Mania: A Novel
“In Mania, Shriver is not enlightening us with sharp satire; she is hitting us over the head with a baseball bat.”
In her tedious, overlong satire, Mania, Lionel Shriver takes on Democrats and Republicans. President Biden who in her satirical fantasy was elected president in 2012 because Barak Obama was too intelligent and articulate for the American populace, is the perfect representative of a dumbed-down American society. As for Donald J. Trump, he has set a new template for presidential candidates: “badly educated, uninformed, poorly spoken, crass, oblivious to the rest of the world, unattractive and preferably fat.” Shriver’s target is the wholesale dumbing of the United States.
Shriver begins, not in the future, but in an alternative 2011 when the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Any word suggesting lack of intelligence is out, even signifiers like “turkey” have to be replaced. Stupidity becomes “alternative processing.” Grades are no longer given in school and competency tests for jobs are out. The result is a country in chaos. Cars break down because of incompetent workmanship. Prudent people buy imported food because American-produced food can’t be trusted. An untrained military allows Russia and China to take over parts of Europe and Asia. Untrained doctors accidentally kill their patients.
A blue state liberal might assume Shriver is skewering right wing anti-intellectualism, the sort of attitude that is leading to the banning of books and attacks on universities. However, Shriver, an often-shrill social critic, is a fan of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ policies. Is it, then, left-wing tendencies toward egalitarianism that inspired this diatribe? Shriver seems most concerned about any policing of politically incorrect language.
As usual, Shriver places a feisty mother at the center of her story. As a teenager, Pearson Converse left her Jehovah’s Witness family. She could not accept their restrictive faith or their adversarial attitude toward modern society. Pearson left family and faith but maintained her own adversarial attitude. Aware of her own average intellect, she found the most brilliant sperm donor for her son Darwin and her daughter Zanzibar. Lucy, her third child fathered by Pearson’s sweet, reserved partner, a tree surgeon, is not as precocious.
Trouble brews when Lucy overhears her mother discuss her relative lack of intelligence. Lucy a fervent product of the Mental Parity movement, reports her mother’s comments to the authorities. A social worker threatens to put all three children in foster care. Later, Pearson’s classroom meltdown in which she uses “the D word” goes viral and she loses her university teaching job.
There are no likable characters in Mania. Pearson may be right in her outrage at the insanity of the Mental Parity movement, but she doesn’t seem to care about anything but her own feelings. She is indifferent to the effect that her behavior has on the people around her. Emory, her only friend, is a cynic who will say anything to boost her career as a television journalist. She becomes famous as a spokesperson for mental parity, even to the point of personally attacking Pearson on one of her telecasts but, when the pendulum swings the other way, becomes an equally passionate defender of intelligence. Pearson’s partner, Wade, the most sympathetic character, is only interested in protecting his family, in holding on to his children. He tells Pearson, “From now on you’re going to be perfect. And not in your terms. In theirs.”
The problem with Mania is that Shriver, like her central character, doesn’t know when to stop. We don’t need all these examples of the foolishness and danger of mental parity. The joke wears thin. Pearson explains herself too much. Shriver never lets her readers develop their own interpretation of her. Moreover, she is so shrill and tiresome that one starts feeling sympathy for her opponents. Emory, who is presented as a callous opportunist, gains our sympathy toward the end when she offers the most succinct criticism of our heroine: “That’s what this misfit iconoclasm is about: clutching your status as uniquely enlightened to your chest like some one-eyed teddy bear.”
By the end of the book Shriver seems to have given up fiction writing altogether and simply editorializes. In Mania, Shriver is not enlightening us with sharp satire; she is hitting us over the head with a baseball bat. Her leading character isn’t a heroine; she, like her creator, is a tiresome nag.