Such arrangements are the subject of A Better Life, a new novel that sends up migrant-hosting in New York City. The book’s author, Lionel Shriver, is a writer of literary thrillers, and has never been one to shy away from the big political issues. She was an early and brave voice of dissent against political correctness and “own voices” in fiction. And she was canceled in 2016 for wearing a sombrero during a speech defending the fiction writer’s right to “be an appropriator par excellence” because stealing, prying and presuming are essential tools of the trade. A Better Life takes a harsh view of precisely the type of Brooklyn woman Holley represents.

The novel’s main character, Gloria Bonaventura, is a divorced bourgeoise liberal in the arts. In response to New York’s Biden-era migrant crisis, Gloria takes in Martine, a migrant from Honduras. In Shriver’s eyes, Gloria is silly and a little desperate: she has a business hand-knitting stuffed animals and cashmere “packers” for transgender men, and spouts obtuse clichés: the migrants, she says, “just want to participate in our democracy, work hard, and raise a new generation of Americans”. The novel is written from the perspective of Gloria’s adult son Nico, a self-described incel who is still living at home, unemployed, four years after his college graduation, and who resents the intrusion of Martine into his home. Gloria soon describes Martine as a member of the family, but Nico fears his mother is being taken in.

Shriver is a smart and compelling writer, a cut above most novelists working today. By mining the headlines on the migration crisis, she produces an excellent thriller. Martine, it turns out, has criminal gang-member relatives who prey on the book’s liberal do-gooding characters with ease. The set-ups are funny — Gloria stocks Martine’s kitchenette in the basement with a bougie spread of “salted almonds, rosemary potato chips, whole-grain crackers and corn nuts,” for example, and puts the fluffy towels for company and “Cornish hedgerow” bath gel in her guest’s shower. And the plot twists are satisfying, but the novel also asks potent questions on migration. What is lost when we invite “too many” others into our country? Who really belongs here? And if we’re being taken advantage of, who is at fault?

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Through Nico, the incel son, Shriver explores such questions. He’s not, as the cliché might have it, a hateful racist, but rather a young man who, after a youth of promise and privilege, has become strangely stalled in life. He is living in his mother’s home while drawing money from a small inheritance, and has the explicit goal of doing nothing. He watches YouTube, orders DoorDash and has a standing date with internet porn every night at midnight. He believes that he’s happy: in his view, his peers are empty strivers; his mother and sisters are moral neurotics; and by contrast his activities are a rational response to his comfortable economic situation.

The migration wave, however, creates the competitive conditions that finally encourage Nico to pursue a more fulfilling life. Martine’s arrival pushes him out of his basement room and back to his childhood bedroom, forcing him to confront his failure to launch. Then, her surly and possibly dangerous brother Domingo moves in, intimidating Nico out of his own living room, and causing him to contemplate his manhood or lack thereof. After an escalation of violence and intrigue, it’s a toss-up as to who “deserves” Nico’s mother’s Brooklyn mansion: its original occupants, or Martine and her crew.

Shriver allows herself an extremely non-PC ending (the immigrants are everything we feared, basically), but the book’s larger take is ambivalent. Nico’s father, Carlin, a Right-wing journalist, laments that whites of European origin are being replaced (not a conspiracy theory, just a fact, he says) by people they have nothing in common with. Carlin’s friend Vernon, a documentary filmmaker, expands on the point, arguing that “the country’s been so successful not because it’s so ‘diverse’ but because it is, or used to be, relatively homogeneous.” However, if Nico is a symbol of the whites of European origin in the 2020s, this vaunted European “culture” has devolved into entitlement, DoorDash and masturbation — so the argument feels perhaps deliberately weak. As one of Martine’s friends puts it: “Migrants do all the work? Then USA belong to migrants. Maybe you Americans are the freeloaders.”

The novel appears at a time when illegal migrants have once again become a flashpoint in America. But while it succeeds at giving voice to ideas that are usually forbidden in the Left-leaning world of literary fiction, its various forms of satire, especially the characterization of Gloria, are limiting. It’s enjoyable to poke fun at an imaginary insufferable liberal woman, but it’s simply not true that one side of the debate is wholly ridiculous: nothing is ever entirely black and white. And the ways in which the women who host illegal migrants aren’t ridiculous are worth exploring.

In addition to Holley, I spoke with two other Brooklyn women who have also hosted migrants at some point since 2023: Louise Bauso, a high-school teacher, and Sarah*, a social worker. Bauso is the founder of Red Hook Mutual Aid, a “hyper-local” neighborhood organization. At the height of the migration crisis in 2023 and 2024, she tells me, men, mainly from West Africa, who were being housed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard not far from her Red Hook neighborhood, would be lined up 25 deep outside her organization’s free store.

Bauso ended up taking in two asylum seekers from Guinea, boys aged 18 and 16, in the winter of 2023-2024. As she describes it, they’d somehow started “diligently” messaging the mutual aid line every day, asking for assistance with transfer to a youth shelter. They were soon due to lose their spot in an adult city shelter, because the city at the time had a 30-day rule. When you had stayed for your allotted 30 days, you had to leave and be re-admitted, a process that could take weeks. On the day the Guinean teenagers lost their housing, they called Bauso. She met them for the first time at a coffee shop. They’d been turned away by all the city agencies, Bauso says, and “they said, ‘We don’t have anywhere to go, we don’t know what to do. It’s cold’”.

She took them into her 850-square-foot railroad apartment with few interior doors, where they slept on her sofa on and off for three months. “It was an extreme thing to do,” she says, “and not everyone understood it.” When pressed to explain her choice, she says, “They were literal children, and so young-looking. They had to stay with me. I had nowhere to send them.”

Bauso says the experience was “definitely complicated”. She was never afraid for her safety: “These are young Muslim men. They pray every day. They are really trying to be good, good people.” But she had to teach them to cook and clean, and the need in the city was so great that eventually she found herself putting up as many as five migrants at a time.

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The women I talked to had different takeaways from their experience hosting. For Holley, those 18 months were enriching. Reflecting on her relationship with Babacar, Holley says: “I love him; he’s like a son to me.” “I only had one child,” she says, “and it turns out I had room for more.” Holley and her husband have become friendly with Babacar’s large extended family over Zoom, and hope someday to go to Dakar to meet them. She wishes more people were aware of the ongoing opportunities to help. In particular, there is a short supply of Americans willing to be legal guardians to minors.

For Sarah, the experience was a little more difficult. She hosted a Guinean man in his early twenties for eight months after he lost his place in a shelter. She enjoyed hosting, she tells me, and her guest was no trouble, but her teenage daughter wanted her privacy back. Eventually, due to lack of patience from family members, Sarah had to tell the young man it was time to find another place. She still has regrets about asking him to leave. “I’m sure he was confused by it,” she says. He now has documentation allowing him to work, and has two jobs and an apartment with a roommate. He and Sarah still keep in touch. His tax documents came to Sarah’s house, and they recently attended a chili cook-off together.

What strikes me about all these stories is the reordering power of direct personal charity. All of these women, when presented with a crisis, made a choice to do something. They may all share a commitment to social justice, but the larger issues of the kind we debate online, and that Shriver brings to life in her novel, felt much less present in their retellings than the moment of human need, and the innate human desire to respond. All three spoke of the unfolding situation of a particular person, rather than an ideology. Holley’s reasoning — “We had a spare room and he needed a room. It was really just luck” — was typical.

To encounter a human being in a situation of crisis, and to stop to help them, is a rare moment of stepping outside our usual self-centeredness, and it tends to be oddly humbling. And every woman I spoke with seemed humble — not flighty, not silly, not entitled, not like Gloria. They didn’t say so, but they did something that, in the Catholic tradition at least, is a virtue — and is even more virtuous when it isn’t named. An understanding of this virtue is missing in A Better Life. “Charity” of a direct personal kind doesn’t offer a simple answer to the contentious question of what to do about immigration policy — or at least it won’t to everyone — but in practice it equalizes us, and creates common ground. To dwell on it in a real way, acknowledging its concreteness and its challenges, but also its value, would make a better life for migrants and citizens alike.

*Some names have been changed at the subject’s request. 

I’d been invited to deliver the opening address of the Brisbane literary festival. The organisers had originally requested that I speak on the theme of “Community and belonging”; I told them for such a soft, sappy topic they had the wrong speaker. By all means, choose your own subject, they wrote back. I proposed to speak about identity politics in fiction, and received wholehearted approval.

I chose to focus on a concept I’d only recently encountered, which at the time had primarily been used to castigate adventurous musicians and fashion designers. ‘Cultural appropriation’ was a brand new taboo: ‘stealing’ from other people’s traditions for your own evil creative purposes without ‘permission’. Although it was baffling however one might go about securing such a licence.

In 2016, I was hard-pressed to come up with examples of this peculiar no-no being used to impugn works of fiction. But I did manage to dig up the fact that a white male British novelist had recently been chided in reviews and on social media for daring to employ a female Nigerian character. I worried that if this sort of rebuke spread, the new taboo could be catastrophic for my occupation, one wholly dependent on imagining what it’s like to be someone else.

Alas, only three years later, I’d have found copious examples of fiction writers who’ve had their knuckles rapped for helping themselves to what didn’t belong to them.

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Before delivering that lecture, I’d been solely concerned that my thesis was so self-evident that the speech would be boring. Afterwards, I was informed that one audience member, a 24-year-old from Southern Sudan, had flounced down the middle aisle and out of the venue – to be followed, after several minutes, by her concerned mother.

The young woman — who has dined out on her rude exit ever since — promptly posted an indignant screed online about how deeply hurt and offended she was by my talk (much of which she did not hear). Said screed was so over-written that it was actually funny. Nevertheless, the Guardian, which has an increasingly, shall we say, ambivalent relationship to my politics, picked up the blog and posted it on the paper’s website.

The rest is history.

Media across the world piled on. The story, such as there was one, was widely misreported. One woman walking out, followed five minutes later by her mother, transformed into a mass audience desertion. My final flourish of donning a sombrero – a droll reference to the speech’s intro, and worn only during the last three words of the speech – was mis-described in every account. According to news reports, I’d worn the sombrero belligerently during the entire 45-minute address. Now, that was slanderous. I have a far better sense of theatre.

To set the record straight, I had had my publicist post the keynote’s text online. Meanwhile, the festival administrators informed the press that I had spoken “beyond my brief”, and had no permission to address this topic. When my publisher sent the organisers a copy of the email thread demonstrating that they knew perfectly well what I would speak about and had given the topic their blessing, we got back sorrow about my “hurt” and “pain”. I wasn’t hurt or in pain. I was pissed off. Advertising that I go rogue at the podium impugned my reputation, and potentially curtailed future speaking invitations.

In private, I received a surprising quantity of supportive email, some from friends I didn’t know I had, but most of these defenders didn’t take a public stand. Oh, and that British writer, whose novel I stuck up for? He’s never spoken to me again.

*

It had been my intention to nip in the bud a poorly thought-out hard-Left injunction that had the capacity, if widely applied, to make my occupation untenable. Instead I fear that I helped spread the very concept that I’d hoped to discourage. For ‘cultural appropriation’ has in this last three years become widely regarded as forbidden in fiction.

I confess that I’m sick of the subject. Nevertheless, my opposition to this harebrained notion has grown only more implacable.

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It took me a while to figure out that the ‘appropriation’ foofaraw is, in part, about the commodification of identity. In those indignant 2016 comment pieces, I encountered outrage that pale-faced authors were making money from experience that wasn’t theirs to sell. Thus the idea must be to reduce supply of writing about ‘marginalised communities’, and thereby to increase demand. Presumably, if we white writers are prevented from using ‘stolen’ material – if we’re required, in the latest lingo, to ‘stay in our lane’ – then, clamouring for fiction about characters from Southern Sudan, the minority-starved reading public will turn the recent first novel of a certain huffy African-Australian activist into a bestseller. I fear this model displays a poor understanding of economics and publishing both.

In literature, too, ideological predation on established writers is intended to allow younger, woker folks to take their place. When I was coming of age, we younger writers were eager to find mentors whom we admired, and with whom we often tried to ingratiate ourselves in Master of Fine Arts programs. We inhaled the work of accomplished predecessors, the better to hone our own skills.

We now have a generation that simply ‘cancels’ the older generation, the better to clear the stage and clamber onto it. (None of these people read anymore, but mysteriously they all still want to be writers.) What I encountered in Brisbane hewed to an ugly behavioural model that has more in common with big game hunting than with art.

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More fundamentally, I challenge the propositions that any of us ‘own’ our own culture, that a culture is even subject to strict definition, and that a culture has any borders that can therefore be rigidly policed. Because we are all elements in other people’s landscapes, our experience – how we act, what we say, what traditions we observe – is also an ingredient in other people’s experience. Thus I would submit: we do not even own exclusive title to ourselves.

I reject this hoarding, hostile, selfish, and perplexingly commercial relationship to ‘identity’. Better that we all conduct our work and social lives in a spirit of sharing, generosity, exploration, curiosity, experimentation, and even willingness to fail in our sincere efforts to understand one another.

But apparently we white writers are now on notice that we don’t have “permission” to write non-white characters. There was actually a headline I tripped over online during the Brisbane hullabaloo, atop an article I didn’t choose to read: “Lionel Shriver Should not Write Minority Characters” – just in case I hadn’t got the message loudly and clearly enough. Ironically, this implies that authors like me are obliged to portray the Western world as if it’s still the 1950s. Off the page, our countries may grow ever more ‘diverse’, but between book covers we’re back to apartheid.

*

The strictures now constraining the imaginations of fiction writers are not limited to a ban on cultural kleptomania. All artists today are encouraged to be political, but only in the service of a narrow hard-Left orthodoxy. Any novel that challenges the trans movement or the 100% socially and economically beneficial character of today’s mass immigration to the West will attract a Twitter mob and scathing reviews. And that’s assuming you could get such books published in the first place.

Cutting-edge artists were once famously ‘transgressive’.  Now to be cutting edge is to be cookie-cutter. Despite the reputation of the artist as a maverick, I live in a world of conformity. I don’t personally know a single fiction writer in London who supports Brexit.

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You know, even having characters voice views or behave in a manner that runs contrary to progressive mores is now dangerous. At the 2016 Sewanee Writers Conference in Tennessee, fellow authors accused Allen Wier of a “microaggression” because three old men in a baseball park ogled a young woman in his short story.

It’s especially perilous for a novelist to express anything but officially approved progressive opinions in non-fiction – and as a prolific comment writer and columnist, I should know. I should have kept my noxious libertarian views about tax policy, the EU, and affirmative action to myself. I’ve made myself a target of animosity for virtually all the people who can influence my career – who commission the manuscripts, judge the literary prizes, award the writing residencies, and assign the reviews. For politically, my professional milieu is almost perfectly homogeneous. In outing myself in journalism, I’ve branded myself an outsider, if not an exile, among my own kind.

Hence I now get a brand of review I’ve come to recognise —whose author pre-hated me, and read my novel only with a view to locating unforgivable sins against social justice.

A friend of mine who teaches criticism at Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts program in New York confirmed that this recent inclination to judge literature in accordance with its adherence to a political catechism is not all in my head. Over a glass of white wine last summer, she despaired that all her criticism students think the job of a critic is to assess a given work in accordance with its implicit racial or sexual mores. Her students won’t even cut historical texts any slack if the content doesn’t line up perfectly with contemporary progressive values.

*

Writing fiction used to be a hoot. Now it’s fraught with anxiety. My colleagues and I have been made destructively self-conscious about any sentence that touches on race, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual harassment or assault, Israel, colonialism, imperialism, diversity, class, or inequality – and that list keeps getting longer. As a consequence, too many of today’s artists are struggling to be ‘good’ rather than to do ‘well’. Perpetual nervousness that a foot wrong could get you banished from civilisation for life is not conducive to making art at all, much less outstanding art.

Publishers’ practice of employing “sensitivity readers” to vet and censure manuscripts is currently restricted largely to Young Adult fiction, but could soon be coming to a mainstream publisher near you. Self-appointed experts in the delicate feelings of a range of protected special-interest groups supposedly ensure that the text doesn’t offend anyone —although at this point if your book doesn’t offend anyone, it’s probably not worth reading.

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After #MeToo, we authors are also fearful about how we behave at parties, which could not only invite personal censure but get our books withdrawn from the shelves. Now that the presumption of innocence is out the window, we have to protect ourselves from both our real sexual lapses and mere accusations of such lapses. Ask Junot Diaz. It took months of ignominy to clear the author’s name after he was accused of planting an unwanted kiss, and meanwhile booksellers banned his work.

Remember when writers like Hemingway were expected to be licentious hell-raisers who drank too much? I’m perfectly capable of batting the odd hand from my knee, so please give me back the old days, when being a novelist was good fun.

*

What are we all to do?  Because this watch-your-step environment is not only a problem for artists. We’re all being coached to use dumb expressions, to edit what we say lest we violate a host of unwritten regulations, and to be increasingly avoidant of people different from ourselves not because we’re bigots but because we might say something wrong.

The hard Left’s code of conduct is drafted by people with no authority. A small group of self-nominated tyrants concocted ‘cultural appropriation’ as an unpardonable transgression, but that doesn’t mean we have to pay any attention to these bullies. The only thing that gives made-up rules any teeth is obeying them.

I’m an old-school rebel. Tell me I can’t do something and my immediate impulse is to do it. I write minority characters. You can only dispense with silly rules by breaking them, and any freedoms that you don’t exercise you’re bound to lose.

This means resisting the all-too-rational protective urge to self-censor. In 1969, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint outraged American conservatives, and Roth meant the novel to be outrageous. He recognised that artists are supposed to push the confining cultural boundaries of their times. But these days, that means pushing back against the rigid rectitude of the Left.

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We can also maintain our senses of humour. The best weapon against people who take themselves too seriously is not to denounce but to make fun of them. They deserve it, and we deserve a good belly laugh at their expense.

It’s also important to come to the defence, publicly and not only in private emails, of artists, academics, journalists, and thinkers who have stuck their necks out only to have their heads chopped off. The august, yet temporarily disgraced philosopher, Roger Scruton, who was crucified by an irresponsible journalist taking his quotes out of context, was only restored to respectability with the assistance of friends and allies who advocated on his behalf.

Otherwise, we just have to weather the storm. This Left-wing mania for dos and don’ts can’t last forever. I fear what may be required is some sort of catastrophe, one that makes ‘microaggressions’ suddenly seem as trivial as the expression suggests. This lunatic authoritarian obsession with an infinitely growing list of rules in relation to an infinitely growing list of specially protected categories of people? It’s an ailment born of prosperity. It’s the ultimate first-world problem. A plague of antibiotic-resistant flesh-eating bacteria across the planet might kill billions of people, but it would also wipe identity politics right off the map. In my desperation to restore sanity, playfulness, mischief, and abandon to our cultural landscape, I just hope I don’t have to resort to disseminating the bacteria myself.

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Both artists and arts consumers need to return to first principles. That is, the purpose of art is not to do good. A given novelist may choose to promote the author’s version of virtue, but being good-as-in-virtuous is not what makes a book good-as-in-excellent.

It’s time to return to valuing not only nuance and complexity, but anarchy, wickedness, and heresy. It’s time to stop feeling obliged to be such good little campers, at least in our heads. Both writers and readers need to feel free to explore the unseemly underbelly of our imaginations. After all — aren’t books the ultimate ‘safe space’?

And sometimes we just have to talk about something else — something besides whatever group is socially disadvantaged this week, or what remark some public figure made about race or gender that’s supposedly beyond the pale. Sometimes we authors have to write about something else — so maybe I’m even apologising for the very topic I’m speaking of right now.

Because for me, the biggest trap of this whole identity politics lark has been getting lured into debating a proposition that’s unworthy of my address. I get drawn into fights from which I’d be better off just walking away. I’m genuinely embarrassed to have continually explained what I think is wrong with the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ for three solid years. It’s a dumb idea, and it’s dumb terminology. Call it ‘cultural appreciation’ and the argument is over. For there’s a way in which, when you spend your precious time on this earth battling something dumb, even if at length you prevail, you’ve nevertheless thrown your pearls before swine, and the morons have still won.

This text is an abridged version of Shriver’s John Bonython Lecture for the Centre for Independent Studies, entitled ‘Creativity in the Age of Constraint’, which she gave in Sydney earlier this month.