Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels, a satire on the absurdities of politics, warmongering, government overspending, and (in Part III) elite fashions. On the floating island of Laputa, Gulliver finds their houses “very ill built, the Walls bevil, without one right Angle in any Apartment; and this defect ariseth from the Contempt they bear for practical Geometry.” Down below, in Barnibarbi, he discovers that landowners have espoused the latest agricultural trends, which have wrecked their harvests. Such are the dangers of abandoning common sense for fashion. It’s a lesson that Swift’s literary heir, Lionel Shriver, reinforces in her novel, A Better Life.
In exquisitely styled prose, Shriver takes readers on a journey through a world in which former Mayor Eric Adams’s proposal to pay New Yorkers to house immigrants in their private residences is enacted for a year. In this alternate reality, the results—both hilarious and tragic—satirize the pretensions of elites while prompting readers to consider what it means to have a better life.
The story is told in the third-person limited perspective of Nico Bonaventura. A twenty-six-year-old college graduate, he lives in the basement apartment of his mother’s renovated mansion in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn (her part of the divorce settlement from Nico’s father). Nico shows no inclination to look for a job, help his mother (Gloria), engage with his community, or produce anything. His self-designated role is that of observer.
Nico’s passivity is related to his initial decision to pursue a career in sustainable energy. After four years of college, he realized that “the whole renewables paradigm didn’t add up. So long as you still needed fossil fuel backup to kick in during what the Germans called Dunkelflaute, intermittent wind and solar would only moderately reduce carbon emissions, and a whole parallel energy infrastructure was too expensive.” He tries explaining this to his mother, who points out that his talents are therefore especially needed. But Nico realizes that “the problem, if it was a problem, which he continued to doubt, was far deeper. His own energy was not renewable.”
On one level, this passage is about Nico’s struggle to find purpose, especially since he pays no rent and has an inheritance from his grandfather. But it is also about the way in which some political fashions harm individuals without improving society. In the case of the proposed government program paying citizens to house illegal immigrants in private residences, we see yet another fad that “didn’t add up.” Nico observes that the migrants don’t apply for work permits because they only work for cash. They’re “quick studies.”
As a result, Nico spends his days watching online videos and news programs that fuel his critiques of the social causes espoused by his mother and two sisters, Valerie and Palermo. The result is a novel that addresses what it means to have “a better life” through a young man who does nothing, illegal immigrants scrambling to grab anything, and liberal women embracing every fashionable cause. By focusing her satire on a program never enacted, Shriver preempts criticism of the imagined results while inviting debate about immigration policies.
Staying Au Courant
Among Shriver’s satirical targets are left-leaning women who espouse every liberal cause of the moment. Gloria learns, for instance, that little boys are sometimes born into the bodies of girls, so she knits packers for children. Hearing that immigrants need housing, she volunteers for the mayor’s program by inviting one—without even an interview—into her home. Deciding that the immigrant deserves the best space, Gloria moves Nico out of the basement and into his childhood bedroom.
When their guest arrives, the Bonaventura women are delighted. Martine claims to have fled Honduras due to violence. She works hard—cooking, cleaning, and even knitting packers (though with obvious distaste: unlike her host, Martine is no liberal). The family’s women glow with the virtue of aiding her. Nico is ambivalent.
And rightly so, for Shriver suggests that empathy without judgment is evidence of gullibility. After living with them for several months, Martine announces that she has become the victim of extortion: a gang in Honduras has kidnapped her three children, whose very existence comes as a surprise to the Bonaventuras. Whereas the mayor’s program had been paying Gloria to house Martine, now Gloria is under pressure to pay the $30,000 ransom. In fact, she asks Nico to pay it. He refuses. Shriver is not subtle: those who encourage unrestricted immigration hesitate to pay the price.
Shriver’s warning is really for readers. The Bonaventuras’ grand house—an aging home that his parents painstakingly renovated into a $2.5 million investment—is a metaphor for our national house.
From this point, Shriver introduces scenarios that constantly test readers’ assumptions about who immigrants are and what they are entitled to. In one scene, a man whom Martine identifies as her brother, Domingo, arrives and moves into the basement with her. He is not participating in New York’s immigrant housing program, but Gloria does not kick him out, so Nico and his sisters can’t either. As the narrator observes, “Swap ‘Mom’ for ‘US federal government’ and you had the last three years’ policy paralysis in a nutshell.”
But Shriver’s critique is not just that liberal women follow political fashions but that Americans have become “soft.” As Martine observes, “Other people take your nice country, they take your nice soft life. Because you no fight.”
Shriver intersperses such snide comments with those of moderate and conservative Americans. Dining with her friends Vernon and Colleen, Gloria hears them disagree on the title of a documentary they’re making about immigrants: Guests of the Nation or A Better Life. The latter title provokes Vernon: “But that’s even more sarcastic. Like, better for whom?” It’s the question Shriver pushes readers to consider.
Vernon is most interested in the money trail, since immigration is now an expense that affects everyone: “Mind you, despite the ‘Non-Governmental’ tag, American NGOs are massively funded by public money. We’re paying to invade ourselves.” In this novel, Vernon presents the extreme right position. Is it a caricature? Perhaps. Yet polls suggest that Americans are uneasy about illegal immigration, and Shriver certainly builds on that concern.
Giving Away the (National) House
In fact, Shriver’s novel encourages horror. By centering her novel on Mayor Adams’s proposed plan and focusing on Honduran immigrants, she creates the worst possible scenario. A gang of Honduran men follows Domingo, taking over the Bonaventura house and appropriating Gloria’s credit card. While Nico prides himself on being an “observer,” he loses that position as he turns into a guest in his own house. The narrator observes, “No less than if the Nazis had billeted in their farmhouse in France, the Bonaventuras were under occupation.” Moreover, the eviction process can take a year. This is the price of empathy without judgment.
Shriver’s warning is really for readers. The Bonaventuras’ grand house—an aging home that his parents painstakingly renovated into a $2.5 million investment—is a metaphor for our national house. Over time, it has been improved and has attracted immigrants seeking a better life. Many of them work hard and thrive. Some of them manipulate others to access benefits. And a few of them are violent gang members who rape, steal, and kill. In choosing a Honduran gang, Shriver ensures the most negative consequences possible.
As the gang member Alonso reminds Gloria, it’s the fault of New York laws made by her own representatives. “This is what you call ‘democracy’! Taxpayers vote for their own houses be [sic] taken by peoples [sic] who pay them no money!” He adds, “Weak, foolish country cannot last very longer [sic]. Even your president—he is shaky, babbling old man. You know how Americans say: it is not a good look.”
The narrator comments acerbically, “The lesson here might be utile for America’s commander in chief: once you let people into your home, it can be legally labyrinthine and larcenously expensive if not downright impossible to get them out.” Recognizing the problem, Nico turns to his father. Having avoided what our culture terms “toxic masculinity,” Nico now sees “yet more proof that his spoiled, ignorant, middle-class head was up his ass.” His father and friends are willing to act, though it’s unclear whether this is more of a sequel to RED or Rambo.
Shriver, like Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, suggests that the search for “a better life” is serious business, and the price of being politically fashionable can be high. And like Swift, she exaggerates trends to underscore her satire. The concluding plot twists—particularly in relation to Gloria, Nico, and Martine—suggest that, while each seeks “a better life,” their methods produce different and even horrifying results.
What do we owe others, ourselves, and our national “house”? Shriver’s alternate reality novel satirizes attempts to answer such questions using empathy rather than judgment. She also suggests that one cannot remain an observer, watching videos in a basement while remaining neutral about one’s family, one’s personal residence, or our national house. Each of us must decide whether and how to achieve “a better life.” If we abandon that responsibility, we risk devolving into the Laputian elite that Swift imagined with their “ill built” houses and decimated society.
