ABOMINATIONS

Sharp, witty contrarian views.

Journalist and novelist Shriver gathers 35 pieces from her copious output of essays, columns, talks, and opinion pieces, many from the Spectator, where she has been a columnist since 2017, and Harper’s, where she inhabited the “Easy Chair” for a year. A preacher’s daughter born in the U.S., Shriver has lived in the U.K. for more than 30 years, 12 of them in Belfast, and has strong, cranky, shrewd opinions on culture and politics on both sides of the Atlantic. A supporter of Brexit, she “dislikes affirmative action, opposes lockdowns for the suppression of disease, abhors soaring national debts, defends free speech even when people use it to say something unpleasant, and resists uncontrolled mass immigration.” Describing herself as a “socially liberal economic conservative,” her views on issues such as cultural appropriation, #MeToo, and the left’s “preening sanctimony” have generated vehement criticism and led, she admits proudly, to her being canceled three different times. Her wide range of topics includes tennis, urban cycling, fitness, the quality of Ikea furniture, happiness, friendship, and the use—or not—of quotation marks in fiction. In a sermon about her alienation from religious faith, she characterizes religion as “flattening and anthropocentric; it makes the world too known and so too small.” In a memorial tribute, she praises her older brother for having been an iconoclast, “naturally disobedient, defiant, and headstrong.” Many pieces reflect Shriver’s dismay at the “weaponized sensitivity” that has created “an oppressively gendered world, in which identity is more bound up in one’s sex than ever before.” As a straight, White, female novelist, she rails against the idea that creating characters of different ethnicity, race, disability, sexual identity, religion, or class opens her work “to forensic examination” and derision. “The contrived taboo of so-called cultural appropriation,” she asserts, “means we can safely write only autobiography.”

Spirited, incendiary, entertaining, and sure to ruffle some feathers.