Monday, April 22, 2013

Lionel Shriver: time to talk about her big brother


The author, who won the Orange prize for We Need to Talk About Kevin, is noted for her honesty. But her new novel, inspired by the obesity that killed a sibling, is her most courageous book yet

Lionel Shriver, Observer profile
Lionel Shriver: 'a person of iron will and self-discipline'. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

Most novelists go to great lengths to convince readers that their work is not autobiographical. Not Lionel Shriver. Her latest novel, Big Brother, out next month, is about a sister trying to rescue a man who is eating himself to death. Topical? Sure. In the UK, health problems associated with being overweight cost the NHS £5bn a year. But a bit too close to the bone? Shriver's own "big brother", Greg, died of obesity-related causes four years ago at the age of 55.
    Ever since Shriver won the Orange prize for We Need to Talk About Kevin in 2005, her name has been synonymous with brutal honesty in fiction and mesmerising eccentricity in real life. But with her latest one, is this self-examination through fiction taken a step too far? Without any knowledge of Shriver's own life, Big Brother is an entertaining, gripping, intelligent story. But just before the end, it has an astonishing, jaw-dropping moment when the novelist pulls away the curtains and lets you see right into something that looks dangerously like her own life. It's a shockingly frank and bold move, one that has already divided early readers.

    For Shriver, 55, this book surely represents some kind of wish-fulfilment  in novel form. Shriver says she did not have the chance to "save" her brother. By the time she realised that she could have staged an intervention, it was too late.
    She wrote of her older brother: "He's topping 330lb: 24 stone. He was once 5ft 7in tall, but his vertebrae have compressed and, at 5ft 3in, I now look him straight in the eye. I used to look up to him in every sense. I ended our last two visits in tears. My brother breaks my heart. He's obscenely smart ... but he's also, sadly, a good test case for the claim that one can be 'healthy at every size'." Within hours of her filing that article in 2009, she learned that her brother had died of cardiac arrest in New York, following a sudden respiratory crisis.

    But this novel is also something of a mid-career test for Shriver. Her recent novels have had mixed reviews. So Much For That, a story of one family's struggle with the American healthcare system, was judged preachy. The New Republic, a novel about terrorism written before 9/11 but published many years later, was slammed ("...flails ineffectually, never quite finding a juicy enough target").

    But Big Brother, like Kevin, can only serve to fuel the cult of personality that has grown up around Shriver, a figure of fascination whose makeup-free complexion has become the female equivalent of Tom Wolfe's statement white suit. Shriver is a person of iron will and self-discipline, especially over food, exercise and her daily writing schedule. She let herself go once in the past, she has said, when she was 18. "I basically did the pastry tour of Britain. It's amazing how much weight you can put on if you just eat cream puffs. That was cautionary: 'Oh, I see, you're not immune.' That has not happened again."
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