Should We Stay or Should We Go-Lionel Shriver's Mighty Question

Have you ever tried to fill in the blanks on a living will? Have you ever talked with family or partner about how you envision your so-called golden years? Have you ever admitted that you hope that you’ll die in your sleep? We should all be so lucky! But if you’ve lived even a little bit then you know what a fool’s game it is to try to outsmart the future. The best laid plans…etc.

Wonderful, controversial, massively talented writer Lionel Shriver has skewered the health care system (“So Much for That), the economic crises (“The Mandibles), and the crazed Peloton generation (“The Motion of the Body Through Space”), in novels just made for book discussion groups. Now she’s cast her jaundiced eye on the indignities of the aging process in “Should We Stay or Should We Go.”

We first meet Kay and Cyril shortly after they’ve returned from her father’s funeral. It seems that the old man has held the family hostage to his years long battle with Alzheimer’s to the detriment of their own lives and it was with a sense of relief that they put him in the ground. They open a chilled bottle and begin a serious discussion about the long, horrific process of aging, the cost to the National Healthcare System (we are in London), and the suffering of caregivers.

That’s when Cyril proposes his bright idea, a suicide pact. Not until they’re eighty, mind you, a long, long ways away. Still, as a physician Cyril prefers to obtain the necessary drugs sooner rather than later while Kay wonders how they will account for the fourteen-month gap in their ages. Will he go at eighty and she wait around, or will he cheat her out of her extra year and four months by expecting her to go along with him? They decide that the fairer thing is to wait until her eightieth.

The years go by, and we are treated to the inner workings of a very happy marriage. They spar over politics, career choices, the ups and downs of their three kids’ lives, and sensibly, since they’re leaving, they refinance their home in a bid to travel a bit and enjoy life before Covid locks them down. Suddenly, by page seventy, their final week is looming.

And this is where Shriver throws you for a completely unexpected loop. Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series? I’m not even sure I should say any more. Shriver paints various futures for Kay and Cyril that are contradictory, hilarious, revolting, terrifying, but sadly, all possible. Lionel Shriver has written one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read this year. The trouble, or perhaps the gift, is that my friends and I are barreling toward eighty ourselves and there’s nowhere to go but forward!