A perfectly good novel -- and yet...

By Tracy

I’ve been reading my third Lionel Shriver novel: A Perfectly Good Family. It’s an older one than We Need To Talk About Kevin or The Post-Birthday World, which was one of my Christmas presents, but has been republished after them, at least here in Australia. (Shriver had brought out a number of novels before she came to major prominence with Kevin.)

A Perfectly Good Family is highly readable and very compelling – it’s lured me temporarily away from my PhD reading – but then it is school holidays...

It’s the story of three adult siblings, white Southerners in the USA, who haven’t lived together for years, who come together again after their parents’ death because the family home has been willed to them all (plus one – see below!*).

The two wildly different brothers don’t get on at all – and the narrator Corlis, the “middle child”, who has spent her life negotiating between the two of them, must choose which way to cast what is more or less a deciding vote in the house’s fate.

(That house is a Reconstruction mansion in the US South... which must make it symbolic in more than the familial sense, for the characters – in the wider cultural and political sense, it’s not just any old mansion, but a piece of “historical” metonymy.)

The novel’s technically well-handled – apart from one scene that I think was overplayed, dragged out, when Corlis and others clear out the freezer in which her mother had stored years’ worth of leftovers. Every inch of the metaphor is examined, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be effective, except that I think it goes on too long.

The novel’s title is an echo of the late mother’s catchphrase about this or that food item being still “perfectly good”, in a kind of eternal unwillingness to face transience, corruption, deterioration. (I think here of Hodge & Mishra's description of white Australian culture as wilfully "hebephrenic" -- she'll be right, mate -- and their call for "paranoid" readings of the literature, that go to the truths of colonial violence -- in their book, The Dark Side of the Dream.)

Shriver is very good, too, on the agonies of mother-love, or mother-ambivalence, especially in a scene where Corlis goes through her late mother’s dressing table, pots and scents and jewellery, only to counter her own emotionalism straight after, with a cruel and bathetic act that undoes the moment.

On the whole, the story’s excruciating in the best Lionel Shriver manner – you wince as you recognise all-too accurate behaviour and evasions – Shriver seems to leave no stone unturned. It’s the sort of harshness I associate with Mary McCarthy in The Group, except that there’s some compassion here, and a recognition of the utterly mixed nature of human personality. Shriver’s not standing back to say “you people”, but “we people”.

She also shows us the ambiguities and imperfect mixtures in purportedly held political views (Kevin was like this too), so that ultimately, while you’ll find a lot of reference to the world outside the individual (bourgeois) family, it’s mostly as a means of constructing their psyches for the reader; there’s no absolute political stance, only a lively “dialogism” and a clear depiction of the way that contradictory attitudes can exist within individuals and indeed families.

When this is used for humour and irony, it sometimes treads a fine line between satire of unintentional racism and participation in it. Two of the siblings, not wanting their house to sell, wish to be rude to prospective buyers – but the first to turn up are a well-off African-American couple. Since the siblings were brought up by a father who spent his life fighting for civil rights causes and on behalf of African Americans, Corlis and her brother squirm now in a predictable white middle-class self-scrutinising fashion.

This is meant as satire on shallow white guilt, but it only gets there by deploying still another stereotype, one that’s meant to overturn the “poor black” stereotype, yet is just as glib in its way. It doesn’t satisfy as a piece of satire, and it got me thinking about why humour that treads this line often wobbles. (I have problems watching, say, Ricky Gervais, that I don’t quite have if I watch Chris Lilley, and maybe asking myself why that is would be material for another blog entry...). This is the juncture at which I have to state that as a privileged white in a racist, colonial country, I read Shriver from the demographic position that makes my own critique of her, as John points out, equally compromised.

To be fair, I haven’t got right to the end yet, so it will be crucially interesting to see what Shriver does at last with these issues. (*One of the plot engines, pressuring the sale of the house, is that a fourth share in the parents’ will was left to the ACLU; this is resented by the three siblings each in his or her own way, and yet it seems to me to be part of the book’s point – again ambivalently presented – the unaddressed social and political dimension of the family story, the fourth who is there alongside the three...)

But any book that drives you to write about it before you’ve finished (as if you just can’t let it end) must have some narrative and psychological power.