Home Sickness
Lionel Shriver loves a good tragedy. In the months of soul-searching that followed the Columbine massacre, Shriver penned the Orange Prize–winning novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003). The epistolary thriller, narrated by a mother attempting to understand why her dislikable son went on a murderous rampage at his high school, wonders whether to blame herself or society. Or maybe he was simply a bad seed?
In her new finger-on-the-pulse novel, So Much for That, Shriver weaves together four medical dramas, and there is no ambiguity about where fault lies—at the cloven feet of the two-headed