Were Shriver not such a superb satirical novelist, we 'woke' types could just ignore her and be done with her offenses and contradictions. But alas her latest novel, Mania, is one of her best — in part because the subject is one of her queasiest ... Very funny, occasionally offensive and, yes, smart. But the famously iconoclastic Shriver’s most striking accomplishment here is more representative than she may want to acknowledge: namely, that its satire is as reflective of a reactionary fear about demography and post-1960s social movements as it is of a concern with the waning of meritocracy.
Her fiction bristles with discomfort, and her protagonists, not surprisingly, sail against stiff currents ... At its best the book works as a fantasy that hews uncomfortably close to today’s reality, where facts and the truth are selectively recognized at increasingly subjective whims. Shriver only nibbles at the political implications of all this, enough to make you wish for a bigger bite ... Shriver isn’t one to tip-toe around her subjects. She still knows how to poke the bear. In this case, the bear is us.
A thoughtful — if still quite cross — parable of the culture wars more generally ... An enjoyably bracing thesis disguised as a novel ... Convincing ... Shriver’s fans will be deeply grateful that it’s an asset she continues to lack as she blasts away.
Lionel Shriver’s new novel, a hymn to inclusivity and kindness – just kidding – takes place in a parallel recent past as western civilisation withers under the grip of the Mental Parity movement ... World-building as trolling, basically ... Even she seems to sense that, for all the needle, this novel lacks verve or sass, stretching thinly dramatised ideas – political correctness has gone mad; we should worry about Putin, not pronouns – over nearly 300 pages.
Without a clear sense of what kind of tyranny of the (lib) commons Shriver fears—DEI? the language police? socialism? virtue signaling? grade inflation?—the conceit is a better fit for a tart short story than an extended narrative. And given that today’s most robust anti-intellectual initiatives come from right-wing quarters—book bans, shutdowns of college liberal arts departments, efforts to drain public school funds—Shriver’s process for picking a target seems, let’s say, cognitively subpar. A peculiar novel driven more by bogeymen than brains.
