Lionel Shriver

The assignment of books for review has always been haphazard. Fellow fiction writers can be tempted either to undermine the competition, or to flatter colleagues who might later judge prizes or provide boosting blurbs. There are no clear qualifications for book reviewing — perhaps publication, but most of all, because reviewers are paid for their text but not for the many hours it takes to read the bleeding books, a willingness to work for atrocious wages. Mitigating the gravity of this matter? Aside from the authors whose work is on the block, almost no one reads book reviews, and I say that as someone who writes a fair number. It’s a publishing truism that ‘reviews don’t sell books’ — although negative ones can un-sell books.

Am I the only one to find the #metoo-ing over Harvey Weinstein a little creepy? Bandwagons always make me want to jump off. And talk about kicking an asshole when he’s down. I resent being made to feel sorry for the man. Now that the confessional groundswell over sexual harassment has moved far beyond this one Hollywood toad, we seem to be losing the distinction between actual sexual assault and mere poor taste. The theatre director Max Stafford Clark’s remark to a staff member that he would be ‘up her like a rat up a drainpipe’ in his friskier days sounds like the arm chancing of an earlier generation, and at 76 he was unlikely to have made a young woman feel threatened. He was in a wheelchair, for pity’s sake. So was George H.W.

Matt Ridley’s fine recent Times column was hardly the first to raise the alarm about the pseudo-Soviet intolerance of the left emerging from university campuses. Yet he began with arresting statistics: ‘38 per cent of Britons and 70 per cent of Germans think the government should be able to prevent speech that is offensive to minorities.’ Given that any populace can be subdivided into a veritably infinite number of minorities, with equally infinite sensitivities, the perceived bruising of which we only encourage, pretty soon none of us may be allowed to say an ever-loving thing. We won’t rehash the whole trigger warning/safe spaces nonsense.

To my embarrassment, ever since my novel We Need to Talk About Kevin was published in 2003, I’ve been a go-to girl regarding American mass murders. I’m embarrassed because my credentials are so poor — I’m only an expert on a school killer I made up — and because I’ve so little to say. That’s one of the standard reactions to these things, whose scale seems only to escalate: being struck dumb. That’s why Sky News and the BBC ring me up. They’re desperate, you see. They have nothing to say either. In the days I accepted many of these gigs, I made what I hoped was one serviceable point. As most of the shooters want attention, surely our mistake is to give it to them.

Novelists can’t merely tell cracking tales. We’re supposed to save the world. At the University of Kent, a student implored me to inscribe The Mandibles with instructions for ‘how to keep this from happening’ — for the feverish young man now vowed to devote his life to preventing my new novel’s debt-fuelled near-future financial collapse. And I thought I was just doing a book signing. I wrote, ‘To keep this from happening, pay your bills. To cash in on this happening, get as deeply into debt as possible.’ The next student proffered a tiny spiral notebook, in which I was to jot ‘three things that are really important’.

When an old friend X came to dinner in London, I sampled what it must have been like during the American Civil War, when families were split asunder from aligning on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon. Lo, this warm-hearted, well-read, intelligent Midwesterner is backing Donald Trump. This was my husband’s introduction to X, whose electoral preference clearly queered the first impression. Our threesome didn’t talk long on the matter. The disconnect being so absolute, there was little to say. X is the only Trump supporter I wittingly know. But I was chilled by the difference between this and countless heated-but-civil suppers of yore, at which a dinner guest plumped rambunctiously for a candidate I opposed — Romney, McCain, even George W.