A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  “You mean, you gave it to whom,” or “You mean, that’s just between you and me.” I am a lone champion of the accusative case, and so—obviously—have no friends.

  I read every article I can find that commends the nutritional benefits of red wine; if they’re right, I will live to 110. Though raised by Adlai Stevenson Democrats, I have a violent, retrograde right-wing streak that alarms and horrifies my acquaintances in London and New York.

  Those twelve years in Northern Ireland have left a peculiar residual warp in my accent—house = hyse, shower = shar; now = nye. Since an Ulster accent bears little relation to the more familiar mincing of a Dublin brogue, these aberrations are often misinterpreted as holdovers from my North Carolinian childhood. Because this handful of mangled vowels is one of the only souvenirs I took from Belfast, my wonky pronunciation is a point of pride (or, if you will, vanity), and when my

  “Hye nye bryne cye” (= how now brown cow) is mistaken for a bog-standard southern American drawl I get mad.

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  About the book

  Return to Raleigh

  Writing A Perfectly

  Good Family

  A Perfectly Good Family is about inheritance—in the general sense of what our parents bequeath to us genetically, psychologically, and morally. How much do we have a choice in what we would keep, what we would discard? Yet the novel is also about a literal, nitty-gritty inheritance, the disposition of goods—likewise, what we would keep, what we would discard. Most of all, this is a book about a house.

  A house, and who gets it. In my experience, a house is never a mere building. According to standard Jungian interpretation, in dreams a house is a stand-in for the self. The house where you grew up must have more power to evoke that house = self formula than any other.

  An inheritance dispute between siblings over the family home often grows so nasty because you are inevitably fighting not just over title to a property, but title to parental preference, or title to the past itself.

  “Most of all, this is a book about a house. ”

  A Perfectly Good Family—which my mother prefers tellingly to misre-member as The Perfect Family—is the only novel I’ve ever written set in North Carolina, where I was raised. When I was a kid, it wasn’t yet fashionable to hail from the American South, and once I came of age I fled my Tarheel heritage—as well as my accent—for New York. I never looked back until I wrote this book. When I returned to Raleigh to do the research (and how odd, to discover that you still need to do 283

  “research” on a town where you lived for ten years), I was surprised to find Raleigh a much more fascinating, particular place than I remembered, with a rich Civil War history; why, it was a lovely city in which to live, and I was lucky to have grown up there. In fact, I located an entire neighborhood called Oakwood, in the very center of downtown, of which I’d been utterly unaware as a teenager—full of fabulous Reconstruction mansions that were being restored to their original splendor by the wealthy gays who had recently colonized the area.

  I fell in love. Specifically, I developed a crush on a massive three-story manor on Blount Street replete with widow’s walk, wrap-around porch, and carriage house. Yes, Heck-Andrews is a real historical home, and in the novel I kept its name. But when I came upon it, the place was a shambles. The windows were boarded up; the roof was dropping slates. It hadn’t been painted in decades. Digging through local records, I learned that the old girl had been inhabited for years by another old girl—an agoraphobic who was bats. Charitable neighbors used to leave casseroles on her steps. When she’d ceased to retrieve these offerings for weeks, the police finally broke in to find not only the owner’s corpse, but bin liners bulging full of newspapers and bric-a-brac that so filled the first floor and on up the stairway that the cops could barely push in the door. You know the type: she never threw anything away.

  With no living relatives, this old woman had willed Heck-Andrews to the State, but North Carolina couldn’t afford to do the place up, so the poor house was falling to bits. Well, this once-grand manor captured my imagination, which for me is the same thing as capturing my heart.

  With the help of photos of the house from better days, I duplicated the same endeavor of those wealthy gays, albeit the low-budget version: I renovated the house on paper.

  Of course, this novel isn’t only about a house; it’s also about a love triangle. The fact that the triangle is between siblings makes it no less charged than the romantic sort.

  Like Corlis, I grew up sandwiched between two brothers. Only in retrospect have I appreciated the political complexity of growing up between two boys. During most of my childhood, I was pressured—sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly—to ally myself with one brother against the other. Thus our household was forever teeming 284

  with subterfuge, capricious betrayals, and ongoing seductions to switch camps, of which my parents were blissfully unaware. When there had been only two kids in the family, life was simple: my older brother and I were a team. But once my younger brother entered the picture, ultimately I switched sides. For years, my older brother was scheming to win me back. Perhaps he still is.

  While the structure of the McCrea family mirrors my own, I would hope that these characters live and breathe independent of my real relations, to whom they bear only modest resemblance. The story is fictional. At this writing, my parents are—touch wood—still alive and well. Thus I have never wrangled with my brothers over real estate, and we weren’t raised in a house anything like Heck-Andrews—more’s the pity. Nevertheless, underpinning this sometimes sour, sometimes comical story is gratitude for much of what I have inherited from my own parents, like an aptitude for language and an awareness of the world outside the United States. As the dedication notes, ultimately I came into “more strengths than foibles, which is the most parents could hope for any child.”

  While I do believe that the profound affection that underlies these retouched portraits is obvious in the text, when this novel was first published some members of my family took offense. So just in case one of them trips across this edition, I would append a truism that should be self-evident to anyone who’s ever been a member of a family: We are not always loved for the reasons for which we want to be loved.

  That is, we are often loved not so much for who we are as in spite of who we are, making the experience of being “loved” at points rather unpleasant. Rest assured that my family loves me in spite of myself as well.

  But hey, when it comes to love, I take what I can get.

  Oh, and I am pleased to report that when I returned to Raleigh a few years after this novel was first published, North Carolina had mobilized funds and was then putting the finishing touches on a complete restor-ation of the Heck-Andrews house. I was ambivalent; I had enjoyed having sole proprietorship of that house at my keyboard. But Truman would be delighted.

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  Read on

  Read an Excerpt from

  The Post-Birthday World

  (2007, HarperCollins)

  Can the course of life hinge on a single kiss? That is the question that Lionel Shriver’s Post-Birthday World seeks to answer with all the subtlety, percept-iveness, and drama that made her last novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, an international bestseller and winner of the 2005 Orange Prize. Whether the American expatriate Irina McGovern does or doesn’t lean into a certain pair of lips in London will determine whether she stays with her smart, disciplined, intellectual American partner, Lawrence, or runs off with Ramsey—a wild, exuberant British snooker star the couple has known for years. Employing a parallel-universe structure, Shriver follows Irina’s life as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men. In a tour de force that, remarkably, has no villains, Shriver explores the implications, both large and small, of our choice of mate—a subject of timeless, universal fascination for both sexes.

  Chapter One

  What began as coincidence had crystallized into tradition: on the sixth of July, they
would have dinner with Ramsey Acton on his birthday.

  Five years earlier, Irina had been collaborating with Ramsey’s then-wife Jude Hartford on a children’s book. Jude had made social overtures.

  Abjuring the airy we-really-must-get-together-sometime feints common to London, which can carry on indefinitely

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  without threatening to clutter your diary with a real time and place, Jude had seemed driven to nail down a foursome so that her illustrator could meet her husband Ramsey. Or, no—she’d said, “My husband, Ramsey Acton.” The locution had stood out. Irina assumed that Jude was prideful in that wearing feminist way about the fact that she’d not taken her husband’s surname.

  But then, it is always difficult to impress the ignorant. When negotiating with Lawrence over the prospective dinner back in 1992, Irina didn’t know enough to mention, “Believe it or not, Jude’s married to Ramsey Acton.” For once Lawrence might have bolted for his Economist day-planner, instead of grumbling that if she had to schmooze for professional reasons, could she at least schedule an early dinner so that he could get back in time for NYPD Blue. Not realizing that she had been bequeathed two magic words that would vanquish Lawrence’s broad hostility to social engagements, Irina had said instead, “Jude wants me to meet her husband, Raymond or something.”

  Yet when the date she proposed turned out to be Raymond or something’s birthday, Jude insisted that more would be merrier. Once returned to bachelorhood, Ramsey let slip enough details about his marriage for Irina to reconstruct: After a couple of years, they could not carry a conversation for longer than five minutes. Jude had leapt at the chance to avoid a sullen, silent dinner just the two of them.

  “It is always difficult to impress the ignorant. ”

  Which Irina found baffling. Ramsey always seemed pleasant enough company, and the strange unease he always engendered in Irina herself would surely abate if you were married to the man. Maybe Jude had loved dragging Ramsey out to impress colleagues, 287

  but was not sufficiently impressed on her own behalf. One-on-one he had bored her silly.

  “When you cocked only half an ear to her uproarious discourse, it was hard to tell if she was laughing or crying. ”

  Besides, Jude’s exhausting gaiety had a funny edge of hysteria about it, and simply wouldn’t fly—would slide inevitably to the despair that lay beneath it—without that quorum of four. When you cocked only half an ear to her uproarious discourse, it was hard to tell if she was laughing or crying. Though she did laugh a great deal, including through most of her sentences, her voice rising in pitch as she drove herself into ever accelerating hilarity when nothing she had said was funny. It was a compulsive, deflective laughter, born of nerves more than humor, a masking device and therefore a little dishonest. Yet her impulse to put a brave, bearable face on what must have been a profound unhappiness was sympathetic. Her breathless mirth pushed Irina in the opposite direction—to speak soberly, to keep her voice deep and quiet, if only to demonstrate that it was acceptable to be serious. Thus if Irina was sometimes put off by Jude’s manner, in the woman’s presence she at least liked herself.

  Irina hadn’t been familiar with the name of Jude’s husband, consciously. Nevertheless, that first birthday, when Jude had bounced into the Savoy Grill with Ramsey gliding beside her—it was already late enough in a marriage that was really just a big, well-meaning mistake that her clasp of his hand could only have been for show—Irina met the tall man’s grey-blue eyes with a jolt, a tiny touching of live wires that she subsequently interpreted as visual recognition, and later—much later—as recognition of another kind….

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  Author’s Picks

  THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, by Edith Wharton

  I love virtually all of Edith Wharton, but this one’s my favorite. Why Wharton, in general? I admire her prose style, which is lucid, intelligent, and artful rather than arty; she is eloquent but never fussy, and always clear. She never seems to be writing well to show off. As for The Age of Innocence, it’s a poignant story that, typically for Wharton, illustrates the bind women found themselves in when trapped hazily between a demeaning if relaxing servitude and dignified if frightening independence, and that both sexes find themselves in when trapped between the demands of morality and the demands of the heart. The novel is romantic but not sentimental, and I’m a sucker for unhappy endings.

  FLAG FOR SUNRISE, by Robert Stone

  I’m a big fan of most of Stone’s work. This one’s the best, though—grim and brutal. Stone has a feel for politics in the gritty, ugly way they play out on the ground. His cynicism about what makes people tick, and his portrayal of how badly they behave when either desperate or given free rein to do what they like, jibes—alas—with my own experience of the species.

  “[ The Age of Innocence] is romantic but not sentimental, and I’m a sucker for unhappy endings. ”

  AS MEAT LOVES SALT, by Maria McCann

  I include this more recent title if only because, especially in the U.S., it didn’t get the attention it deserved. A historical novel—which I don’t usually read—set in Cromwellian England, it’s about a 289

  homosexual affair in the days when same-sex marriage was hardly in the headlines; rather, man-meets-man was a hanging offense. I relished the radical sexual tension McCann created, without ever becoming sordid or even very blow-by-blow (so to speak), and the story is sexy even for hetero readers like me. In fact, this riveting story works partly because it’s told by a straight woman, and so isn’t tainted by the faint self-justification of many gay authors’ work.

  “I’d recommend all of Dexter’s books, but he may never have topped [ Paris Trout]. ”

  PARIS TROUT, by Pete Dexter

  I’d recommend all of Dexter’s books, but he may never have topped this one. He writes about race and bigotry without the moral obvious-ness that this subject matter often elicits. His prose is terse and muscular, but not posy and tough-guy.

  ATONEMENT, by Ian McEwan

  A terrific examination of guilt and exculpation—or, as for the latter, lack thereof. He writes about childhood in a way that isn’t white-washingly sweet, and he doesn’t endorse cheap forgiveness, of yourself or anyone else. There’s a powerful sense in this book that sometimes seemingly small sins have enormous and permanently dire consequences, with which you’re condemned to live for the rest of your life. I read this while writing Kevin, and I think some of McEwan’s and my themes must intersect.

  ENGLISH PASSENGERS, by Matthew Kneale

  Once again, I include this novel for its relative commercial obscurity in the U.S.—

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  though it did, justly, win the Whitbread in the UK (and should have won the Booker). Seven years in the writing, English Passengers follows the hapless journey of a ship bound for Tasmania in the mid-nineteenth century to find the original Garden of Eden. The novel demonstrates the value of good research, which is seamlessly integrated into the text, and it’s hilarious.

  HAVE THE MEN HAD ENOUGH?,

  by Margaret Forster

  Forster is underappreciated even in the UK, and shamefully neglected in the U.S. This book takes on subject matter from which most novelists have shied: the increasing decrepitude and dementia of an aging relative.

  Given the demographic future, this is material that most of us will soon have to contend with, like it or not.

  REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, by Richard Yates

  Yates was able to look at the disturbing underside of so-called ordinary life, and even more successfully than John Cheever exposed the angst and dissatisfaction that teem beneath the placid suburbs. I don’t think anyone’s life is simple or easy, even with enough food on the table, and Yates was depressive enough as a person to appreciate this fact.

  “[Richard] Yates even more successfully than John Cheever exposed the angst and dissatisfaction that teem beneath the placid suburbs. ”

  THE IDIOT, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Of Dostoevsky’s novels,
most writers would cite The Brothers Karamazov.

  Which I also adored in latter adolescence, but found I 291

  could not bear when I tried to read it again in my thirties. I hadn’t the patience. By contrast, re-reading The Idiot as an adult rewarded the return. At that time, I was writing my second novel, Checker and the Derailleurs, and also grappling with how difficult it is to write about goodness.

  Virtue in literature, as it is often in real people, can be downright off-putting. The secret, I discovered, was to put virtue at risk—thus guaranteeing that our hero is misunderstood and persecuted. I preferred to confirm this with Dostoevsky, though if I hadn’t acquired an allergy to all things religious during my Presbyterian childhood, I might also have located the same ingenious fictional strategy in the New Testament.

  ALL THE KING’S MEN, by Robert Penn Warren

  As I scan these (hopelessly arbitrary) selections, I note that a number of novels that have made a big impression on me have somehow managed to incorporate a political element—without being tiresome or po-lemical. In my own work, I’ve often tried to do the same. Penn Warren’s loose fictionalized biography of Huey Long has stayed with me for so intertwining the personal and the political as to expose the distinction as artificial. Unfortunately, when I tracked down his other books—and there are not many—they were all disappointing in comparison. Read All the King’s Men and forget the rest. Years hence folks may be dismissing most of my own novels in just this manner, but if they’re still touting one title, and it’s as good as this one, then I’ll still be very lucky.

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  Have You Read?

  WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

  (winner of the 2005 Orange Prize for fiction) In this gripping novel of motherhood gone awry, Lionel Shriver approaches the tragedy of a high-school massacre from the point of view of the killer’s mother. In letters written to the boy’s father, Eva probes the upbringing of this more-than-difficult child and reveals herself to have been the reluctant mother of an unsavory son. As the schisms in her family unfold, we draw closer to an unexpected climax that holds breathtaking surprises and its own hard-won redemption. In Eva, Shriver has created a narrator who is touching, sad, funny, and reflective. A spellbinding read, We Need to Talk About Kevin is as original as it is timely.