I’ve noticed that the more morally charged a topic becomes, the harder it is to talk about it honestly. Immigration is a good example. The public conversation has flattened into slogans, while engagement with real disagreements is treated as suspect, if not outright taboo.
The emotional effect of cultural change is a human response—and yet it is not acknowledged consistently. While it would be widely accepted for a black resident of Harlem to say he wants to preserve the culture of his neighborhood, the same sentiment, expressed by a white resident of Arizona, would almost certainly be condemned.
This dynamic is what drew me to A Better Life, the new novel by Lionel Shriver. Rather than making an argument about immigration policy, the book stages a simple experiment. A family that strongly supports open immigration agrees to take a migrant into their home. The book then follows what happens when ideals that feel virtuous at a distance collide with the practical realities of daily life.
What’s interesting about the novel is its refusal to resolve that tension cleanly. The migrant is neither presented as good or bad. The family members are not presented as heroes or villains. Shriver captures something that is often missing from political debate: that human beings are inconsistent, that generosity has limits, and that, in practice, ideology can get muddled by real life.
I sat down with Shriver to talk about her book, and to have some healthy debate about immigration, cultural change in the West, and why policing speech has become an obstacle to understanding what’s actually at stake.
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