Lionel Shriver: Why she's worried about the publicising of her new book

Lionel Shriver is very keen to talk about her new novel, The Post-Birthday World (HarperCollins, £15). She is pleased with the book, really likes the last chapter and is nervous about how readers will take to it. She worries that British audiences will resent an American author attempting a south London voice. She hopes that people will "get" the structure: two alternating stories diverging from a single, life-changing decision. She admits that there are autobiographical undertones. All of this she will happily discuss.

The trouble is, her new book is the last thing anyone seems to want to discuss with Lionel Shriver right now. We meet within a week of the Virginia Tech shootings, and Shriver has unwillingly been thrust into the role of an expert. Four years ago, she published We Need To Talk About Kevin, a bold and shocking novel with one of the most chilling endings since Don't Look Now. It was a very early example of what she now, guiltily, calls the "campus shooting" genre. Which means that, since Virginia Tech, her phone has not stopped ringing.

This is a problem for Shriver not just because she worries for the publicising of her poor, new book. In "Kevin" (she talks about the book as if it were a slightly wayward, grown-up child), she described a society in which young people crave fame by any means. She believes that giving this posthumous notoriety to misfits who shoot up their classmates is the last thing we should do. "Newspapers exercise self-censorship all the time," she pleads. "Usually it's because the readers wouldn't give a shit. But what about if they shouldn't give a shit?" She praises DBC Pierre, her fellow campus-shooting-novelist, for disappearing to Scandinavia as soon as the news hit.

She must wonder, like the protagonist in her latest novel, what life would have been like had one defining moment gone differently. Kevin was rejected by 30 publishers and lost Shriver one agent before it was finally bought by Serpent's Tail, won her the Orange Prize and made her a household name. She resents that assumption that she was an overnight success. Kevin was her seventh novel and she had worked hard for those achievements. But what if the book had never caught on?

"It would be foolish to complain - but it doesn't stop me!" she says of the phonecalls, the interview requests and the endless queue of people all demanding her comments. "It's not that long ago that I couldn't get interviews." Unfortunately, it means that her next novel will be a long time starting, because she needs to get the tedious business of talking about the last one done. It is a shame: she enjoys writing, and goes at it with a creature-of-habit work ethic. "But I have too many commitments, I don't really have the freedom right now. It's funny: I don't have the freedom to be regimented."

She is nervous about her new book for several reasons. "I had Post-Birthday well under way before Kevin really took off," she explains. "This will be the first book with a lot of eyes on it before I've written it. Also, having a contract for it ahead of time makes me anxious. It's like going into debt. I'm Protestant, if not by faith at least by constitution, and that just doesn't feel right."

If Shriver is taking on a debt with her next novel, she is at least borrowing on the collateral of Kevin and Post-Birthday, the latter having already been described by reviewers as "extremely clever" and "literary gold". But she seems to be half-dreading the reviews - and being a reviewer herself doesn't help.

She is wary in particular of sneery, young, female reviewers, whom she believes make criticisms of her work that they wouldn't dare utter about an established male writer. Not that she steers clear of iconoclasm herself.

"Right now I'm feeling a little guilty because I just reviewed Graham Swift's book [Tomorrow]," she says, glumly. "He's going to hate me." Next, she reveals that she has just "taken the mickey out of the new Norman Mailer [The Castle in the Forest]: an atrocity". "I don't care whether he reads the review. I read that book in a state of rage." When I suggest that Mailer might be just as privately hurt by the review as Swift, or herself, she is thoughtful. "This is a very personal profession," she admits.

If that is true, then Post-Birthday must be a very personal book. Like an adult version of those children's books where the reader makes the character's decisions and follows her progress along branching paths, this novel has more than one story. In the first chapter, Irina is at a birthday dinner with a male friend, and her compulsion to kiss him makes her reconsider herself and the relationship she is in. In one story they kiss, and she begins a sequence of events that alters her life completely.

In the alternating chapters, she remains true to her long-term beloved, and her image of herself inside that couple. The critical thing is that both options have many benefits. "In both the universes you have moments - because what life offers you is only moments." Irina's dilemma is the choice itself.

More than ever in Shriver's novels, her main character is a patchwork of personal eccentricities and obvious Shriverisms, from her heavy popcorn habit and the groaning spice rack in her kitchen to her green marble coffee table and thrift-shop clothes. So it perhaps shouldn't be surprising that Irina's choice was the author's choice, too. "I made a decision to run off with my now-husband," she says, matter-of-factly. To make things more complicated, he was also the ex-husband of the agent with whom she split up over Kevin. She still contemplates the parallel life she might have led if she had stuck with her ex, her partner of nearly ten years. "Both were good choices," she reasons. "That seems like an embarrassment of riches but it doesn't feel like it at the time. It is much easier to be presented with the good choice and the crap choice."

Just like Eva, mother of the notorious Kevin, Irina's dilemma is shared by many women in the post-feminist generation. Eva's choice was about whether or not to have children. Irina's is about which of two men, two lives to choose.

"There's a way in which, having it all mapped out, women used to have it easy. You just did what you were supposed to. Now, there is no map." Shriver is surprised that readers are polarised between the safe guy, Lawrence, and the new guy, Ramsay. "I'm quite on the fence," she says. "I mean, as the author, and ultimately the reader too, why should I choose? I get to have both!"

Also like Eva, Irina has caused consternation where her author least expected it. After Kevin, Shriver became an unwilling spokeswoman for the childless generation. One broadsheet interviewer referred to a "coldness" in her "icy eyes" and described the novel as "a recipe for a very selfish society". Not because it described the calculated murders of schoolchildren, but because it contemplated the unthinkable position of not having babies.

Irina's offence has been to consider a happy relationship a worthwhile ambition. "I thought this book mild, not likely to ruffle a lot of feathers," Shriver sighs. "I still managed." Now, the feminists who applauded Eva for daring to say the unsayable are howling at Irina's confession: that she needs a man in her life to be content. "This business of having a protagonist who works more than anything to have enduring love is now a controversial thing," says the baffled author. "I find it riveting." She suggests that we pen a letter to the Daily Mail, reading: "It's my fault. It is always my fault."

Shriver's next novel will be about illness and death: she refuses to shrink from the controversial. When I ask whether her outsider status, as an American in London, helps her to see the truths that insiders prefer to gloss over, she tentatively agrees. She adds that she resents that some people begrudge her any opinion at all because she is a foreigner. "This whole business of your funding of religious schools with state money is to an American naturally outrageous... But, for instance, if I do Newsnight Review I know that the listenership mostly hears an American - and it changes what I say." She also wants me to know that popcorn with sugar is a British aberration. Not everything gross comes from the States.

So is there any subject too outrageous for Lionel Shriver? Just one. "There's only one subject so far that I would be nervous to write about, and that's taxes," she says. I bet that, by novel ten, she will have plucked up the courage.

Biography

Born in North Carolina in 1957 (her father was a minister), Margaret Ann Shriver chose at 15 to call herself "Lionel". She studied at Columbia University in New York and has been based in the UK for 20 years, for more than a decade in Belfast. Her first novel was The Female of the Species, (1986); Ordinary Decent Criminals (1992) made use of the knowledge of the Troubles she acquired as a Belfast journalist. A period in Kenya helped inspire Game Control (1994). Other novels include Double Fault, now re-issued by Serpent's Tail. We Need To Talk About Kevin (2003) won the Orange Prize and sold more than half a million in the UK. The Post-Birthday World is published by HarperCollins. Lionel Shriver, married to a jazz musician, lives in south London.