The Bonfire of Open Borders

In his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe lampooned 1980s New York City—including its rampant street crime, self-important bond traders, race hustlers, biased media, and feckless elected officials—in a manner that was both scathing and funny. Lionel Shriver’s A Better Life gives the same mordant treatment to Brooklyn’s anti-ICE, open borders do-gooders. In the process, it exposes the overall softness, feminization, and vulnerability of blue America in the 2020s. The difference is, A Better Life is only funny in the way that dark comedy can sometimes be funny. The disturbing pathos Shriver deftly presents in the fictional household of the divorced Gloria Bonaventura and her 26-year-old unemployed son, Nico (who returned home four years earlier after completing his engineering studies at Fordham), presents a grim and disquieting morality tale, not a satire.