Since I met Shriver, she has become as well known for her opinions as for her novels—she writes columns for The Spectator about the perils of high taxes and unchecked immigration; in 2016, she showed up at a literary festival in a sombrero to mock the concept of cultural appropriation. But as Adelle Waldman writes in The Atlantic’s March issue, she has also continued writing books that lend extraordinary sympathy to characters she wouldn’t agree with, and “her novels have never been mere vehicles for her politics.” The exception, Waldman writes, is Shriver’s scathing new book about Biden-era immigration policies, A Better Life. It “fails not because its politics are out of step with progressive opinion,” she writes, but because, among other things, it “reads like an op-ed thinly disguised as a novel,” and its characters are rendered through “sociology, not psychology.”