Shriver, born in Gastonia, North Carolina, is a American export to Britain, and much appreciated over there for her novels and journalism. This week, she was persecuted by a less welcome American export, the modern Salem that is trial by Twitter mob. Her crime was to have ridiculed a ridiculous letter that Penguin Random House has sent to literary agents. Penguin has identified a ‘new company-wide goal’, in addition to the old company-wide goal of drinking at lunchtime. From now on, Penguin wants ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025’.
‘I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing,’ Shriver wrote in the London Spectator. She then drew the reasonable conclusion that, when Penguin are looking for manuscripts, ‘from now until 2025, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability sexual preference and crap-education boxes’.
Shriver was accused of racism, just as she was in September 2016, when she pointed out that the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ runs counter to the principles of fiction, and even the right to an independent imaginative life. She was publicly dropped as a judge for a writing competition run by the women’s magazine Mslexia; no one seems to mind that the magazine’s crass title is insulting to dyslexics. Hanif Kureishi, who happens to have a new book to promote, has jumped in, and accused Shriver of ‘knuckle-dragging’ and ‘a conservative fear of other voices’, as well as the familiar feminine errors of ‘stupidity’ and ‘pathetic whining’.
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