“One of the best works of fiction about Africa I’ve ever read.”
—Amanda Craig,
New Statesman (London)
THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES
Gray Kaiser, at fifty-nine a world-renowned anthropologist, seemingly invincible—and untouchable—returns to the site of her first great triumph in Kenya to make a documentary. She is accompanied by her faithful assistant, Errol McEchern, who has loved her from afar for years. When Raphael Sarasola, a sexy young graduate assistant assigned to Gray’s project, arrives on the scene, Gray is captivated and, before Errol’s amazed and injured eyes, falls head over heels in love. As Errol watches the progress of their affair with jealous fascination, Raphael’s true nature is revealed—but only after his subtle, cruel, and calculating manipulations of Gray reduce this proud and fierce woman to miserable dependence.
“Stunning…wide in its horizons, interesting in its insights, and satisfying in its conclusions.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
Excerpt: Double Fault
From Chapter 16
“WHAT IS IT that you want from me?” he shouted. “When I walk up to the baseline, what’s going to make you happy? I have to do something, I can’t just stand there. So even if I were to run my professional life wholly according to your whim, in consideration of your feelings, do I serve an ace or drill the ball into the net?”
A forthright answer (“drill the ball into the net”) was unacceptable. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“If my ranking goes down, too, that’s not going to raise yours one single point, is it?”
“I just want a little sympathy—”
“I have sympathy. It doesn’t seem to do you much good.”
It didn’t. “That journalist didn’t even know I played tennis!”
“Whose fault is that? Why didn’t you tell him?”
“It’s my fault. My fault for having become a nothing. My fault for being ranked 696. That you feel badly now is my fault. Everything’s my fault. You’re perfect, you’re good to me, you’ve become a dazzling athlete, everything’s going your way except your hideous marriage. I’m probably the only mistake you’ve ever made in your whole life.”
“Sweetheart, no.” At last she let him wrap the tissues around her finger. “I’ve never regretted marrying you.”
“What’s happening to me?” she sobbed. “I love you, so why can’t I act like it? Why am I so mean to you? That you can’t even tell me when you win prizes? And I don’t blame you! I want to be happy for you, but I can’t! You’re right, I just get mad, and it’s horrible, I hate it. You come home and you’ve won another big match and this anger rises instantaneously in my throat like heartburn. And then I feel gross, gross to myself, bitter and ugly and twisted. How can you stand it?”
Eric pulled her into his arms and murmured, “I know it’s hard to feel happy for me when you’re not happy for yourself. And I know you love me, because you do act like it, most of the time. But I can see how, when I come home, and things have gone great for me and rotten for you, well, I must make you worried on your own account. I know you feel excluded. I mean, no matter how I try to tell you it’s your win, too, you don’t believe that.”
Willy’s chest shuddered. “You wouldn’t buy that ‘it’s your win, too’ stuff if it were the other way around.”
“No,” Eric conceded with a smile, soothing her hair, “probably not. So I guess you feel lonely. But you’re not alone. And I doubt I could have ever come this far without your help. One of the things that gets me through the grind of the road is knowing I have you to come home to. If this tennis thing weren’t something we were doing together, I might deep-six the whole tiresome business. But just try to remember that when I do win a tournament, or some nickel-and-dime ATP award, it’s not something I’m doing to you, OK? I want your ranking to turn around as much as you do.”
“Why can’t I win anymore?” Willy whimpered into his shirt. “I used to be great! I used to feel great! Now I feel like a slug!”
“Sh-sh,” he stroked her head. “You’ve had crummy luck. You’re in a slump. You’ll pull out. It’s a bad time. You’ll see, in the end all these travails will make you stronger. You’ll look back on this year and be proud that you didn’t give up. It’s just a bad time,” he whispered again. “A slump.”
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As if to embody the metaphor, Willy went slack in his arms.
PRAISE FOR LIONEL SHRIVER
Checker and The Derailleurs
“Funny, clever, and touching…. [Shriver’s] own lyrics are terrific. Recommended.”
—Library Journal
“Shriver is a lively storyteller, and she keeps readers guessing to the end…. More compelling even than the plot turns are Shriver’s insights into human nature…. She has a keen eye for the archetypal characters common to human tribes everywhere…. Checker and The Derailleurs, like its beguiling protagonist, is hard to forget.”
—People
“A funkily romantic novel…. Shriver’s writing soars.”
—Glamour
“Shriver is a gifted, expansive writer, and her novel should be a big hit with rock music fans, who have been so poorly served by fiction writers in the past.”
—Booklist
“A bittersweet, graceful, poetic, yet clear-sighted vision of the New York Tom Wolfe won’t tell you about. More than that, it is a tale about good and evil, and about the promise and pain of being nineteen.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Surprising, moving, and modern, wonderfully observed and wittily styled. It’s a cover version of some time-honored motifs by a writer with an acute, hip, and loving sensibility: as though Jane Austen listened to rock and roll.”
—Amtrak Express
“It is a joy to find a book that both glitters and glows.”
—WEBR Radio, Buffalo, New York
“[Shriver] gives us fiction that breathes and dances and taps out time…. Lionel Shriver writes with rhythm. Her sentences sweat and work and play and stay up to the small hours when the city is sleeping. The talk is real, the people wildly interesting.”
—Grand Rapids Press
We Need to Talk About Kevin
“Powerful…harrowing.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Sometimes searing…impossible to put down…brutally honest…. The novel holds a mirror up to the whole culture. Who, in the end, needs to talk about Kevin? Maybe we all do.”
—Boston Globe
“It is Desperate Housewives as written by Euripides…. A powerful, gripping, and original meditation on evil.”
—New Statesman
“Impressive…. It’s always a challenge for a novelist to take on front-page events. A guilt-stricken Eva Khatchadourian digs into her own history, her son’s, and the nation’s in her search for the responsible party, and her fierceness and honesty sustain the narrative.”
—New York Times
“Impossible to put down.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“An awesomely smart, stylish, and pitiless achievement.”
—The Independent (London)
“Terribly honest. Ms. Shriver takes a calculated risk…but the gamble pays off as she strikes a tone of compelling intimacy.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Furiously imagined…. A pleasure to read.”
—Seattle Times
“A slow, magnetic descent into hell that is as fascinating as it is disturbing.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Scathingly honest and often witty.”
—Salon
The Post-Birthday World
&n
bsp; “Hugely entertaining…. Tackles the dueling human needs for passion and security with fierce, witty honesty.”
—Vogue
“The Post-Birthday World is a brilliant ‘what if?’ novel. But that barely scrapes the surface in describing Shriver’s imaginative feat…. It’s mad genius…. A tour de force.”
—USA Today
“A playful, psychologically acute, and luxuriously textured meditation on the nature of love.”
—The New Yorker
“Outstanding…. Shriver, a brilliant and versatile writer, allows these competing stories to unfold organically, each a fully rounded drama, rich with irony, ambiguity, and unforeseeable human complications.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A wonderful new novel…. The rewards for sticking with these five-hundred-plus pages are as delicious as one of Irina’s feasts.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Complex and nervy, Shriver’s clever meditation will intrigue anyone who has ever wondered how things might have turned out had they followed, or ignored, a life-changing impulse.”
—People (Critic’s Choice)
“Provocative…stunningly intense.”
—New York Daily News
ALSO BY LIONEL SHRIVER
The Post-Birthday World
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Double Fault
A Perfectly Good Family
Game Control
The Bleeding Heart
The Female of the Species
Credits
Cover design by Milon Bozic
Cover photogarph © Justin Ouellette / Getty Images
Copyright
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following published works: “Bang the Drum All Day” by Todd Rundgren, copyright © 1983 Fiction Music, Inc./Humanoid Music (BMI), all rights reserved / “Eleanor Rigby,” words and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, copyright © 1966 Northern Songs Ltd., all rights for the U.S., Canada and Mexico controlled and administered by Blackwood Music Inc. under license from ATV Music (MACLEN), all rights reserved, international copyright secured, used by permission / “Darkness” by Stewart Copeland, copyright © 1981 Reggatta Music, Ltd., administered by Atlantic Music Corporation / “Dancing in the Dark” by Bruce Springsteen, copyright © 1984 Bruce Springsteen, all rights reserved, used with permission / “Blinded by the Light” by Bruce Springsteen copyright © 1973 Bruce Springsteen, all rights reserved, used with permission / “Save the Life of My Child” by Paul Simon, copyright © 1968 Paul Simon, used by permission, Inc., all rights reserved, used by permission / “Love over Gold” by Mark Knopfler, copyright © 1982 Chariscourt Ltd. (PRS), all rights administered in the U.S. and Canada by Almo Music Corp. (ASCAP), all rights reserved international copyright secured / “The Man’s Too Strong” by Mark Knopfler, copyright © 1985 Chariscourt Limited (PRS), all rights administered by Rondor Music (London) Ltd., administered in the U.S. and Canada by Almo Music Corp (ASCAP), all rights reserved, international copyright secured.
The drawings reproduced in Checker and The Deraillieurs are by Lionel Shriver.
CHECKER AND THE DERAILLEURS. Copyright © 1988 by Lionel Shriver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition October 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-189932-4
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* “Concentration Is Likened to Euphoric States of Mind,” by Daniel Goleman, New York Times, Mar. 4, 1986 (pp. C1, C3).
Lionel Shriver, Checker and the Derailleurs
(Series: # )
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