The Female of the Species (42 page)

“I don’t have to do that tonight, Gray. I can stay. It’s your birthday.”

“You do have to go now, Errol. You won’t always be able to leave here; I won’t always be able to tell you to go. Take advantage of a few minutes of grace and intelligence on both our parts and kiss me goodbye.”

Gray held out her hands, and without thinking Errol wrapped his arms around her and pressed her against him, kissing her on the mouth with a long, lingering savor he hadn’t experienced in twenty-two years.

“I think I’ve always wanted to kiss you one more time,” said Gray, as if she knew what he would ask her at the age of ninety-five. “I’ll miss you terribly. Get out of here before I cry.”

She hugged him one more time, and Errol would not glance again at the crimson den but walked out of the house and into the cold night air. The wind hit him in the face with all the force of his future, in New Guinea, in Kenya, wherever he might end up, and Errol walked down the familiar pathway to his car no longer able to see himself at ninety-five in any place in particular, nor for that matter all alone or even in separate bedrooms. As he placed his hand on the cold handle of the door, he thought maybe he would call Ellen, after all. When he accelerated into the night air he sped a little faster than usual, spinning the wheel with three fingers. He took a roundabout route home, passing at one point a couple of miles away a set of blinking orange lights that steered him around the scene of an accident. Errol slowed for a moment, but thought better of stopping and, flooring the accelerator, kept on going.

About the author

Meet Lionel Shriver

About the book

Looking Back at a Debut Novel

Read on

Recommended First Novels

Have You Read?

More by Lionel Shriver

About the author

Meet Lionel Shriver

A
H WAN OW
!
It took a while for my mother to decode the first words from my crib as “I want out.” Since,
Ah wan ow
has become something of a running theme.

I wanted out of North Carolina, where I was born. I wanted out of my given name (“Margaret Ann”—the whole double-barrel; can you blame me?), and at fifteen chose another one. I wanted out of New York, where I went to university at Columbia. I wanted out of the United States.

In 1985, I cycled around Europe for six months; one hundred miles a day in wretched weather fortified a lifetime appetite for unnecessary suffering. The next year, I spent six months in Israel, including three on a kibbutz in the Galilee helping to manufacture waterproof plastic boots. Thereafter, I shifted “temporarily” to Belfast, where I remained based for twelve years. Within that time, I also spent a year in Nairobi, and several months in Bangkok. Yet only my partner’s getting a job in London in 1999 tore me decisively from Belfast, a town that in those days addictively commanded equal parts love and loathing. As
We Need to Talk About Kevin
attests, I’m a sucker for ambivalence.

Though returning regularly to New York, I’ve lived in London ever since. I’m not sure if I’ve chosen this city so much as run out of wanderlust here. London is conventional for me, and I’m a bit disappointed in myself. But I’ve less appetite for travel than I once did. I’m not sure if this is from some larger grasp that people are the same everywhere and so why not save the plane fare, or from having just gotten lazy. My bets are on the latter.

At least the novels are still thematically peripatetic. Their disparate subject matter lines up like the fruit on slot machines when you do not win the jackpot: anthropology and a May-December love affair (
The Female of the Species
), rock-and-roll drumming and jealousy (
Checker and The Derailleurs
), the Northern Irish troubles and my once dreadful taste in men (
Ordinary Decent Criminals
), demography and AIDS in Africa (
Game Control
), inheritance (
A Perfectly Good Family
), professional tennis and career competition in marriage (
Double Fault
), terrorism and cults of personality (
The New Republic
, my
real
seventh novel, which has never seen the light of day), and high school massacres and motherhood (
We Need to Talk About Kevin
). My latest,
The Post-Birthday World
, is a romance—about the trade-offs of one man versus another and
snooker
, believe it or not—whose nature seems in context almost alarmingly innocent.

For the nosey: I am married, to an accomplished jazz drummer from New York. Perhaps mercifully for any prospective progeny, I have no children. I am confessedly and unashamedly fifty-two years old, and never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.

Lesser known facts:

I have sometimes been labeled a “feminist”—a term that never sits well with me, if only because connotatively you have no sense of humor. Nevertheless, I am an excellent cook, if one inclined to lace every
dish with such a malice of fresh chilis that nobody but I can eat it. Indeed, I have been told more than once that I am “extreme.” As I run through my preferences—for
dark
roast coffee,
dark
sesame oil,
dark
chocolate,
dark
meat chicken, even
dark
chili beans—a pattern emerges that, while it may not put me on the outer edges of human experience, does exude a faint whiff of the unsavory.

Illustrating the old saw that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I cycle everywhere, though I expect that eventually this perverse Luddite habit will kill me, period. I am a deplorable tennis player, which doesn’t stop me from inflicting my crap net-game and cowardly refusal to play formal matches on anyone I can corner on a court.

I am a pedant. I insist that people pronounce “flaccid”
flak-sid
, which is dictionary-correct but defies onomatopoeic instinct; when I force them to look it up, they grow enraged and vow to keep saying
flassid
anyway. I never let anyone get away with using “enervated” to mean “energized,” when the word means without energy, thank you very much. Not only am I, apparently, the last remaining American citizen who knows the difference between “like” and “as,” but I freely alienate everyone in my surround by interrupting, “You mean, as I said.” Or, “You mean, you gave it to
whom
” or, “You mean, that’s just between you and
me
.” I am a lone champion of the accusative case, and so—obviously—have no friends.

I read every article I can find that commends the nutritional benefits of red wine; if they’re right, I will live to be 110. Though raised by Adlai Stevenson Democrats, I have a violent, retrograde right-wing streak that alarms and horrifies my acquaintances in London and New York.

Those twelve years in Northern Ireland
have left a peculiar residual warp in my accent—house = hyse, shower = shar, now = nye. Since an Ulster accent bears little relation to the more familiar mincing of a Dublin brogue, these aberrations are often misinterpreted as holdovers from my North Carolinian childhood. Because this handful of mangled vowels is one of the only souvenirs I took from Belfast, my wonky pronunciation is a point of pride (or, if you will, vanity), and when my “Hye nye bryne eye” ( = how now brown cow) is mistaken for a bog-standard southern American drawl I get mad.

About the book

Looking Back at a Debut Novel

I
HAVEN’T READ
The Female of the Species
in its entirety since its publication in 1986. I don’t make a habit of rereading old work, a pastime that surely falls under the heading of “Get a Life.” Nevertheless, I’m surprised by how vividly I remember it. I recall the full names of all the characters and exactly what they look like in my head. I can still replay the story in mental Cinemascope, just as Errol McEchern—his imagination inflamed by decades of unrequited love for his august mentor, Gray Kaiser—is able to spool through whole reels of her life that he never witnessed himself. Like first loves, first novels are indelible.

In terms of career trajectory, most first novelists fall into one of two camps. One sort immediately establish themselves as forces to be reckoned with. A debut met by widespread acclaim seems enviable, of course, but it isn’t always. Philip Roth was clearly unfazed by the sensation caused by
Goodbye, Columbus
, which he has followed with a long and distinguished literary career. Yet others find the raised expectations of early success a burden, and some writers discover, horribly, that they only had one story to tell. In the worst case, writers praised to the skies for their first novels will spend the rest of their lives trying to regain heights reached back in their twenties, and often end up crafting poor imitations of their own work. Joseph Heller never wrote another novel that was quite as good as
Catch-22
. Jay McInerney has never captured the spirit of his times as well as he did in
Bright Lights, Big City
. Even Richard Yates, whose work I adore, believed that his debut,
Revolutionary Road
, was probably his finest book. Structurally, what an awful arc: all downhill from here.

The second sort of first novelist may
garner some appreciative reviews, but they don’t hurtle his or her career into the stratosphere. Perhaps the book fell short of genius; perhaps its genius was overlooked—for publishing is capricious, and luck plays as great a role as talent. In either case, as a rule, the second sort of novelist?
Gets better
.

On publication,
The Female of the Species
was critically well received and sold a respectable number of copies. I was encouraged. But my literary life was hardly sewn up, and that made me fortunate. I’ve always felt sorry for writers who are successful before they know how to handle the stress, before they know their own voice, before they’re quite sure what they want to say. While I didn’t exactly savor fifteen years of obscurity, not achieving significant commercial success until my seventh novel was good for the books, and good for my character. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have wanted
The Female of the Species
to have been hailed as a work of insurmountable genius because I was hoping to surmount it myself in many novels thereafter. I wouldn’t have wanted publishers, agents, and magazines breathing down my neck when I was still feeling my way and probably needed most to be left alone.

Of course, were I writing this novel now, there are things I might do differently. I like to think that my prose style has grown quieter and simpler over the years (though it never gets
that
quiet, and simplifying the prose itself is in the service of characters and ideas that grow only more complex). I wonder if nowadays I would have gone on that long riff about Charles Corgie in Africa near the beginning of the book. Such a lengthy early departure is structurally
inadvisable
and could appear to me these days as an indulgence. Nevertheless, maybe it’s a good thing I can’t get my hands on the novel now; maybe
Female
is better off for that inclusion, which I had enormous fun writing.

Besides, I do think that
The Female of the Species
displays an instinctive feel for narrative structure. The emotional triangle on which the novel is built is classic: Gray Kaiser’s becoming smitten with a much younger man, who might merely be using her for her prestige and connections, is all seen through the eyes of her middle-aged assistant, Errol McEchern, who has loved her for years. Errol’s sense of insult that his idol exercises such poor romantic judgment enlivens the voice. Errol’s exasperation that Gray doesn’t love
him
instead also makes his perceptions subtly unreliable, a technique I would also employ in
We Need to Talk About Kevin
. That technical trick I developed in
Female—
getting around the limitations of point of view by hijacking a character’s imagination—I would later deploy in
Kevin
as well. The use of quotations from Gray’s fictitious anthropology case studies as epigraphs is, I think, a lovely decorative touch, one that helps to shore up the internal reality of the book. Even at this great distance, I still think that the sections about North Adams are inspired and constitute the best parts of the novel. I love the character of Ida, and the way that her manipulative relationship to the adolescent Raphael provides him the model for manipulating Gray Kaiser in his young adulthood. I like the ambiguity of Raphael’s relationship to Gray, the suggestion that he is far more taken with her than he pretends—that he is not only fooling her, but himself.

No one enjoys getting worse, so naturally I like to believe that my work following
Female
has improved. Yet despite a few stylistic rough edges, the text teems with an exhilaration distinctive to first novels—an excitement about words, an awe at their power to bring events and people to life from nothing that a veteran fiction writer is less
likely to duplicate. In those days, I wrote nonstop for many hours at a go, whereas now I’m much more likely to knock off for a cup of coffee. If (perhaps foolishly) I would cut the Charles Corgie section now, that beginning riff—full of jokes to keep myself entertained, and carrying on in such detail because I was the boss and could do whatever I felt like—is what helps to distinguish the book as formally adventurous, fearless, and playful. Besides, I haven’t changed as much as I might think. I didn’t obey the rules in my twenties, and I still don’t.

Lionel Shriver
2009

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Catch-22
, by Joseph Heller

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, by Kaui Hart Hemmings

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