Lionel Shriver

Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that would be cancelled in the instance of ‘sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author’? Even cautious, congenial writers are working in an era when a bland, self-evident physiological assertion like ‘women don’t have penises’ attracts a school of frenzied piranhas. So journalists would be fools to sign a document voided if, in a magazine’s ‘sole judgment’, they were the subject of ‘public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals’. These are the ‘morality clauses’ arising in standard publishing contracts in the wake of #MeToo.

We’re closing 2018 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 5: Lionel Shriver on the publishing world's quest for diversity: I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The email cites the publisher’s ‘new company-wide goal’: for ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’ (Gotta love that shouty boldface.

Behold, the most incendiary statistic in America: the Census Bureau’s projection of when whites will become a minority in what last century was ‘their own’ country. (In only 1980, 80 per cent of Americans were white. Mind, where the US leads, Europe often follows.) When in 2008 that red-letter date moved up to 2042, notes California demographer Dowell Myers: ‘People went crazy.’ After decades of progressive lobbying for multicultural inclusion, the startling proximity of this demographic tipping point is enticing a certain brand of activist to embrace the rhetoric of replacement instead. Evident during the midterms, this new approach to the melting pot is militant. If I may paraphrase: ‘Move over.

I’d recommend any aspiring writer to marry a jazz drummer. It’s done wonders for my powers of concentration. If I can write while my husband is practising rolls, or rehearsing with his quartet loudly enough that I don’t know why they didn’t just set up in my study, or worst of all tuning his drums (Bam. Bam. Bam. ‘Nooooo!’ Bam. Bam. Bam. ‘Nooooo!’), then I could knock off novels amid shock and awe in 2003 Iraq. As part-requirement, part-perquisite, over the years I’ve attended a range of jazz clubs, festivals, and concerts. So I can testify: the musicians are nearly all men. Jazz and jazz education make up a small world, but gender disparity has become a mighty tempest in this teacup.

Trump has hinted that Democrats may have been secretly funding the ‘caravan’ of more than 7,000 Honduran immigrants trooping towards the United States. I don’t think so. In the lead-up to the midterms, if any party would sponsor by far the largest organised mass migration to the US on record, Republicans would. For politically, the spectacle is a gift. Thousands of clamorous would-be asylum seekers crammed onto a bridge with no toilets, stampeding, breaking into fights, demanding to cross the Mexican border, the better to gatecrash the US: it was a premier photo op for anti-immigration Republicans. Trump has threatened to close the American border and bring in the military.

‘There are two sides to every story’ is an aphorism you don’t hear often lately. Ask anyone amidst a family row: most stories have more than two sides. But in the take-no-prisoners world of #MeToo, there’s only one side. All women are victims and all women are truthful. Any man who’s had a shadow of doubt cast on his sexual behaviour since his first wet dream at 12 is deserving of permanent social and professional banishment and is forever forbidden from saying a word in his own defence. As the editor-in-chief of the respected New York Review of Books found out. Ostensibly Ian Buruma resigned, but resignation over your own dead body sounds awfully like ‘sacked’ to me. His fatal error, according to the usual Twits?

In a recent column, I vowed to return to a point made in passing. To refresh your memory, the American magazine the Nation printed a formal apology for running a harmless 14-line poem by a white writer about homelessness. The poet’s sins: using the word ‘cripple’ and adopting a voice lightly evoking what I gather we’re now to call ‘AAVE’: African-American Vernacular English. Facebookers were incensed, comments huffy. The poet apologised, too. I decried this ritual progressive self-abasement as cowardly and undignified. But it’s worth taking a second look at that story as a prime example of screaming emotional fraudulence in the public sphere.

To mark last weekend’s one-year anniversary of the violent right-wing demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, a meagre two dozen card-carrying white supremacists showed up in the town, vs thousands of anti-racism protesters — proportions that may reflect the nation as a whole. Nevertheless, ever since the 2017 rally, the American left has thrown around the pejorative ‘white supremacist’ with such abandon that you’d think the country was jagged with peaked white hats from sea to shining sea. By fits and starts, the past 50 years have seen equality of opportunity for minorities in the States improve dramatically. Yet racial rhetoric, and the overall touch-and-feel of race relations on the ground, is deteriorating.

Promoting physical fitness, the left has developed a bracing set of competitive callisthenics. Participants vie over who can complete a marathon crawl on the belly like a reptile, who can flop onto the floor in a pose of the greatest prostration, and who can bend over the farthest, pants down, while begging to have large pieces of furniture shoved up the backside. Athletic displays of public remorse also constitute an increasingly popular spectator sport. The young American poet Anders Carlson--Wee was excited at first about getting ‘How-To’ published in a July issue of the Nation, a storied New Statesman-style weekly.

Dear 2016 WriteNow mentees, Thanks so much for your open letter to me. It seems only good manners for me to write back. You’re rightly proud of having been admitted to a challenging programme at Penguin Random House that mentors gifted young minority authors and helps to cultivate their talents. My own publisher, HarperCollins, runs a similar programme, which enjoys my full support. Such proactive outreach is exactly the approach I endorse for helping to vary the voices on our bookshelves. That is why my column of a fortnight ago said not one discouraging word about WriteNow. Indeed, I made no reference to your programme whatsoever.

I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The email cites the publisher’s ‘new company-wide goal’: for ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’ (Gotta love that shouty boldface.) ‘This means we want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.