Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel-turned-movie We Need to Talk About Kevin was a major prize-winner, a bestseller, and a hit, especially among liberals. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as it dealt with two of their favorite subjects: school shootings and mental health. However, her latest work of fiction, A Better Life, is guaranteed to be received less warmly on the Left, if it’s acknowledged at all.

The central figure in A Better Life is Gloria Bonaventura, an archetypal liberal white woman whom conservatives and independents know all too well. While many New Yorkers at least bristled at their city’s 2022 “migrant crisis,” in which billions were spent on hotel housing alone, Gloria splashily ramps up her do-gooder bona fides. The Brooklyn resident and mother of three adult children sets up a clothing drive for “our newest New Yorkers,” then pushes supermarkets to install donation bins for “culturally appropriate” food, a new program called “Big Apple, Big Hearts” that lets her reach new heights in conspicuous charity. Gloria also brings a highly questionable asylum-seeker into her large home to live with her and her Gen Z son, Nico. For Gloria, young Martiné of Honduras becomes the perfect vehicle, in the words of Nico’s woke sister, to “assure her that she’s making the world a better place.”

But for her family’s world, at least, Gloria’s virtue-flexing ends up making everything much, much worse.

Politically awakened by President Biden’s self-imposed border invasion, Nico clashes with his mother about the new addition to their home, as well as immigration more generally. Mostly through mockery, he tears into Gloria’s increasingly progressive posturing, which we’re told began to intensify after the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin—an event that marked the beginning of the end of her marriage to Nico’s dad, whose own politics began trending the other way.

Shriver’s use of Gloria as a liberal white female parody—and the motivation behind her pathological hospitality—provides plenty of red meat for conservatives. As Nico narrates, his mom has a “fatal weakness”: “people of color.” For Gloria, nonwhites “triggered an obsequious, apologetic sh*t-eatery and effectively functioned as her kryptonite.” Interfacing with POCs generated “an awkwardness” for her, which any “interloper could deploy to their advantage”—a point that lies at the heart of the novel.

In Gloria’s equally woke and childless older daughters, Shriver burrows further into liberal psychology. Nico says that his sister Vanessa always had a level of innocence, which, while charming, “meant she projected guilelessness onto everyone else, making her a danger to herself.” Such danger does eventually come, and hard.

Similarly, Nico tells us Gloria is also a loving and “naturally generous” person: “Unfortunately, she mostly exercised her magnanimity on people she’d never met.” This is key to understanding the liberal mindset vis-à-vis immigration. Gloria’s altruism disloyally skips over her own family—not to mention her fellow American citizens—to home in on people she neither knows nor understands. When Nico and Gloria are locked into one of their “predictable” heated tête-à-têtes over Biden’s immigration policies, he argues, “Somebody’s got to defend the interests of the people who were born here, even if sticking up for regular Americans makes us look bad.” To which she responds, “Makes ‘us’ look bad? I’m afraid your ‘us’ may be my ‘them.’”

Those familiar with Mrs. Jellyby from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (who devotes so much energy to raising money for an obscure African tribe that she neglects her own family) or Flannery O’Connor’s The Lame Shall Enter First (in which a widower spends so much time trying, in vain, to help an ungrateful criminal teen that his actual son kills himself) will instantly see parallels to Shriver’s Gloria. Such misspent compassion appears in other novels satirizing open-borders types, like Timur Vermes’s The Hungry and the Full, Derek Turner’s Sea Changes, and the late Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints.

Immigration is the perfect issue on which to build a satirical takedown of the Left today. That many “asylum seekers” could be lying about their supposed past persecution woes simply doesn’t register with leftists, so consumed are they by their need for moral affirmation.

This “lack of necessary guile” manifests in Martiné, who is initially infantilized by Gloria and her daughters but eventually turns their lives upside down. For Nico, Martiné’s asylum story—her small laundry business back home was supposedly subject to extortion by a local gang—is suspiciously well packaged: “Why wasn’t her account more particular? Why wasn’t anything she told us surprising?” he asks his sisters. “It’s like she’s lined up her story in advance, carefully crafted to match recent changes in asylum law.”

As Martiné settles into her new home in America’s most expensive city, the inevitable confrontation with Nico over immigration takes place. In one of her numerous self-serving arguments for staying in the country, she tells him (in heavily accented English): “USA is a big country. Big space everywhere…. America is rich…. This house, three bedrooms with nobody. In Honduras, thirty, forty people live here, no hay problema. Why big feeling?” The response from Nico hits: “The ‘big feeling’ has to do with home. Home isn’t only a place; home is a big feeling. That you belong. That you can understand the people around you, and they can understand you, because you’re mostly the same.”

These to-and-fro exchanges feature throughout the novel, and although overwrought at times, Shriver deftly articulates the right side of the immigration issue. For instance, when Martiné hits Nico with the old saw, “You’re just lucky to be born in a rich country,” Nico formulates the following response:

[Good countries are]…the cumulative consequence of diligence, social cooperation, and innovation over many years, whereas ‘bad countries’ were the result of tyranny, social indiscipline, and corruption, so in an intergenerational sense the fashioning of a desirable place to live had precious little to do with luck. Hence Martiné and her ilk were trying to cash in on civilizational benefits their forbears haven’t amassed: their attempted shortcut to prosperity was effectively a king of cheating, mooching and theft.

From Alonso, another “asylee” who later moves in unannounced, as well as a “business associate” of Martiné’s brother (who also moves himself in), we get a far more direct and honest take from a Third-Worlder on Biden’s America. Sitting at the kitchen table in his boxers, drinking his second stolen beer from Nico, Alonso tells Nico:

When I come here, first words I need translate are los idiotas, los credulous. Americans, they give clothings, they give doctors, they give money. Your mama, she even give her house. Best of all, they give their country! You think you, Nico, you come to Honduras and we give you our country? You try take our country, this is when we punch you in your face!

When the domestic discomfort finally reaches Gloria herself, Alonso mockingly tells her, “How hard for Alonso to live in your house? I walk in. Bingo, Alonso live in your house. Same at the border: I walk over, bingo, Alonso live in your country. This is what I talk about with Nico…you and your country are pushovers.”

While often comical (and indeed polemical) throughout, the novel ends tragically. Shriver shows herself to be as deft a craftsman in plot-making as she is an expert on the issues she writes about. Partly due to how gate-kept the publishing world is, modern conservative fiction is a relatively thin genre, making her latest novel all the more valuable. Of course, if there ever was a more target-rich era for satire, it is now.

A Better Life deserves wide praise and circulation, and hopefully more authors like Lionel Shriver get the opportunity to put a mirror in front of woke do-gooders everywhere.