Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World

Despite seeing through the book's conceit, and predicting the form (if not the content) of its ending, I still enjoyed it. Mostly, I think for the characterizations, but there was also the fun of the puzzle. Shriver imbues certain phrases with multiple levels of meaning by putting them in the mouths of different characters, or the same character in a different situation.

Not to give too much away, but if you don't like being played with a bit as a reader, I wouldn't recommend this one...more I went to the library for another book altogether and this title caught my eye. I compared its first paragraph with the first of the novel I came for, and Shriver definitely won. I wish I could remember what the other book was, but all I can tell you is that its first paragraph informed me of the shape and color of precisely one rock. Perhaps on a beach, or lake side.

The Post-Birthday World, though, grabbed me at the get-go. Within a moment of reading, I knew this was a book about a woman, who illustrates children's books and lives with a man, with whom she is joining another couple for dinner and it's going to be awkward. How could I say no?

Chapter 3 threw me for a loop, because in it Shriver begins taking certain liberties with our readerly chronological expectations. As soon as I realized I was reading outside of the traditionally chronological novelistic framework, I got jumpy and excited about the experiment. While it doesn't push the boundaries of genre in the ways I'm really interested in these days, it's still pushing the boundaries. Seeing a writer willing to trust her readers to understand her nontraditional approach to time gives me hope for the publishing prospects of writers who believe their readers can handle forays into the far wilder woods of mixed-up hybrid genres.

Or perhaps I'm just pumped by the comic book version of this book that now exists in my head. The comics genre inherently has the tools to communicate and interrogate alternate versions of time, outside the norm of text progressing linearly. Pictures can slow you down, make you consider, and alert you immediately and unobtrusively to shifting perspectives, both spacial and temporal, in a way that words can't. Shriver doesn't even try to make them; she just jumps right in and lets you catch up as best as possible.

If I have a complaint, it's that once you catch up, the book's conceit lets you see ahead. It's a bit of a downer on the whole suspense side of things. Yet, despite seeing through the book's conceit, and predicting the form (if not the content) of its ending, I still enjoyed it. Mostly for the ideas it gave fuel too, and a bit for the characterizations, but also for the fun of the puzzle. Shriver imbues certain phrases with multiple levels of meaning by putting them in the mouths of different characters, or the same character in a different situation. Finding and taking apart those moments felt like solving a particularly slippery crossword clue.

Not to give too much away, but if you don't like being played with a bit as a reader, I wouldn't recommend this one. I would recommend it for anyone who enjoyed The Time Traveler's Wife for its unusual form as much as its love story.