Property

Starred review from February 19, 2018
The wry and nimble novellas and stories in this collection by Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin) focus on how homes and objects shape the lives of those who own them. The collection, which concentrates on middle-class Brits and Americans, is bookended by two richly detailed and sardonic novellas. In the first, “The Standing Chandelier,” a freelance web designer’s relationship with his girlfriend is tested after his high-strung ex-girlfriend gives them a gift that dominates their house. In the concluding novella, “The Subletter,” an American journalist who has been making a meager living in Belfast for years is brought to the edge of
a breakdown when she has to share her apartment with an ambitious young subletter. In between, mordant tales touch down in the lives of a young American making herself at home in an African household (“Kilifi Creek”), a recent widow discovering that her late husband had done more than she thought to take care of a seemingly simple garden (“The Self-Seeding Sycamore”), and a slacker whose parents find him impossible to uproot from the household (“Domestic Terrorism”). Shriver’s stories will make readers laugh when they feel they shouldn’t, and the uniting theme of houses and humans works exceedingly well, turning up new wrinkles with each successive story.

January 1, 2018

Shriver (The Mandibles) has a reputation for being arrogant and combative, traits she shares with a number of protagonists in this first collection, and she makes good use of those characters. The collection opens with Jillian, in "The Standing Chandelier," contemplating why she is so widely disliked and ends with judgmental Sara in "The Subletter." Sara's pettiness keeps her isolated, stuck, and, by novella's end, unemployed in Northern Ireland. The property in "Property" is real estate, and homes and housing play a major role in many of the pieces. In "The Self-Seeding Sycamore," neighbors fight over a tree spanning two back yards. "Domestic Terrorism" features an adult child who refuses to move out of his parents' basement; the married couple in "Negative Equity" breaks up during a housing crisis but can't afford to move out of the house; and an artistic couple in "Vermin" watch their marriage fall apart after buying their funky rental house in Brooklyn and starting to renovate. VERDICT Whether unlikable or likable yet behaving badly, Shriver's characters are complex and well drawn, and the pieces here are all engaging. Recommended for readers of short fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 10/16/17.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2018
A dozen stories about homeownership, cohabitation, and other domestic perils, suffused to various degrees with Shriver's (The Mandibles, 2016, etc.) political concerns.The Standing Chandelier, the stellar novella that opens this collection, concerns Jillian, a bright but eccentric middle-aged artist who's longtime best friends with Weston--until he gets engaged to Paige, who resents Jillian's invasiveness (symbolized by the quirky wedding gift of the title) and demands he cut her off. The story recalls Shriver at her best (i.e., 2007's The Post-Birthday World): keenly alert to interior matters of jealousy, romance, and friendship and exterior matters of manners and decorum. The entire collection is unified by the question of how new arrangements, be they via marriage or a house, change or reveal our personalities, though none of the stories quite matches the opener. A few are irony-rich satires about contemporary living: In "Negative Equity," a married couple splits up but are loath to find new homes while their current one is underwater; in "Paradise to Perdition," an embezzler finds life on the lam at a tropical resort is duller than he'd hoped for. But in recent years, Shriver has become something of a scold in both her essays and fiction about what she sees as our overly sensitive, gumption-impaired society, and a handful of these stories are effectively chastising op-eds. "The ChapStick" is a critique of the Transportation Security Administration told via a man hastening to reach his dying father; in "Domestic Terrorism" (note the overheated title), a couple is at a loss about what to do about their layabout son, a vehicle for much grousing about shiftless millennials; and the closing novella, The Subletter, sourly and clunkily likens the lives of two women writers with the warring factions during Ireland's Troubles.Few writers are so committed to using fiction to explore the intimate impact of formal regulations and informal social engineering, but it remains a hit-and-miss project.

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January 1, 2018
In Shriver's (The Mandibles, 2016) collection, precisely depicted characters laud and lament the nuanced specificities of their property, power, and possessionsand any corresponding lacks thereof. Not surprisingly, real estate is a theme, as in Vermin, where a couple's purchase of the New York apartment they'd been happily renting for years signals a disconcerting change in the husband, and Repossession, in which a meddlesome ghost is a small price to pay for an underpriced home in an upward-trending London neighborhood. Personal standing is also put under a magnifying lens, as in a millennial's refusal to vacate his parents' home despite their increasingly desperate efforts, or an expat's outrage that his cheapskate father would use him to exchange pounds back to dollars to skirt a nominal fee. In the two bookending novellas, women realize just how valuable something is only after they've given it away. Award-winning Shriver's enthusiastic audience will delight in her clever and literary analyses of the spaces we occupy, and how they're all too often no broader than a knife's edge.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)