Post-Birthday World is a bit of a mixed bag. I read the bulk of it in two days and was tearing up towards the end. After I set the book down and my mother asked me how it was, my response was, "It was okay," then I proceeded to tell her, at length, about the story, what I liked and what I didn't like.The story is set in London, where Irina McGovern has lived in domestic comfort with her partner (not husband) of 10 years, Lawrence (both in their 40s). After starting a tradition of having yearly dinners with Ramsey Acton (slightly older), a celebrity sportsman/snooker player, on his birthday, Lawrence is out of town on Ramsey's birthday one year and urges Irina to have dinner with Ramsey so that he's not left alone. In the past, Irina found she didn't have much to say to Ramsey and ends up dreading the event, but sets it up, anyhow. Then - surprise, surprise - on the occasion that the two of them are left alone, they have a fun time together, and Irina finds herself in an eye-lock with Ramsey, questioning whether or not to give in to her all-consuming desire to kiss him. Here, the story splinters, following two plot lines - one that examines what would happen if she kisses him, one that examines what would happen if she doesn't.It's two age-old debates for the price of one. Firstly, which kind of love is more suited to long-term happiness: the passionate yet volatile kind, or the comfortable, reliable kind? And secondly, is there such a thing as fate? Can one action, even a small one, change the course of your life?Just a hundred or so pages in, I found myself annoyed with Irina. I assumed I would like her in some way as the book went on, and I did to some degree - but at the same time, as the story progressed, her tragic flaw became that much more apparent. What is her tragic flaw? Her lack of any kind of self-interest. She constantly grapples, mentally, with whether or not it's okay for a woman's life goal to be having a solid relationship with a man - but in practice, there isn't much struggle. The fact that she lets the men in her life decide to such a tremendous degree how hers ends up only shows how out of her own hands she allows her life to be. She says that, ideally, she likes the idea of an independent woman, but when Lawrence is out of town for 10 days, she's despondent. She's only confident about how she looks when it's acknowledged by a man. There are only a few times when she's ever satisfied when she's alone, and that's when she forces herself to be happy, out of spite, when Lawrence goes to Russia without her, or when she's engrossed in working on her own book (something she does all of once during each plot line). She argues that you can only derive so much satisfaction from a career and even I, in my career-driven ways, can agree with that - but Irina's interest in her own career is passing. Sure, she reaches the same career mark in both story lines, but everything else is determined by who she's with at the time. Even when she writes her book, does something that should be hers, it's completely influenced by the man in her life. It's pathetic! It reminded me of the comments I got on a short story I wrote in my fiction class senior year about - oh, you bet - a woman deciding between two men. My professor - also a woman - told me that I didn't include enough of the main character's career, that it was hard to get a strong sense of who the character was if her life and ambitions were consumed by men, and I'd argue the same is true of Post-Birthday World. She doesn't even really have many friends - she only ever hangs out with two of them, one of whom she stops speaking to, and the other who she sees only once.But even going beyond my tough-girl response to Irina, the book itself had a tragic flaw, which was its tendency to want to fit things in convenient little boxes. Everything was heavy-handed, from the metaphors to the characters of Lawrence and Ramsey. I more or less knew how the book was going to end (even before Shriver basically spells it out for us a little over halfway through). It felt a little too-dumbed down and required a little too much suspension of belief - which is a bit ironic, in a way, considering that Irina's character kept saying that she hated when people dumbed down a book just because it's for children.This dumbing down is all sort of inter-connected, but for starters, the male characters were not remotely complex. Lawrence, the "responsible" one, was highly intelligent, average looking, thrifty, constantly critical, anti-social and not particularly exciting or fun. Ramsey, the "wild one," is incredibly charming, incredibly handsome, not especially knowledgeable on world events, throws money around, loves to go out, is spontaneous, and a voracious substance user (particularly alcohol). Not once do these characters break out of their stereotypes, even in small ways, until - gasp! - the big revelation ending. I'm not in my 40s, and I'm far from a homebody, but I find it completely hard to believe that even the most homebody couples never go out to movies, go out to concerts, go out to the theater, meet up with friends or go on trips - but Irina and Lawrence seem to leave their house about once a year, otherwise contended with staying in and watching TV. In reality, the most domesticated couples I know go on camping trips or go out to movies, and even the older people I know get out of the house far more than the Irina & Lawrence paring did. Likewise, I found it hard to believe that Ramsey, upon returning from months on the road, wanted to go out to dinner every single night. I certainly don't hear about or see sports players out on the town every night during off-season. In connection to the simplicity of their personalities, I'm assuming to really cement the fact that the men are veritable opposites, the events flip from black to white and the men act as black to white. For example, when Irina is cheating on Lawrence, he doesn't seem to suspect a thing. Ramsey, on the other hand, thinks Irina is cheating when she isn't. Where Lawrence didn't want to get married, Ramsey wants to get married right away. When a bowl of sour cream spills at Christmas, Lawrence cleans it up immediately, where Ramsey could care less. Lawrence and Irina are apt to fight when they go out, and Ramsey and Irina are apt to fight when they stay in. I don't know that such a polarizing contrast was needed for the reader to get the idea.In connection to that - and this is where the suspension of belief really comes in - despite the fact that the entire book is, to some degree, an argument that something as simple as a kiss can change the course of your life, Shriver's characters will have the exact same conversation in the different plots. Oh, sure, the context changes, but you've got to be fucking kidding me! The first time she did it, it didn't irk me, but she does this throughout the entire book, and eventually I was rolling my eyes every time it happened. "Oh, how ironic, it's the same conversation, but now she's lying in it and before she was telling the truth." Even though Irina's life changes drastically in many regards based on her decision, even though the lives of other people change based on her decision, two people will still have the exact same conversation. She didn't limit this to conversations, either, she did it with events - regardless of what choice she makes, someone ends up with a car for Christmas, someone spills sour cream on the rug, someone ends up out in the rain forgetting their coat, someone lets the spices go stale. It was painful.Thing is, Shriver is a good writer, in the sense that he has a way with words, and her descriptions/similes/metaphors, when not heavy-handed, are killer. That's what makes this book so much more tragic to me, because if she hadn't dumbed down the men or the plot, had she made the characters more complex and the story-lines completely different instead of overlapping, it would have been such a phenomenal book. Instead, I got the sense that she simply didn't have much imagination - and this is one of many ways that Shriver is connected to her main character. Just like Irina couldn't write something more out of her own imagination, Shriver seems unable to, as well. However, she also manages to completely envelop you, to hook the reader, even with one-dimensional characters and a flawed plot. There's something to be said for novels that make you think about not only the novel, but its relation to your life, that leave you with a lot to say and talk about, and Post-Birthday World is absolutely that kind of book. It's a book you'll want your friends to read, because one's response says a lot about them, because most people - in either gender - face this kind of decision or this kind of situation, where you wonder what path you should take or what would have happened if you do this instead of that, and because Shriver does, to some degree, leave it up to the reader to decide which story line is "better." I don't have much doubt about which she preferred, but she doesn't hit you over the head with it, and thank god for that. As I mentioned before, part of it even made me cry.Going into this, I didn't consider it chick lit, but having finished it, I don't know that I can classify it as anything but. And perhaps that starter mindset is responsible for my mixed response to it, perhaps if I had gone into it thinking of it as fluff, I would have been pleasantly surprised instead of a bit disappointed.
Great Premise with Unlikable Results Being a fan of Lionel Shriver's previous novel, "We Need to Talk about Kevin", I was thrilled to find that she had a new novel out. I was even more intrigued by the novel's beguiling plot: Irina McGovern, a forty-something ex-pat living in London, finds herself at a crossroads, and the novel proceeds in two separate directions. Irina has been in an almost ten year relationship with Lawrence Trainer that has settled into a comfortable if stultifying groove. He's sturdy, reliable, intelligent, and reasonably attractive, but he's also stubborn, judgmental, strict, and their relationship has become exceptionally passionless. He won't even marry Irina because he's against marriage. Enter Ramsey Acton, a beguiling pro Snooker player that is Lawrence's polar opposite: smoldering to Lawrence's blandness, passionate to Lawrence's stoicism, daring where Lawrence is cautious. And here lies the predicament that Irina finds herself in after being left alone with Ramsey for his annual birthday dinner: give in to fiery, passionate temptation ... or remain loyal to the tried-and-true life she has grown accustomed to. Thus, in storyline 'A' Irina gives in to temptation and leaves Lawrence for Ramsey, while in storyline 'B' she takes smug satisfaction in her own strength of character and loyalty. For a while the back and forth is quite enchanting and clever, and the reader delights in Shriver's carefully concocted parallel structure. But by page 300 those very same parallels that were intriguing and smart become oppressive to the plot and render it hopelessly predictable. If something happens in storyline A you can rely on its counterpoint occurring in B: if Irina has to act as a mediator during a public spat in A, she will be the one causing the scene in B; if she receives a special something in A she will be denied it in B; and so on until the novel's ultimate counterpoint that I cannot reveal here. What was so exciting, at least to me, about the premise of the book was the concept of exploring two different scenarios, and Shriver squanders the opportunity to explore what might have been by slavishly adhering to form -- creating two stories that move in parallel lines instead of diverging ones. Suddenly an otherwise intelligent novel becomes dull and plodding, and the ultimate disappointment is that both A and B's endings are also entirely predictable since both are foreshadowed earlier on. One would have easily been touching and heartfelt if you hadn't been cued to see it coming, and the other might have been shocking if it hadn't been portended earlier on. Shriver also has a periodic way of getting sidetracked by politics in her novel, which spans roughly fifteen years starting in the 1990s and taking us to the post-9/11 era. They are distracting, and woefully out of place. She takes swipes at Bill Clinton for failing to catch Osama Bin Laden and potshots at Hillary for being ambitious. She decries Britain's National Healthcare system as a hackneyed operation doomed to failure. She even contrives to have all of her characters in Manhattan on the eve of 9/11 for no real reason, since ultimately the atrocity will have very little to do with the plot except to serve Shriver's purpose in analogies for the remainder of the novel -- which is ironic because one character opines that to reduce the scope of that tragedy to such (comparatively) trivial matters is "surely a vain misappropriation of national tragedy". But that didn't stop Shriver from doing it anyway. The aforementioned political asides feel disjointed and don't belong in the plotline, and ultimately neither did 9/11. Had it ultimately had more to do with the plot it would be fine, but it just pops in and then out again as suddenly as it happened. It's a shame that it is becoming commonplace for such a tragic event to be used as a go-to plot device in novels, and while Shriver's depiction of the day is about a million times better -- and more accurate -- than the shockingly offensive turn Claire Messud gave it in last year's "The Emperor's Children", it still feels like a cheap trick. But what I really disliked about 'The Post-Birthday World" in the end was Shriver's sadistic treatment of Irina. In both storylines she is doomed to apologize for other people's messes in addition to hers, to accept a grotesquely unfair portion of the blame for every misdeed committed, and to be misused and taken advantage of. It comes down to the men in her life. Ramsey is a brash lush whose raging temper has him emotionally abusing Irina from the beginning of their relationship. Lawrence is such an unrelentingly arrogant, narcissistic jerk that he smothers Irina at every turn. What you would really like is for her to toss them both on the street and tell them to sod off, but Shriver seems more interested in antagonizing Irina than in letting her off the hook even a little bit. Book clubs would have a field day with this novel because it certainly leaves itself open for debate, but I can't imagine really imagine recommending it to anyone looking for a pleasurable read. For that, I would point them to Shriver's previous effort: "We Need to Talk about Kevin". In that book, her protagonist had some cause to be put through the wringer, but it just feels degrading to watch Irina sink lower and lower.
What do You think about The Post-Birthday World (2007)?
The novelist is talented, but squanders her gift. The Post-Birthday World is maddening for many reasons, the first being that the conceit of the novel is strong enough to have made me want to see how Shriver could pull it off so I was compelled to finish and the payoff was not there; the second, that the narrator appears to be Shriver herself, including her condescension toward anyone outside a particular realm--is it impolite to call narrator/Shriver insufferable?; and the third, that the novel's back and forth narratives were so obviously parallels, where a much more interesting approach would have been to have the situations veer from each other completely, realizing all the while that the main character's core personality and life-approach would probably be the same either way. This was like an extended creative writing project, replete with convoluted dialogue. I've read lots of Shriver criticism that extolls her finger-on-the-pulse sensibility, but I don't see it.
—Sonya
Húha! Nem akarok én minden szerzőtől elalélni, de mostanában túl sok jó könyv került a kezeim közé. Ez meg... Szenzációs volt! Lionel Shrivertől él félnék az életben. Annyira intelligens, annyira élesszemű, annyira okos. Tökre félnék hogy kielemez, a mélyemre túr és megfejt :D Ebben a regényben amúgy nagyjából fel is vázolt Lawrence személyében.... Shriver sziporkázó fifikával vezette végig 600 oldalon Irinának a történetét, történeteit egy 'mi lett volna ha' szituáción keresztül, párhuzamosan. Az egyikben a nő "bűnös", azaz a párkapcsolata kellős közepén megcsókol egy másik férfit és el is hagyja érte a régi párját. A másik történetben "tiszta" marad, élik tovább a kis életüket a párjával. De mint arra számítani lehet, ez a történet sem lesz happy end. Az élet nem ilyen. Minden vonalon vannak jó és rossz dolgok. Az sem kizárt, hogy egyes momentumok pont az ellenkezőjére fordulnak egy másik úton, vagy a párkapcsolatban épp a másik fordul abba az irányba, amely egy másik történetben a mi szerepünk lenne. Shriver végig is játszotta ezeket a kis kifordított szituációkat a párhuzamos történeteiben. Ezek időnként kifejezetten humorosan hatnak egymás után olvasva őket, de sokszor eleve nagyon kínos és egyben vicces helyzeteket teremt az írónő: Ramsey és Irina látogatásán a nő anyjánál például hangosan röhögtem, annyira ott volt.Mindezeken a furfangokon kívül Shriver olyan ötletes és okos mondatokkal, hasonlatokkal operál, hogy csak lestem. Zseniális ez a nő.Nem titok, hogy én a két férfi közül melyikkel szimpatizáltam volna, de az nem ennyire egyértelmű, hogy melyik történetben szerettem őt jobban. Irina helyébe nem igazán tudtam beleélni magam, annál inkább Lawrence-ébe. És bármennyire is rossz dolgok történtek vele az egyik történetben, azt kell mondanom, hogy megérdemelte és a végén talán helyére kerültek a dolgok abban a verzióban, ami mellett az írónő végül állást foglalt és ennek tökre örültem.Senki nem tökéletes - ezzel a közismert ténnyel kezdődik ez a könyv. Ez így is van, gyarlóak vagyunk, emberek, mindannyian hibázunk, nem ítélhetünk el valakit véglegesen (ezt nekem is jó lenne gyakorolnom...), mert a sors útjai kifürkészhetetlenek és lehet, hogy 1 év múlva mi is ugyanazt a hibát fogjuk elkövetni, mint aki felett most pálcát törünk. Az viszont biztos, hogy akárhogyan is döntünk egy helyzetben, vállalnunk kell és meg kell próbálni a legjobbat kihozni belőle. Van egy olyan zönge is a könyvben, hogy vállaljuk fel az érzéseinket, éljünk, mert nem biztos, hogy az etikusabbnak/helyesebbnek tűnő út üdvözítő lesz. Ragadjuk meg a pillanatot...Ami mondjuk kissé egyszerűbbé teszi ezt a sztorit a valósághoz képest az az, hogy nincsenek benne gyerekek, akik alaposan megbonyolították volna a szereplők élethelyzetét és döntéseit. De nagyon szép és okos történet ez az emberről. Túlzás nélkül mondhatom, hogy minden sorát élvezetem. (Sajnos a fordításban vannak stílusbeli kisiklások, de azon a pár kifejezésen kívül igazán frappánsra sikeredett.)
—Szeee
I read an article in Esquire magazine this morning that laments Sexless Fiction http://www.esquire.com/fiction/sexles.... The author should pick up The Post-Birthday World, which explores grown-up sex and grown-up consequences. This adult choose-your-own-adventure story presents a moral dilemma for a woman in a committed relationship: should she give in to temptation and kiss the attractive/attentive celebrity snooker player, or should she remain true to her steady companion, who never kisses her/has never proposed? In real life, when we pause to make such a decision, we might consult our moral compass, or we might imagine the consequences of our actions—should I stay or should I go?— and choose accordingly. The moral compass points in one direction, unwaveringly, whereas the calculus of potential consequences tends to go...pretty much in the direction we already want. Author Lionel Shriver generously provides her heroine with two narratives; after the pivotal temptation scene by the snooker table, each alternating chapter supplies either the consequence of giving in to temptation, or the consequence of remaining true to one's moral compass. When Shriver plays God, the dilemma risks becoming a no-brainer: the bias leans toward Yes to temptation/No to monogamy/monotony. But neither narrative is cut-and-dry. Both alternate futures contains sexual let-downs and emotional disappointments, crowning successes, definitive failures. Choosing love, choosing to live morally, choosing to live happily, is never as easy as it appears.
—Lisa
