Monthly Archives: February 2026

Review – A Better Life by Lionel Shriver

A Better Life

Reviewed by Jayson Gallaway on 3 February 2026 .

5 out of 5

A Better Life
Lionel Shriver
Harper, February 2026
(304 pages of unfiltered badassery)

Straight up, dear reader, I love this book. Something finally that has the balls to ask all the seemingly unasked questions this rotten culture has been dodging since the borders started bleeding sympathy and the headlines turned into a perpetual guilt trip.

You know that moment when the polite liberal dinner party – candles flickering, everyone nodding along to the gospel of compassion while secretly calculating the equity in their house perched on “stolen” land – you know that moment when someone finally says the quiet part out loud, the part about how maybe, just maybe, inviting the whole world into your foyer isn’t an act of saintliness but a slow-motion home invasion dressed up in humanitarian drag? Lionel Shriver doesn’t just say it…she loads it into a cannon, lights the fuse with a grin, and blows the whole goddamn table to kingdom come. And then she rebuilds the rubble into a mirror, forcing you to stare at your own complicit reflection.

A Better Life is the novel we’ve been waiting for since the first cargo plane full of South American illegals touched down in 2022 and the talking heads started competing to see who could furrow their brow the deepest while explaining why borders are just lines on a map drawn by evil white men. Shriver, one of my favorite contrarians, a walking provocation in sensible shoes, takes the premise – an actual proposal (never implemented, thank Christ) from New York’s idiot mayor to pay citizens $110 a day to billet asylum seekers in their own homes – and turns it into a domestic siege thriller that reads like a paranoid yuppie fever dream crossed with the sharpest satire since American Psycho decided to get political, turning her character Gloria’s sprawling Queen Anne in Ditmas Park into a bloated, creaking metaphor for the United States itself: a once-grand edifice, built on borrowed glory, now sagging under the weight of its own open-door illusions, rooms filling with strangers while the original inhabitants squabble over the thermostat and pretend everything’s fine.

I’m getting ahead of myself here. So assuming my dear reader hasn’t read it yet:

Gloria Bonaventura, 62, freshly divorced from a husband who bolted for greener pastures (or maybe just a condo without drafts), flush with this inherited pile that’s more liability than legacy – she decides she’s going to Do The Right Thing. Signs up for Big Apple, Big Heart (the program’s actual Orwellian moniker – Shriver doesn’t invent: she transcribes), and welcomes Martine Salgado, Honduran, soft-spoken, saintly-eyed, into the house. Martine is helpful. Martine is grateful. Martine cooks pupusas that make Gloria’s mouth water and her conscience sing. Martine charms Gloria’s adult daughters, all childless themselves, drifting through their forties and fifties like ghosts in the machine of delayed adulthood: one a corporate drone too busy climbing ladders to procreate, another an artist chasing grants instead of legacy, the third a perpetual grad student pondering the ethics of reproduction in a warming world. They’re all barren branches on the family tree, a subtle Shriver jab at how the West’s fertility drought leaves us wide open to demographic takeovers, our houses – and nations – echoing with the footsteps of others’ offspring.

And then there’s Nico, Gloria’s 26-year-old son, the basement-dwelling slacker with a philosophy degree gathering dust and a vape habit that’s his only reliable companion. Nico smells the rat from day one, but here’s the genius twist: he can’t quite articulate why. It’s not racism…it’s this gnawing, inchoate dread, a confusion that manifests in stammered objections and half-formed rants about “boundaries” and “sustainability” that Gloria waves off as millennial entitlement. Nico paces the halls, watching Martine’s brother Domingo show up unannounced, then Domingo’s “associates,” then a cousin or two, the house swelling like a balloon about to pop. He senses the wrongness – the way goodwill curdles into obligation, how one act of kindness metastasizes into a full-scale occupation – but every time he tries to voice it, it comes out muddled, drowned in Gloria’s platitudes about empathy and shared humanity. It’s Shriver’s cruelest cut: Nico’s impotence mirrors our own cultural paralysis, where calling out the erosion feels like shouting into a void lined with accusations of bigotry.

What follows is a masterclass in escalation, plot twisting like a knife in the brainstem. Martine’s sob story about kidnapped children back home, a $30,000 ransom demanded by shadowy cartels. Gloria’s frantic scramble to wire money she doesn’t have, dipping into retirement funds while her house (the metaphor ramps up here) starts to resemble America writ small: porous borders (that unlocked back door), overburdened resources (the fridge emptying faster than it fills), cultural clashes (Domingo’s crew blasting reggaeton while Gloria’s classical records gather dust), and a host of uninvited guests who arrive with needs that multiply like unchecked deficits. The daughters pop in, coo over the “diversity,” then vanish back to their sterile apartments, leaving Gloria to foot the bill. Nico tries to rally, but his warnings fall flat – too vague, too hesitant, too afraid of sounding like the villain in his own story.

Shriver’s immigration themes aren’t preached as much as they are vivisected. She leans hard into the paralysis of her characters, especially Gloria’s fatal flaw: her inability – or unwillingness – to actually do anything to stop the unraveling. Gloria could call the authorities, could draw a line, could say “enough” when the living room turns into a dormitory and the utilities spike like a national debt crisis. But she doesn’t. Why? Because that would make her the bad guy, the one who turns away the huddled masses. Shriver skewers this with surgical glee: it’s the liberal elite’s Achilles’ heel, this ridiculous addiction to moral vanity, where virtue-signaling trumps self-preservation. The house-as-America metaphor hits peak resonance as the foundation cracks – literally, in one scene where an overloaded beam groans under the weight – symbolizing how unchecked influx strains infrastructure, dilutes identity, and leaves the hosts depleted, their own progeny absence or ineffective. Shriver doesn’t demonize the migrants; Martine and her kin are survivors, opportunists in a Darwinian game, playing the system because the system invited them to. The tragedy is in the hosts’ complicity, their failure to act until the locks are changed from the inside.

In an era when every novel about immigration either weeps piously or screams nativist slogans, A Better Life does something rarer: it laughs while the house burns down, then hands you the matches and asks if you’d like to roast something over the flames. It exposes the hypocrisy of open borders from the comfort of gated communities, the way good intentions pave the road to domestic apocalypse, and how our collective Nico-like confusion – knowing something’s off but choking on the words – dooms us to watch it all unfold.

This is a book that will make people throw it across the room, then pick it up again because they have to know how far she’ll push it. It’s cruel, it’s funny, it’s terrifyingly smart. It’s Lionel Shriver saying, once again, that reality doesn’t give a shit about your feelings, and neither does she.

Buy it. Read it. Argue about it in bars until someone punches someone else. Then read it again, and wonder why your own house feels a little less secure.

Five stars, no footnotes required. Though it I were forced to append one, it would be: finally, someone had the balls to write the ending we all knew was coming, where inaction is the real invasion.

N.P.: “Immigrant Song” – Super Sonic Temple

February 2, 2026

It is, perhaps, a testament to the sheer entropic force of the universe that John Simon Ritchie – better known to the constabulary and the terrified mothers of Great Britain as Sid Vicious – managed to survive on this spinning rock of sadness for as long as twenty-one years. When he finally shuffled off this mortal coil on February 2, 1979, having ingested enough heroin to sedate a mid-sized rhinoceros with emotional baggage, the collective sigh of the establishment was audible from London to New York. It wasn’t a tragedy in the classical, Aristotelian sense, because tragedy implies a fall from grace, and Sid never really had any grace to begin with. He had a bass guitar he barely knew how to play and a sneer that could wilt flowers at fifty paces.

To understand the death, one must first attempt to parse the life, which was less a biographical narrative and more a series of violent spasms interrupted by periods of unconsciousness. Sid was the id of punk rock made flesh – a walking, spitting, safety-pinned monument to the idea that if you can’t be good, you should at least be loud and possibly infectious. He was the poster boy for a movement that didn’t just want to watch the world burn but wanted to be the one holding the match while flipping off the fire brigade.

The scene in the Greenwich Village apartment where he checked out was grim, but also possessed of a certain dark inevitability. He had been out on bail for the alleged murder of Nancy Spungen, a relationship that makes Romeo and Juliet look like a sensible e-harmony match. Their love was a chemical fire, fueled by codependency and substances of questionable purity.. When he woke up that morning – or rather, failed to wake up – it was the final punctuation mark on a sentence that had been screaming itself hoarse since 1977.

One might argue, whilst adjusting one’s spectacles and attempting to sound profound, that Vicious was a victim of the very machine he raged against. That he was a lost boy looking for a father figure and finding instead a manager who treated him like a circus bear with a drug habit. And there’s probably a kernel of truth in that sociological analysis, assuming the dear reader cares for that sort of thing. But to reduce him to a victim is to strip him of his agency, however self-destructive that agency was. Sid chose chaos. He embraced the void with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever jumping into a mud puddle.

His death wasn’t just the end of a man; it was the symbolic closing of the casket on the first wave of punk. The anger had turned inward, the nihilism had become literal, and the “No Future” slogan had transformed from a rebel yell into a bleak prophesy. He left behind a legacy that is equal parts embarrassment and inspiration – a reminder that you don’t need talent to change the world, just an unshakeable belief in your own refusal to conform and a leather jacket that smells like stale beer and resentment.

So here we are, dear reader, decades later, still talking about a kid who couldn’t play bass, couldn’t sing, and couldn’t stay alive, but who somehow managed to become an icon. It’s funny, really, in a way that makes you want to laugh until you start coughing us something suspicious. Sid Vicious didn’t die for our sins; he died because he lived life with the safety catch off and the throttle stuck wide open. And in a world that increasingly demands we color inside the lines, there is something undeniably, terrifyingly respectable about that level of commitment to making a mess.

N.P.: “Pretty Vacant – Remastered 2007” – Sex Pistols

February 1, 2026

I am in a foul mood this morning, dear reader…foul! I woke up this morning in the kind of mood that makes small children cry and grown mean cross to the other side of the street – an existentially foul, sleep-deprived snarl of a mood – because I made the catastrophic tactical error of letting the puppy sleep in the bed. A choice that, in the moment, felt like benevolent paternal bonding but in practice became a kind of canine waterboarding session conducted in hourly installments. Starting at 01:00, the little beat launched a precision-engineered campaign of nocturnal harassment: toenail scritching, repositioning with the subtlety of a bowling ball, and the occasional full-body flop that suggested she believed gravity was optional. The coup de grace arrived at 04:45, when a warm, unapologetic tongue made direct contact with my inner ear canal, a sensation so profoundly violating it should be classified as at least a misdemeanor in California. Everything else is illegal here, might as well add this to the pile.

And but so anyway, in this state of bleary, half-feral irritability, I remember that today marks the death of Mary Shelley – who, unlike me, managed to produce world-altering literature while presumably getting more than ninety consecutive minutes of sleep. She died in 1851 at the age of 53, taken out by a brain tumor, which feels cosmically unfair given that she’d already gifted the world Frankenstein, the primordial ooze from which all modern science fiction crawled. She was eighteen – eighteen – when she conjured the monster during that infamous ghost-story challenge at Lord Byron’s villa, while the rest of us at eighteen were barely capable of coherent thought, let alone inventing a genre. Shelly was a literary titan disguised as a human, a woman who understood ambition and monstrosity and the terrible of loneliness of creation long before the rest of us caught up.

I have a brain tumor, too. It’s external, weighs about 6 lbs., is shaped uncannily like a chihuahua and is attached to my hip with the clingy devotion of a barnacle that’s read too much self-help literature. It’s not fatal, but it can be loud, and it is responsible for the fact that I am typing this with the emotional stability of a Victorian ghost.

I hate this goddamn dog right now.

The calendar, in its infinite appetite for chaos, also reminds us that February 1 marks the first proven murder committed by Ted Bundy in 1974. Proven being the operative word, since Bundy’s whole biography is basically a Choose Your Own Nightmare of unconfirmed horrors. On this night, he broke into the basement apartment of Lynda Ann Healy in Seattle, bludgeoned her unconscious, and abducted her. Her remains wouldn’t be found for a year, a grim punctuation mark on a story that was already too bleak to bear. Bundy is the kind of guy who forces you to confront the abyss with no guarantee the abyss won’t wink back.

And honestly – given my current state of sleep deprivation – I’m starting to suspect that Bundy’s entire homicidal career might have been catalyzed by a dog that wouldn’t let him sleep either. I’m not saying it excuses anything (it does not), but I am saying that after being woken up every hour on the hour by a creature who weighs less than a Thanksgiving turkey, I understand how a person’s grip on sanity can begin to fray like a Temu extension cord.

I just burned my tongue on the tea. Fucking dog.

Which brings us back to the present moment, for good or ill: me, the puppy, the lingering psychic residue of Mary Shelley’s genius, and the grim anniversary of Bundy’s first confirmed atrocity. All braided together in the strange, sleepless braid of February 1. Honestly, after the night I’ve just endured, I’m starting to understand the primal murderous rage that can brew in the heart of a man denied the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness. Just saying, if I see one more dog-shaped shadow, or hear one more soft, wet sound, somebody’s gonna pay. And it won’t be me. Or Mary Shelley. Or, probably, Bundy. But someone. Someone will pay.

Okay, fuck it: the puppy is snoring again. I’m wide awake. The monster in my head is probably just caffeine withdrawal and sleep debt, probably. But if it starts whispering in German about galvanism and reanimation, I’m calling it quits and moving to Geneva. Or at least to the couch. Maybe I’ll sleep, maybe I won’t. The hour hand keeps moving either way.

N.P.: “Sellf Help” – Offbeat, Greg Blackman