Earliest Shriver

Once you read the acknowledgments and Qs and As at the back of We Have to Talk about Kevin, you would think that Lionel Shriver wrote nothing but clunkers previous to her Orange Prize winning book.  Not so, and my efforts to read most if not all of her earlier works has begun ... sort of adding box car books to this Lionel train (ooh, bad one).

Finished The Female of the Species last night, her first novel, with a picture of her on the back when she was only 29.  Although the plot outline could not be more different from the household tension in Kevin, there are nascent sub themes that carry forward.  Gray is a 59 year old anthropologist, single, never married, childless, tall, athletic and completely independent, in part due to the subservient devotion of a fellow anthropol, Errol, 12 years her junior and with a decades old crush.  Errol is the novel's narrator whose personal fantasies and frustrations permeate his rendition of Gray's enchantment with a 24 year old graduate student, Raphael.

While Gray's descent into sensuality is the story's main exploration.  Gray has many characteristics in common with Eva from Kevin:  she is highly intellectual, aloof, self-involved, with female "BFFs" and most herself when traveling the world, far from American culture.  Raphael previews most of Kevin's sociopathy:  he is completely manipulative, sarcastic, amoral, and plotting.  So here we have it:  Shriver's view of the sexes.  Men are the fatal attractions; personal decisions are open to judgments regarding their morality or impact on society.  Shriver is still in a bad guys die young structure and it will be interesting to see if that continues.  Her female "heroines" are left to age alone, opining about the interactions.

What is clever about this novel is having Gray be an anthropologist who can see patterns in primitive cultures and even extrapolate them the the burnt out, crack infested Bronx.  But she cannot understand people on a one to one basis.  It is like those eye charts of optic degeneration we have at work:  all she has is peripheral vision.  She cannot see the moral equivalence of Raphael to the WWII deserter she encountered in Africa when she began her career -- only the physical resemblance.

Early in the novel, Shriver introduces what her characters will continue to experience, as she describes Gray interacting with the threatening, attractive AWOL, Charles Corgie:  "The two of them stood face to face.  Perhaps they were gods now, at this moment, and this was omnipotence:  to know exactly how little they cared.  Glaring at each other silently, both Gray and Charles recited together their real credo:  Who cares about you, or anyone?  Who needs you, or anyone?  I blink and you disappear.  I turn my back on you and all I see is the door that I can walk out of, always.  I am tall and smart and powerful without you ... You think I want you, and sometimes even I think that, but you are wrong and that is weakness in me, for I am stronger than even I know ... So if ... you dissolve into the heavy air ... I will not care -- I will be thinking about my important work."

The following quote could just as easily have been placed in Kevin:  "... How did you get like this?  We have always been like this.  There was something before ... That was the mystery.  There was no explaining.  Raphael was a certain way and he had always been ... in his crib his eyes shone like that, like the metal on airplanes in the sun, and there was nothing to say about that, no explanation."

On to the next one.