When we meet Nico Bonaventura, the 26-year-old protagonist of Lionel Shriver’s new novel, A Better Life, he is living a somewhat shiftless existence in the basement apartment of his mother’s sprawling house in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. To call him a failson would be both inaccurate and unfair, if only because to be a failure requires having tried something, and Nico has not; he hovers, intentionally and contentedly, in a place just above the depths of ultimate loserdom but well short of achievement, meaningful or otherwise.
“There was no future to plan for because the future and the present had fused,” Shriver writes. “He was suspended, without a care, in an eternity.”
By his own admission, Nico is “a rotten character”—not rotten as in bad, but rotten as in narratively uninteresting. In a world where so many of his peers think of themselves as the main character of the universe, Nico acts like a background extra in his own life. He has no job, no girlfriend, no hobbies, and no problem with any of it. He wants for nothing, because there’s nothing he wants—except, that is, for nothing to change.
