Lionel Shriver, arguably the world’s greatest living libertarian novelist, has found another timely subject worthy of her illuminating insight and piercing wit.
Living up to her iconoclastic reputation, the British-American novelist finds satirical, intensely dramatic and gut-wrenchingly personal dimensions to bring to life in Mania.
The cautionary fable depicts a slightly different but recognizable contemporary world where good intentions have gone terribly astray.
Set in the recent past and present but in a wryly revealing alternate history, Mania portrays an America taken over by a new ideology: the Mental Parity movement.
Warning: Any resemblances to any cultlike trends or movements of today or just yesterday are purely intentional.
EGALITARIANISM AS A DENIAL OF INTELLIGENCE
Shriver conceives a recognizable alternate America that quickly develops into a delusionary culture and authoritarian regime denying any variability or genuine differences in intelligence, talent or individual merit. Any disagreement or rebellious behavior is vilified and condemned or prohibited as the worst type of bigotry and discrimination.
Set beginning in 2011 during the Obama administration, the novel portrays Trump becoming president in 2016, but as a Democrat and partly reflecting the rising movement’s acceptance of the “dumb.” Biden still replaces Trump as president in 2020, but only, Shriver suggests, as politics and culture deteriorate from dumb to dumber.
A previous two-time Prometheus Best Novel finalist for The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 and Should We Stay Or Should We Go, Shriver is no stranger to challenging mainstream assumptions.
In fact, she often assumes the archetypal role of courageously and very publicly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Her worst sin, from the establishment perspective, might be that she often fashions a compelling narrative case that proves it.
In Mania, melding her fierce imagination and understanding of human nature with her well-honed talent for ingenious plotting and credible characters, she sheds light on the perennial temptations of the morally self-righteous to impose their visions on everyone else. For their own good, of course – and no matter the devastation that result.
THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY CULT
Mania charts the creeping impact of the Mental Parity movement and its progressive (and progressivist) take-over of academia, media, education, medicine, and government itself. In the process, Shriver poignantly dramatizes its harmful impact on public reputations, private relationships, careers, friendships, families and children.
Evoking echoes of the Chinese Cultural Revolution sparked by communist dictator Mao Zedong in the 1960s, the Mental Parity Movement divides and separates co-workers, friends, and parents from children. In the frenzy of its fearful mob excesses, the movement and its virtue-signaling foot soldiers gleefully pursue cancellations and related humiliations.
Although framed as an if-this-goes-on fantasy, Mania disconcertingly holds up a cracked mirror to recent (and sadly ongoing) culture wars revolving around race, gender and identity politics, where facts, truth and objective reality itself are suppressed, distorted or denied in the name of a perverse perfectionism.
THE UGLINESS OF MOB PSYCHOLOGY
Intentionally disturbing to experience, especially as it unfolds, Shriver’s novel reaches devastating emotional depths in revealing the ugly daily contours of the movement and its impact on the lives, livelihoods and relationships of one family.
At the center of the novel is first-person narrator Pearson Converse, the cussedly independent-minded wife and mother of three children – two of super-high intelligence and one, her youngest, of less-than-average intelligence.
Adding emotional dimensions and themes of envy, rivalry and betrayal is the plot thread about Pearson’s lifelong friendship with an ambitious media-personality career woman and how their friendship is twisted and torn by the new cultural wars.
When Pearson’s brilliant older son Darwin is disciplined and expelled from school for making an “abhorrent” comment that only yesterday wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow – that another boy is a “moron” – she begins to feel that she and her family have entered a Bizarro alternate universe.
Rebellious, at times foolishly impulsive or self-destructive, and initially even finding it hard to believe what’s occurring, Pearson doesn’t fully grasp yet the emerging rules of the Orwellian new order. No wonder she can’t really explain the rules to her son, or ultimately protect her children.
“I don’t understand the rules anymore!,” Darwin exploded.
“Okay, so a person can’t be stupid. You’ve explained why, over and over, and no, I still don’t see how, like as, like, one day back around the beginning of fifth grade suddenly a fucking doofhead wasn’t a fucking doofhead anymore.…This junk is all anyone cares about anymore!”
EXTENDING THE WISDOM OF ORWELL
Especially in its exploration of psychology, culture and language, Shriver’s dystopia explores and extends several of the core themes that George Orwell distilled so memorably in Nineteen Eighty-Four, aptly inducted in 1984 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
Like Orwell, Shriver is not afraid to call out the “smelly little orthodoxies” of the knee-jerk mob or any faction that rises to power and begins abusing it in the name of a holy new pseudo-religion.
As in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Orwell’s Prometheus-winning companion classic Animal Farm, the idealistic Mental Parity movement inevitably denies reality itself. Even those privately dissenting from the new orthodoxy are bullied to publicly pay lip service to obvious falsehoods in the name of a spurious fairness.
With the notion that no one is smarter than anyone else enshrined as the newly received gospel, everyone must bow down to the new god – or else be cast out and crucified as heretics.
A DAMAGING DYSTOPIA
Mania is especially incisive in probing the depths of human psychology to reveal the corrupting impact of cult-like beliefs and mob pressures on the mind and soul.
Beyond its initial good intentions in enabling even the less intelligent to participate more fully in society, much of the Mental Parity ideology is so obviously false that most people implicitly grasp that it’s a fiction.
Thus, they understand intuitively that the social/legal pressures to conform to the new religion require mere pretense. Among the public displays of conformity, as universities open offices of Cognitive Equality and the unqualified and incompetent take over many jobs, more people are pushed into public displays, wearing buttons or installing yard signs proclaiming “We Support Cognitive Neutrality.”
Yet, as the culture war is won and the State begins to enforce the new normal, no one is allowed to remain truly neutral.
THE IMPACT ON POPULAR CULTURE
Shriver may be at her wittiest and most perversely perceptive in imagining the censorious impact of the authoritarian ideology on our heritage of movies, TV shows and other aspects of popular culture.
Inevitably, because of their respect for intelligence, Jeopardy and the Darwin Awards are canceled, Rubik’s Cube is banned in the barracks, and IQ tests become illegal. The TV quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is reduced to asking contestants simple questions to win, such as what their name is. (If they can’t answer that, then they’re truly hopeless.)
Once-popular films and shows – Back to the Future, Sherlock, Good Will Hunting, The Social Network, The Big Bang Theory, The Nutty Professor, a host of 1950s sci-fi classics, etc. – disappear from late-night TV listings because of their “supremacist” brainiac, eccentric-genius or mad-scientist tropes.
Once beloved comic characters – such as Steve Martin’s The Jerk, Betty White’s Rose in The Golden Girls, Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean and Forrest Gump – are retired from public culture because the now-politically-incorrect characters are “two fries short of a Happy Meal.”
While the “cerebral elite” initially lampoon the notion that stupidity is a fiction as “exceptionally stupid,” they quickly enough jump on the fashionable bandwagon “as the drive for intellectual leveling gathered steam.”
When Converse, a teacher, sarcastically asks a colleague at work whether the new term for “smart phone” is “mediocrity phone,” she’s slapped down quickly. “How about ‘phone’? Is that so hard, Pearson?”
Despite her incredulity at the denial of age-old realities, Pearson does try to be prudent. “Pick our spots. This new way of thinking about people is bigger than we are,” she warns. “If we stick up for what we believe in the wrong way, or at the wrong time, we won’t accomplish anything, aside from doing ourselves a great deal of damage.”
But her words of caution fall short, especially to her own incorrigibly rebellious ears.
To her credit, Shriver makes her heroine believably human. Pearson has undeniable flaws, which reveal the downside of her “libertarian mindset” even as she justifiably resists “going along to get along.”
As Pearson’s well-grounded and supportive husband points out, she’d be better off not turning everything into a confrontation. (Perhaps that also might serve as a welcome reminder to some other libertarians and anti-statist individualists that behaving politely, reasonably and decently in most social settings can make a more positive impression and be more successful in earning respect for their dissident and unconventional views.)
Best of all, Pearson ultimately demonstrates admirable consistency in her commitment to reason and libertarian ideals. Even when a backlash develops to the Mental Parity movement and she struggles with the temptation for revenge, she refuses to back any form of coercion, even steps that might be seen as beneficial in holding those responsible for creating the toxic culture and undermining individual rights.
HOW AUTHORITARIAN IDEOLOGY CORRUPTS LANGUAGE
Shriver is endlessly inventive in her use of language and darkly amusing in her depiction of everyday life. As previously innocent attitudes and behavior become suspect during the Mental Parity movement’s reign of terror, the absurd and picky extremes invite the reader’s appalled laughter.
At the movement’s height, people no longer can say “dumbbells” or “crash test dummies” because such common terms suddenly are perceived as encapsulating outmoded prejudices. Instead, people must refer to “weights” and “crash test mannequins.”
Inevitably, as language becomes more corrupted, apt words and efficiently concise phrases are replaced with lengthier euphemisms that most find difficult to remember or repeat – undermining the rationality of language and the ability to think and speak clearly.
Even the convenient and apt term “dimmer switch” becomes verboten. Instead, all right-minded citizens must somehow awkwardly remember to say “switch that makes things more seeable.”
Through such absurdities, both humorous and horrific, Shriver succeeds in enlisting her worldwide readers to see many things more clearly – about her fictional dystopia, and our own world.
In the culture reshaped and society brutally warped by Mental Parity mob rule, the worst thing one can do, short of murder, is use the S-word.
Children, indoctrinated by their teachers, are encouraged to report parents for once-normal but now-unacceptable behavior. When Pearson’s less-intelligent youngest daughter vengefully discloses that her mom used “stupid” at home, in a forgetful moment of irritation at her behavior, Child Protective Services separates the daughter (and her two older siblings) from the home.
In the desperate hope to get her children back, Pearson must attend parenting re-education classes – or else her kids will be put into foster care.
Just as Kurt Vonnegut foresaw the devastating consequences of radical coercive egalitarianism taken to inhuman and reality-denying extremes in his story “Harrison Bergeron,” the 2019 Prometheus Hall of Fame inductee, Shriver offers her own satirical but sobering take on the continuing appeal of what she dubs “intellectual egalitarianism.”
Mania also has been compared positively to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the 2000 winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Roth’s speculative novel chronicles the excesses of a new puritanism propelled by the “ecstasy of sanctimony” and “the persecuting spirit” to enact rituals of moral and social purification at the expense of a polarized and demoralized citizenry.
Those same ugly motivations and behaviors are palpably visible in Mania – one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Best Novel award (and in April selected as a Best Novel finalist.)
Yet, reflecting Shriver’s unflinching ability to expose reigning delusions and probe uncomfortable realities, Mania stands on its own as a gripping portrait of similar human folly.
RELATED READING:
* Read the Prometheus Blog reviews of other current Best Novel nominees, including Stuart Turton’s The Last Murder at the End of the World, Danny King’s Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, Wil McCarthy’s Beggar’s Sky and Michael Flynn’s In the Belly of the Whale.
* Check out the full list of 2024 novels nominated for Best Novel.
* Read the Prometheus Blog review of Shriver’s two Prometheus Best Novel finalists: Should We Stay Or Should We Go and The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047.
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One effect (more of an aside in the novel rather than a focus) is that countries which did not participate in this nonsense have grown aggressively bolder as the incompetents running the US (and, I think, Western Europe) were mentally incapable of coping. Illegal immigrants began leaving as the quality of life decreased and US products became dangerous, scientists fled to Russia (I assume those of Chinese descent also to China though that wasn’t mentioned) helping those expansionist nations. Israel wasn’t mentioned but if it didn’t participate in this mania I can imagine a mass exodus of Jewish doctors and scientists immigrating too considering Jewish devotion to education, resulting in even more issues with the Palestinians as space would be needed to house at least a few hundred thousand newcomers.