Abominations Selected essays from a career of courting self-destruction

Review by Booklist Review

In her fiction, Shriver (Should We Stay or Should We Go, 2021) can conjure a dystopian future the way most people can dream up a summer picnic, so when she turns her caustic eye to significant social phenomena such as COVID-19, Brexit, and wealth inequality, the result bounces from merely thought-provoking to certifiably mind-blowing. In a collection of both new and previously published nonfiction, including magazine essays, academic lectures, awards speeches, and literary critiques, Shriver decries everything from linguistic gymnastics to cultural hypersensitivity, media hypocrisy, publishing follies, and political juggernauts, all with a brio that is pugnacious when it needs to be and controversial when that wasn't her intent. It is, however, when Shriver discusses others--her brother, father, and friends past and present--that she most reveals herself. A novelist, essayist, critic, and satirist, Shriver not only defies labels, she despises them. What this collection illustrates above all else is that Shriver is a razor-sharp observer of contemporary life who brings an acutely personal viewpoint to global issues in ways that feel both intimate and universal.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist Shriver (Should We Stay or Should We Go) collects more than two decades' worth of her nonfiction writing in this hit-or-miss compendium. Topics range from the personal, such as the death of the author's brother, to the pedantic--as with a look at Shriver's "battle" against comma splices. Shriver also navigates a slew of professional controversies: in her opening address at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival, she said she hoped "the concept of 'cultural appropriation' is a passing fad (albeit one not passing fast enough)," and goes on, in "a slight expansion" of a New York Times op-ed (rather than the "the crimped, eviscerated" version that the paper published), to respond to a writer who was upset by the address: "This is a performance of injury, an opportunistic and even triumphant display of injury." While her prose is reliably strong, some of the stances she takes in service of being a self-proclaimed iconoclast can be a slog to get through, especially when they near condescension. (Of a diversity questionnaire sent to Penguin Random House authors, she writes "You can self-classify as disabled, and three sequential questions obviously hope to elicit that you've been as badly educated as humanly possible.") Shriver's fans, though, will make room on their shelves for it. (Sept.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Shriver waded through her numerous columns, features, essays, and op-eds (from the Guardian, the New York Times, and more) plus speeches, reviews, and unpublished works, to produce a collection readers will likely find sharp-tongued and bracing. What else would you expect from the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin? With a 30,000-copy first printing.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Sharp, witty contrarian views. Journalist and novelist Shriver gathers 35 pieces from her copious output of essays, columns, talks, and opinion pieces, many from the Spectator, where she has been a columnist since 2017, and Harper's, where she inhabited the "Easy Chair" for a year. A preacher's daughter born in the U.S., Shriver has lived in the U.K. for more than 30 years, 12 of them in Belfast, and has strong, cranky, shrewd opinions on culture and politics on both sides of the Atlantic. A supporter of Brexit, she "dislikes affirmative action, opposes lockdowns for the suppression of disease, abhors soaring national debts, defends free speech even when people use it to say something unpleasant, and resists uncontrolled mass immigration." Describing herself as a "socially liberal economic conservative," her views on issues such as cultural appropriation, #MeToo, and the left's "preening sanctimony" have generated vehement criticism and led, she admits proudly, to her being canceled three different times. Her wide range of topics includes tennis, urban cycling, fitness, the quality of Ikea furniture, happiness, friendship, and the use--or not--of quotation marks in fiction. In a sermon about her alienation from religious faith, she characterizes religion as "flattening and anthropocentric; it makes the world too known and so too small." In a memorial tribute, she praises her older brother for having been an iconoclast, "naturally disobedient, defiant, and headstrong." Many pieces reflect Shriver's dismay at the "weaponized sensitivity" that has created "an oppressively gendered world, in which identity is more bound up in one's sex than ever before." As a straight, White, female novelist, she rails against the idea that creating characters of different ethnicity, race, disability, sexual identity, religion, or class opens her work "to forensic examination" and derision. "The contrived taboo of so-called cultural appropriation," she asserts, "means we can safely write only autobiography." Spirited, incendiary, entertaining, and sure to ruffle some feathers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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