should i stay or should i go lionel shriver

(“Please tell me you’re not listening to that Shriver woman,” Kay groans to Cyril.

Shriver is still Shriver, using her characters to grumble about Brexit, Covid, monetary policy, and political correctness. More wildly, Shriver imagines scenarios in which a drug for immortality is discovered or the couple enter a cryogenic deep-freeze and reemerge to a transformed human race or suffer in a dystopian England overrun by migrants. Elsewhere, they decide to play out their dotage in a spendy retirement home, or their children discover the plan and have the couple banished to a dismal institution.

Kay has second thoughts and is struck dead by a delivery van anyhow or Cyril does and meets a similarly dim fate. In successive chapters, Shriver imagines a dozen ways this plan plays out, or doesn’t. So they agree that on Kay’s 80th birthday, in 2020, they’ll take fatal doses of Seconal. In 1991, Kay, an interior designer, and Cyril, a physician with Britain's National Health Service, are dispirited by the death of Kay’s father from dementia. Is it a good idea to kill yourself before you become elderly and burdensome? Shriver considers the possibilities.Īfter more than a decade of often sour, scolding fiction, Shriver has written her best novel since The Post-Birthday World (2007), in no small part because it revisits that book’s alternate-timeline conceit.

Should i stay or should i go lionel shriver