The Mandibles

Lionel Shriver

HarperCollins

Otago Daily Times, August 6th 2016

One of Lionel Shriver’s defining characteristics is her willingness to confront topical and divisive issues. The Mandibles is no exception, and I would rate this novel among one of her best.

It opens in a near-future America that has defaulted on its debts, renationalised all gold (including jewellery), and made holding or trading in international currency, illegal. Rampant inflation and a stock-market crash have wiped out entire fortunes and, for perhaps the first time since British settlers arrived on the continent, everybody truly is equal under God. The irony being, of course, that the US is no longer the country the rest of the world wants to come to but the place that everybody wants to leave.

Set against this broader geopolitical scenario, the Mandibles family are a synecdoche through which the ramifications of events can be explored at the individual level. The family are the inheritors of a substantial fortune, watched over by the 97-year old patriarch, Douglas, whose demise will see its distribution trickle down through several generations. His son, Carter, plays the dutiful child, regularly visiting his father and dementia-ridden stepmother in the upper class retirement home where they reside, while his daughter Nollie lives – not unlike Shriver – in self-imposed exile abroad. 

Meanwhile Carter’s children, who resemble the three princes so frequently encountered in fairy tales, have made their own way in the world. Avery, a ‘new age’ therapist, lives in moneyed comfort, having married to a tenured economics professor.Her sister Florence works at an emergency housing shelter and struggles to meet her mortgage payments, while and college drop-out Jarred has used his unspent education fund to buy a farm. 

As the economy collapses, four generations of Mandibles slowly trickle their way into Florence’s tiny house and, when they lose even this minimal refuge, set off across country to work for Jarred. These events, which take place over the course of a few months in 2029, take up the bulk of the story, with a coda in 1947 that depicts a resurgent America that is just as frightening.  

The plot is an engrossing one and by combining a broad range of characters with an eye-of god narrative, Shriver presents a broad range of responses ranging from Avery’s husband, Lowell (who spends his time railing against the defeatists whose refusal to recognise the downturn as temporary becomes become a self-fulfilling prophecy) to Florence’s son, a watchful and practical boy who is one of the few member of the family to prepare for the practicalities of living in the new America.

Shriver’s sympathies are clear. She has little time for the pontification of economists of any stripe, nor for the affluent, white, middle-class as exemplified by Lowell and Avery. The admirable characters are those who do ‘real’ work (and writers), with nirvana represented, apparently, by a tax-free state in which family rather than the state provides the social safety net.

Some of this is, I suspect, Shriver being deliberately provocative. I enjoyed the challenge neverthe less. And, in light of recent events, the scenario she paints feels frighteningly plausible.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/dystopian-view-america-top-author