We had been warned, Lionel Shriver is happy and very fit. It is that the American novelist with strong ideas, very famous since the publication ofWe need to talk about Kevin in 2006, is not known to show excessive affability, so we are always a little alarmed. And it’s a fact: here she is, warm, in a living room of the Oscar-Niemeyer Library in Le Havre. However, it was not the lunch offered by the mayor, Edouard Philippe, to the star authors of his literary event, The Taste of Others, which cheered her up, because, she confides to us, laughing: “I hate lunches, I only eat one meal a day, and that’s in the evening. I’m rigid, you know, very rigid.”
But then, would it be the charming themes ofTake it or leave it (trans. from English by Catherine Gibert. Belfond, 288 p., €22), her new novel, that is old age, decrepitude, euthanasia, which delights her so? Yes, three times yes, as they delighted the United Kingdom, where his book was published under the brilliant title of Should We Stay or Should We Go in June 2021. A book that should appeal, she is convinced, to her French readership: “Unlike Americans, who balk at this type of subject, she explains, the French like dark themes treated with black humor .” They are served here, as this novel, an x-ray of a London couple struggling with the inconveniences of old age in a Great Britain whose health system is collapsing, is a festival of irony, malice, intelligence , high-flying literary exercises and politically incorrect considerations. We expected no less from this fine observer of social, family and political dysfunctions.
Twelve caustic scenarios
Long live the first lockdown! Which allowed the 65-year-old novelist, who has been living in London for ages, to complete the first draft of this book in one go and with joy – “The following confinements were a nightmare, she tells us, erratically managed with regulations pertaining to Soviet totalitarianism.” Four short months to write this astonishing fiction, scaffolding of scenarios with varied temporalities and proliferation of constraints and gimmicks – to make the members of Oulipo green with envy. The book opens with a funeral: Kay, 51, a nurse in the NHS, the public health system, has just lost her father, whose senile dementia has ruined the life of his family for years. Very quickly, one evening in October 1991, her husband, Cyril, a general practitioner, a dyed-in-the-wool laborer anxious not to weigh, with advancing age, on public finances, offers her a pact: to commit suicide, together, on Kay’s 80th birthday, i.e. March 29, 2020 , in the midst of a Brexit mishmash.
From this fatal contract (euthanasia, a practice acclaimed by Lionel Shriver), the novelist imagines 12 scenarios: Cyril takes action, alone, Kay remarries and ends up under the wheels of a van at 92 ; the couple decides to stay, but Kay is run over by a van; Kay takes the hasty medication, Cyril retracts then, after a stroke, suffering from confinement syndrome, lives through hell; having given up on their plan, the couple find themselves in a retirement home; informed of their intention, their children make them intern, the horror; Kay plays the guinea pig for a new rejuvenating drug, eternal life is no paradise; the couple’s house, old and broke, is invaded by immigrants, like all of Europe…
The variants follow one another, with the sole imperative, assures the author, “the historical authenticity of everything that takes place before the anniversary of the 80th anniversary”. For the rest, Lionel Shriver’s imagination takes flight, scratching the technocrats of the European Union, uncontrolled immigration (“this is my most politically dangerous chapter, but we cannot deny that there is a problem of appropriation of the territory”), the apostles of immortality, the luxurious retirement homes as well as the places of death… From this pretty game of massacre, deployed cheerfully in the shadow of confinement and confinement, we leave, paradoxically, invigorated. Long live Lionel Shriver!