As a novelist, Lionel Shriver has made her strongest impressions selecting some hot issue of the day — school shootings, the American health care system, the ballooning of the U.S. national debt — and working it into a well-paced drama about its effects on one family. When this formula works, as it did best with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003), the result can be riveting and also very popular. The intimacy of domestic politics moderates Shriver’s polemical side, which, when given free rein — as during an infamous 2016 speech she gave on cultural appropriation while wearing a sombrero — usually turns out to be smug, crude and obtuse.
In Shriver’s tiresome new novel, “Mania,” the balance is off. “Mania” is the story of Pearson Converse, an untenured academic who lives with her tree-surgeon partner and three children in a Pennsylvania college town. Most of the novel takes place during an alternate version of the 2010s, when a social-justice fad has been ignited by a best-selling book titled “The Calumny of I.Q.: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight.”
Pearson’s son gets sent home from school for using “the D-word,” now considered a slur. Lawn signs appear in the neighborhood announcing “We support cognitive neutrality.” Student “predators” haunt the literature course Pearson teaches at the local liberal arts college, hungrily searching for any slip-up suggesting that she thinks some people are smarter than others, so they can report her to the administration and get her sacked. Worst of all, Pearson’s best friend from girlhood, Emory Ruth, boosts her TV career by taping editorials endorsing the new ideology known as Mental Parity.
In real life, partisan rancor typically fuels culture-war initiatives like this; in Shriver’s imaginary America, it barely exists. The new ethos gets rapidly and improbably adopted by everybody in every walk of life, regardless of political affiliation. Mental Parity not only borrows from the left’s obsession with egalitarianism, safetyism and language hygiene but also draws on the right’s mistrust of expertise and credentialism; it could have bipartisan appeal if it weren’t so patently absurd.
Soon, Barack Obama is out of favor for being “outstandingly astute, eloquent and well informed,” and replaced by Joe Biden, who makes a point of installing a Treasury secretary who’s “not only an imbecile but an imbecile who was recognizably an imbecile — someone whose speech and affect were conspicuously vacuous.” Similar incompetents are ordered to take out Osama bin Laden, a failed mission that leaves him free to bomb the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.
Pearson’s partner, Wade, is forced to hire an assistant who knows nothing about arboriculture and drops a branch on him. Because medical degrees are “now handed out as carelessly as shopping fliers,” a young surgeon botches the ankle surgery his injuries require. Then Wade nearly dies after untrained nurses administer the wrong medication and is saved only by a doctor in his 50s, a relic from the good old days who has the temerity to know what he’s doing.
It goes on and on. Cars blow up because they’re built by idiots. Shrewd consumers import their food from overseas to avoid poisoning from unsafe American goods. Any word or phrase ever used as a synonym for “intelligent” (“quick,” “deep”) or stupid (“meatball,” “simple,” “dense”) must be purged from daily usage even when denoting a different meaning. If you want to order a wooden board at a hardware store, you have to ask for one that’s “two inches fat.” Mensa is “the kind of cerebral-supremacist organization” deemed “the greatest threat to American civic order” by no less than the F.B.I. Most fantastically, a child protective services investigator arrives at Pearson’s home because her youngest child reported her mother describing her as less intelligent than her siblings. “Use of language of such a derogatory character with minors,” this pious emissary states, “is classified as child abuse” and “potentially grounds for removing a child to foster care.”
As parody goes, this is ham-fisted stuff. Ironically, “Mania” lacks the discernment required to make it work. Satire demands precision, and Shriver applies an ax to a job calling for a scalpel. Although Shriver has made writing unlikable protagonists into a sort of cottage industry, Pearson is something more, a preeningly self-righteous didact swathed in false modesty about her own supposedly mediocre brain. Like many of Shriver’s narrators, Pearson often speaks or narrates with the sort of affected, antiquated vocabulary of a stock character from a 1930s movie, the portly gentleman in a white three-piece suit, up to no good and puffing on a cigar, played by Sidney Greenstreet. She has an odd, unexplained penchant for alliteration: “At the antediluvian argot, I nearly dropped my mask of stony stoicism.” She is not so much unlikable as simply insufferable.
Pearson’s past as an apostate of the Jehovah’s Witnesses makes her the sworn enemy of cant, and the only language she speaks is invective, so inevitably, she runs ruinously afoul of the new dispensation. Meanwhile, Emory’s star rises. She proves herself the ideal apparatchik on camera while privately snickering with Pearson and Wade over the silliness of Mental Parity, at least at first. The most — really the only — intriguing aspect of the novel is the relationship between these two friends and Pearson’s growing realization that Emory lacks a moral center. Emory herself remains a cipher. Is she a sociopath? Or just an opportunist? If only she were the unlikable narrator to tell this story. That would constitute a stretch for Shriver, imagining the interiority of a character who’s not basically an avatar of herself. That would be a truly daring choice, and dare I say it, a smart one.
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