalier, Bella Mackie, Bridget Collins, Rebecca Huang etc. It won’t have been that she just said ‘Oh well, can’t be bothered’ or ‘I’m too scared of Lionel to cut’, it will have been that she thought this worked as it was.

I actually think Lionel Shriver isn’t really a novelist at all, more of an essayist, who plays around with ideas in fiction, often in heavily satirical shewed dystopias. They often read more like extended op eds. but you know what you’re getting with her.

I met Shriver at the Beijing Literary Festival in 2012. She was super-mean and told an anti-Irish joke

She was a friend of a friend for a while during my London years, and I’ve met her, and didn't take to her, to put it mildly. You would see her running along the South Bank a lot, too.

But to be honest, there are quite a few writers whose work I very much admire (LS isn’t one of them) whom I’ve not liked at all in person, or who are the colleagues from hell according to friends in creative writing departments.