We need to talk about Donald

Lionel Shriver finds Donald Trump entertaining

What does novelist Lionel Shriver think will get those who oppose Donald Trump through the next four (or eight) years? “A sense of humour. I think that’s going to get us through and I think a sense of humour is going to get us through better than indignation.”

This article is the full text of Shriver’s BBC Radio 4 interview with writer and editor Robert McCrum, part of our America Rewritten series.

ROBERT McCRUM: Lionel Shriver is an American writer with her finger on the zeitgeist. Her high school massacre novel ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ nailed the contemporary United States and sold in millions. In the transition from Obama to Trump, Shriver’s special insight into ‘red state’ America adds a sharp commentary to this moment of history. Her imagination has always embraced the dark side of the country: her latest novel, The Mandibles, even anticipates Trump’s obsession with his Mexican wall. At home with inconvenient truths and awkward realities, Lionel Shriver is the perfect guide to a new, new world.

Lionel, in your last novel The Mandibles, you erected a wall between America and Mexico: I just wondered, do you know something about Donald Trump that we don’t?

LIONEL SHRIVER: He’s copying me. (laughs) I finished The Mandibles before Donald Trump started his campaign for President and one of the freakish coincidences in this novel is the wall that goes up between Mexico and the United States. However, in my book…

ROBERT McCRUM: …your wall is to keep them out, isn’t it?

LIONEL SHRIVER: To keep the Americans out. And Mexico does pay for it.

RM: You’re also quite prescient in the way in which you play with the idea of Putin’s interference in the American state and the American economy. Is that something which you feel has been stolen from you by the zeitgeist?

LS: (laughs) Well, certainly in my novel Putin has just maintained his leadership of Russia, though by this point he’s 75 years old. He has connived with the Chinese to devise a new international currency called the ‘bancor’, which takes over from the dollar as the leading reserve currency, and is really behind the plummeting value of the dollar. So yes, I continue to play with him as a force to be reckoned with.

RM: And I would say the vision of many of your novels is fairly dystopian. This is a kind of dystopian comedy in a sense, set in the 2040s, but in some ways it’s quite in tune with the mood of the times.

LS: It is a mood thing. It’s not because what happens in the novel is happening now in real life. It’s not predictive in that sense. But the future in my United States is a drag, (laughs) so I think that’s what people are recognising — the sensation of the centre not holding.

RM: But your United States is also, if I may put it this way, in some senses a ‘red state’ US … I mean you’re more red state than blue state. Would that be a fair summary of your characters?

LS: Well my future United States is much more dominated by the Democratic Party for demographic reasons. That is [to say] the Hispanic population has continued to grow and doesn’t control the majority by any means, but does control the swing vote and therefore has got the first Latino president into the White House. So in some ways it’s the opposite of what’s happening now, though there are some people who think that this election is the last gasp of the dominant white electorate.

RM: Now in your lifetime — and that goes back at least into the ’60s and presidents such as Nixon and Kennedy — has there been any equivalent crisis to the one that some people feel we’re facing at the moment?

LS: There has been a series of crises. Obviously Nixon and Watergate was considered a challenge to American democracy — corruption in the highest office. So I went through that. It was rather exciting.

RM: Are you …

LS: I was 15, 16 years old and it was the height of entertainment.

RM: Do you find any equivalent excitement or entertainment in the present situation?

LS: If I’m going to be honest, yes.

RM: Tell me about that.

LS: In fact that’s the main thing I feel I am personally going to get out of this. I hope it’s self-evident that I did not vote for Trump, and I don’t think this is a good thing, but as long as it’s going to happen, I’m going to enjoy it. In a sick way. But it’s become such a spectacle every time he opens his mouth or tweets, which I always have a hard time saying.

RM: You said in a recent Observer article that — I quote — ‘Reality has gone make-believe.’

LS: Yes, it’s as if we have dived between the covers of a novel. Although I made a point in that same piece that Donald Trump would not work as a fictional character. He’s too crude, too blunt, too overdrawn.

RM: Because the role of the President in America has been to, as it were, write a narrative for the American people, hasn’t it? And that was what Obama’s done so brilliantly; it’s what FDR did, it’s what JFK did in his time; and even bad presidents like Nixon wrote some kind of a narrative?

LS: Something has changed in terms of what at least a segment of the American people seem to want from their leader. It used to be that we would look to somebody like Kennedy, who was still [alive] during my lifetime, and be thrilled and moved by his powers of oratory, his eloquence, his ability to bring poetry to the story of our country and to speak more beautifully than we can speak ourselves: and to represent, therefore, the best in ourselves. There is a clerical purpose that the President has traditionally served, and my father’s a minister so I know all about it. Now it’s more the case that it seems that you want somebody who has reduced himself to your level, who speaks the way you do, with whom maybe you would want to have a beer: it’s lowest common denominator.

RM: When you look back at, or rather when you compare the future Trump presidency with the recent Obama presidency and the difference in rhetoric, tone and quality, does that appall you as a writer?

LS: Yes it does. I think from the very beginning one of the things that most bothered me about Trump was his sheer inarticulacy. He can’t talk. When you transcribe his speech, it is almost unintelligible. He hardly ever finishes a sentence.

RM: The same could have been said of George W. Bush.

LS: I think that George W. Bush was Shakespeare in comparison. The plummeting of standards with Trump, especially in contrast (as you note) with Obama, is truly shocking, and the way that he uses the same words over and over again, often in the same sentence. I find him mystifying as an orator, as a successful orator. I don’t understand why anyone would find that moving or persuasive, and why anyone would want someone speaking that poorly on their behalf.

RM: Now you say that Trump himself is too vulgar and too gross a character to be put between the pages of a book, but one could imagine a situation where Trump’s America does become more of a context in which you could place — in a comic or dystopian way — characters in the context of a contemporary novel. Would that be true?

LS: Well he’s certainly broadened what is possible in both plot and character in political fiction. Now anything is possible, now anything seems plausible. You can write a hugely broad plot, a hugely broad character, and both plot and character might pale before what has actually happened.

RM: Do you feel inclined, as a writer, to engage yourself politically in the situation?

LS: I’m torn on that point. I am interested in the people who voted for Trump and what their gripes are, what their disappointments are. His constituency does seem very angry and I’m curious what they’re angry about: I have some intuitions.

RM: Have you ever put a Trump-style character into one of your novels?

LS: Well, as I said, Trump himself would not work novelistically. He seems too …

RM: A Trump voter, say?

LS: A Trump voter is a different story and, yes, I could see using a Trump voter: I think we will see more Trump voters in fiction going forward.

RM: But how would you informally characterise a Trump voter at this point? Is he just an angry white male?

LS: That would be the challenge in fiction — to go below the stereotype and find something of real profundity in it. Clearly you’re dealing with people who are disgruntled. They feel their country has been taken away from them. They’re tired of being told all the things they can and cannot say, having what they perceive as a media elite dictate to them. They are angry about runaway immigration and they don’t feel that the so-called ‘American Dream’ has been on offer to them and their children. I’ve always been a little mystified as to what the American Dream is, exactly. It seems to be defined in very material terms — like having a house and a car. But I feel that what is missing is much more spiritual — that it’s a sense of purpose and pride that a segment of the United States is no longer able to call up; and somehow, Trump is touching on this desire.

RM: Do you blame Hillary Clinton for failing to challenge him successfully?

LS: I blame the Democratic Party more for selecting her. I think she was probably the wrong candidate for this election. That’s not to blame her personally.

RM: And speaking as an American woman and an American writer, do you feel that her loss is a tragedy for American women or American Democrats?

LS: To a degree. I was never altogether happy with the idea that Hillary Clinton would become the first female president of the United States simply because she was married to Bill Clinton: the story writ large is clearly dynastic and nepotistic. The moral of that story is that in order to become a female President, you have to have connections and you have to have a man behind you: I don’t like that story and I would rather the first female President gets there on her own coat tails.

RM: What do you think will be left of Obama’s legacy after four years of Trump? Do you perceive this as an unmitigated disaster or do you think there’ll be some kind of resilience in the system to protect the legacy?

LS: I think to perceive an unmitigated disaster in advance of it happening is a mistake. If we are going to be patriotic as Americans, then we cannot wish Trump and his administration ill because that’s wishing ourselves ill. So I have every hope that we will get through this, that the system will survive, and that perhaps if he does a crummy enough job — which is not to say catastrophic — there will be a kind of boomerang effect and we will elect someone who’s much more qualified, articulate and high-minded next time.

RM: It’s easy to be very pessimistic about the situation at the moment; but nonetheless the American people historically have risen to the occasion and have found a language and found ideas with which to carry the republic forward. What are the characteristics of the American people that you’d want to identify as the ones which are its best hope for the future?

LS: A sense of humour. I think that’s going to get us through and better than indignation. My biggest discomfort right now is with my own side, because people on the left are so indignant, outraged and puffed up with self-righteousness that I am uncomfortable with the company. I honestly think we should go through a period of just finding it entertaining before anything really falls apart. We’ll have plenty of time to be indignant and I think it’s time to sit back, realise ‘okay this has happened, we can’t stop it, we’re not in control right now’. And that’s not to say throw up your hands and let anything happen, and don’t raise your voice and try to defend the Affordable Care Act if Trump does indeed try to take it down: at least contribute ideas to coming up with something better.

I don’t think that maintaining a sense of hair-tearing outrage for four solid years is going to be productive — and it sounds exhausting.

We’ve edited this transcript to make it flow a little better on the page. Listen to the whole conversation on the Radio 4 web site.