Property

November 15, 2017

National Book Award finalist Shriver offers her first volume of short fiction, with pieces concerning the impact of possessions, even one's home, on personal relationships. In "Vermin," for instance, two artists watch their passion flame out after they purchase a rundown house. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2018
A dozen stories about homeownership, cohabitation, and other domestic perils, suffused to various degrees with Shriver's (The Mandibles, 2016, etc.) political concerns.The Standing Chandelier, the stellar novella that opens this collection, concerns Jillian, a bright but eccentric middle-aged artist who's longtime best friends with Weston--until he gets engaged to Paige, who resents Jillian's invasiveness (symbolized by the quirky wedding gift of the title) and demands he cut her off. The story recalls Shriver at her best (i.e., 2007's The Post-Birthday World): keenly alert to interior matters of jealousy, romance, and friendship and exterior matters of manners and decorum. The entire collection is unified by the question of how new arrangements, be they via marriage or a house, change or reveal our personalities, though none of the stories quite matches the opener. A few are irony-rich satires about contemporary living: In "Negative Equity," a married couple splits up but are loath to find new homes while their current one is underwater; in "Paradise to Perdition," an embezzler finds life on the lam at a tropical resort is duller than he'd hoped for. But in recent years, Shriver has become something of a scold in both her essays and fiction about what she sees as our overly sensitive, gumption-impaired society, and a handful of these stories are effectively chastising op-eds. "The ChapStick" is a critique of the Transportation Security Administration told via a man hastening to reach his dying father; in "Domestic Terrorism" (note the overheated title), a couple is at a loss about what to do about their layabout son, a vehicle for much grousing about shiftless millennials; and the closing novella, The Subletter, sourly and clunkily likens the lives of two women writers with the warring factions during Ireland's Troubles.Few writers are so committed to using fiction to explore the intimate impact of formal regulations and informal social engineering, but it remains a hit-and-miss project.

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Starred review from February 19, 2018
The wry and nimble novellas and stories in this collection by Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin) focus on how homes and objects shape the lives of those who own them. The collection, which concentrates on middle-class Brits and Americans, is bookended by two richly detailed and sardonic novellas. In the first, “The Standing Chandelier,” a freelance web designer’s relationship with his girlfriend is tested after his high-strung ex-girlfriend gives them a gift that dominates their house. In the concluding novella, “The Subletter,” an American journalist who has been making a meager living in Belfast for years is brought to the edge of
a breakdown when she has to share her apartment with an ambitious young subletter. In between, mordant tales touch down in the lives of a young American making herself at home in an African household (“Kilifi Creek”), a recent widow discovering that her late husband had done more than she thought to take care of a seemingly simple garden (“The Self-Seeding Sycamore”), and a slacker whose parents find him impossible to uproot from the household (“Domestic Terrorism”). Shriver’s stories will make readers laugh when they feel they shouldn’t, and the uniting theme of houses and humans works exceedingly well, turning up new wrinkles with each successive story.