The Mandibles

Lionel Shriver is the new Ayn Rand, I guess. This is smug dystopianism for the libertarian doomsday-prepper set. It ends up being no surprise that utopia turns out to be a flat-tax state with no welfare or Medicaid, where everybody is either benevolently helped by their neighbors out of the goodness of their hearts or is left to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

The danger of writing a novel that's intended to teach a lesson is that it can come off as pedantic, doing things like setting up a dinner party attended by guests with wildly divergent political views, for no other reason except to enable them to get into a debate and voice the author's presentation of the various arguments for the issue at hand (which happened in this book, of course).

While I appreciated "The Mandibles" for its detailed presentation of what a collapse of America's monetary system might look like, I think it fell prey to many of these problems. The characters seem less like a real extended family and more like representative archetypes of each social class (the working class, the rich elderly, academia, etc.), and it seemed like the novel was driven more by the desire to make a point than to fully develop characters and plot.

For example, one character (an economics professor) remains stubbornly in denial about changes happening around him in a way that is so unrealistic that he clearly serves solely as a foil for the other characters to explain recent events to him, increasingly emphatically (and, perhaps, to serve as the stand-in for an incredulous reader).

I'd contrast this book to my favorite dystopian novel, "Children of Men," where the story and characters come first, and we are shown the author's intended lesson more subtly, and in a way that I find more effective than in "The Mandibles." Or the excellent "Half of a Yellow Sun," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, where formerly well-off sisters are forced to completely rethink their expectations about life as they become refugees in a civil war, and the political points are made against the backdrop of a compelling plot with characters who, despite representing different class archetypes, still feel like real people who are genuinely transformed by their experiences. Here, the political points are all the author seems to care about.

I'm not even getting into other things that bugged me, like the constant and distracting interjection of cringe-inducing future-slang terms like "roachbar" and "boomerpoop." Or the reveal regarding the "foul matter" boxes, which can be seen coming from ten miles away. Or the novelist character's predictable voicing of what's presumably Shriver's own negative opinion about how even us hoi polloi can presume to be literary critics nowadays. I'm guessing she reads the Goodreads reviews?

Overall, I think this is a good premise, I just wish it had been a better book. I had high expectations for the author of the extraordinary "We Need to Talk About Kevin," and I do think it provides a lot of thought-provoking material to discuss at a book club or with a friend. But the politics and condescending tone get in the way of what might otherwise be a well-written work of dystopian fiction.

Do yourself a favor and read (or re-read) "Children of Men" instead, a better novel, and a likely more realistic description of America's near-term future.

Well, the second Shriver book I've read because of a book club. I didn't detest this book as much as Kevin but I certainly didn't like it. First of all, there are about 50 pages of tedious dialog about the financial system which could be chopped out. I suppose she did lots of research about it and she wanted every bit of it in there, even if it had to be terrible conversations between an economics professor and a teenager (described many times as a economic autodidact). Really, if you were writing a post-apocalyptic novel about a comet hitting the Earth, you don't need to spend 50 pages talking about the physics, the trajectory, the history of the comet. Just smash it into the Earth and get on with it.

Then you have the 2nd half of the novel, is Shriver a Libertarian? There is certainly vast amounts of preaching about the evils of social society, taxation, gun control, etc. Much like the financial blah blah blah, it doesn't make the novel any more engaging. Having the 10 years later trip to Nevada just makes feel like there are two partially completed novels combined into one.

Lots of it just made me cringe. I believe there has already been much written about the novel's racism (i.e. The Lats - Mexicans, the Spanish speaking president who crashes the US into depression). The bigger sin for me was the laughably stupid future slang (boomerpops, Lats, treasury, etc.) that so many of the characters indulge in.

Perhaps there is an interesting novel in here somewhere, but for me there was far too much tedious garbage and Libertarian preaching to wade though. I did finish the novel, but only because it was a book group book. Otherwise, I doubt I would have made it much past the first 1/3rd.