Like much of Shriver’s work, A Better Life creates a semi-realist crisis situation to critique human behavior as universally flawed, building a disaster narrative with dystopian, misanthropic undertones. Characteristic of social satire, the novel’s ironic purpose relies on exposing the discrepancy between the high-minded motivations that people espouse in public and the more selfish drives that they seek to conceal, deliberately ramping up tensions between these conflicting states of being until they break at the novel’s denouement. A Better Life does this by creating two groups of characters: the Bonaventuras, who typify a perception of US society as spoiled, hypocritical, and self-absorbed, and the Salgados and associates, who typify a grittier reality in which violence and criminality are seen as necessary tools of self-advancement. From the outset, the Bonaventuras are positioned as the obvious “pushover” targets of the hungry, ambitious Salgados, and this dynamic establishes the novel’s narrative direction, giving rise to its dark humor and growing sense of impending disaster and dread. 

This theme is firmly established in Chapter 5 when Martine tells Nico, “You fight for what is yours or what should be yours […] You no fight, you lose” (78-79). This is, ironically, a plain description of the Salgados, Alonso, and the gang members, who will indeed take everything that they think “should” be theirs from the Bonaventura family. As an open admission of intent, Martine’s statement provides a form of honest advance warning that Nico and his family fail to see until it’s too late. In this dialogue, Shiver highlights Nico’s inherent inability to recognize Martine’s words on a literal level. Although he’s the most suspicious and protectionist of the Bonaventuras, he engages with these ideas merely on a theoretical, argumentative level, naive to the idea that they could actually be played out in his own life, requiring him to enact his own stated principles. When Martine calls the American lifestyle a “nice, soft life” (79), she accurately equates the comfort of the Bonaventuras’ middle-class lifestyle with a simultaneous unwillingness to help themselves. In this way, Shriver sets up a dichotomy between the active, survivalist world of the Salgados and that of the Bonaventuras, whose privilege means they can’t truly grasp the realities and imperatives of life for the majority of the world’s other people. In both cases, A Better Life suggests that this is an inherent and mutual failure of empathy: The Bonaventuras view other people’s suffering as an opportunity for performative altruism or intellectual debate, and the Salgados unashamedly take what they want from others. 

The novel’s satire extends to the wider failure of official systems to protect the Bonaventuras’ property, depicting bureaucratic systems weighed down by excessive complexity and laws that reflect the same performative altruism that the Bonaventuras display on a personal level. When Gloria finally calls the police to remove the squatters, the officers are powerless: Because the men have been in the house for over 30 days and have produced fraudulent leases, the police declare the invasion a “civil dispute” and advise Gloria to endure the lengthy, expensive eviction process in housing court or simply move out herself. The police’s inability to act affirms that, in the world of the novel, the laws intended to protect have become tools for those who would exploit, subverting the state’s intended role. This legal quagmire mirrors the passivity within the Bonaventura family, suggesting that in both cases, convoluted theoretical approaches have taken the place of robust, active measures. 

The novel satirizes contemporary social divisions around immigration in public discourse. In focusing on the gradual takeover of the Ditmas Park house by uninvited migrant guests in the midst of a semi-fictional migrant crisis, the novel places itself firmly within this controversial issue. As a satirical, quasi-dystopian work, however, A Better Life is less concerned with formulating a right-versus-wrong rhetorical argument around migration than with lampooning the behaviors and attitudes of those on both sides of the debate. Although the Bonaventuras are set up as the narrative’s losers, in characterizing them as victims of their own failures as much as of the Salgados’ predation, the novel aims to avoid simple moral conclusions, instead offering a more complex, unsettling view of human nature and interactions.