In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is 'the last great civil rights fight.' Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word ("stupid") and encouraged to report parents who use it at home. A college English instructor, the constitutionally rebellious Pearson Converse rejected her restrictive Jehovah's Witness upbringing as a teenager, and so has an aversion to dogma of any kind. Made impotent in the university classroom, she's also enraged by the crushing of her exceptionally bright children's spirit in primary school. Fortunately, she enjoys the confidence of a best friend, a media commentator with whom she can speak frankly about her socially unacceptable contempt for the MP movement. Or at least she thinks she can, until one day the political chasm between the two women becomes uncrossable, and a lifelong relationship implodes.
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.
