A BETTER LIFE

Shriver, who’s flirted with hard-right ideology, cozies up to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

Gloria and Nico Bonaventura live in a large Queen Anne house in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. Gloria, the matriarch, is a 62-year-old liberal divorcée eager to support migrants arriving in New York. Enrolling in a city program paying residents to take in migrants and ease overstressed hotels and shelters, she soon welcomes Martine Salgado, an asylum-seeker from Honduras. Gloria’s 26-year-old son, Nico, college-educated but unemployed, resents the intrusion, but is committed to observing before passing judgment. What he witnesses is a doom-mongering fiction about immigrant invasion. With the stately Queen Anne serving as a metaphor for a once-mighty America built on the backs of white Europeans, the Bonaventura home is speedily filled with ever more Honduran migrants, eager to exploit subsidized housing, food, and medical care. Gloria is pressed to give ransom money to Martine to rescue her (maybe) kidnapped children back home, which is only the start of the bleeding. Martine isn’t a stock immigrant character, and her relationship with Nico has an interesting push and pull, but Shriver complicates her mainly to serve the trope of the inscrutable foreigner. The remainder of the migrants are uncivilized schemers at best, gangsters at worst. The asylum system, immigration enforcement, and leftism are not above critique, but Shriver all but revels in meme-grade complaints about “calculated, premeditated welching,” “welfare shoppers,” “Black Lives Matter loonies,” and “nonsensical trans crap.” Fitting such cliches, the climax promulgates a might-makes-right scenario fit for a John Wayne film. Shriver has long taken pride in heterodox thinking, which has made for some fine novels. Here, though, she’s persuaded that savaging liberal pieties represents a brave stance, when this rehash of The Camp of the Saints is just hackneyed paranoid xenophobia.

Her worst book, by a wide margin.