A few things can be said to have formed a cult around Lionel Shriver in the past few years, especially since the watershed publication of her 2003 novel We need to talk about Kevin. By and large, readers have followed Shriver’s fictional production on account of (1) her unique repertoire of topics, i.e. her keen interest in sensitive social issues (obesity, healthcare, gun control, marriage), and (2) her virtually matchless narrative voice, ever-present sarcasm, and good ear for particularly sti

A few things can be said to have formed a cult around Lionel Shriver in the past few years, especially since the watershed publication of her 2003 novel We need to talk about Kevin. By and large, readers have followed Shriver’s fictional production on account of (1) her unique repertoire of topics, i.e. her keen interest in sensitive social issues (obesity, healthcare, gun control, marriage), and (2) her virtually matchless narrative voice, ever-present sarcasm, and good ear for particularly stinging phrases. In other words, Shriver has been known to tackle gargantuan issues head-on, hardly sugarcoating any of her sentences. She has also become famous by virtue of a fondness of depicting mankind’s fall from grace as epitomized by any of her numerous (oddly named) characters.



Thus, what one should first mention about The Mandibles is that Shriver is still playing her own game, still deploying her time-tested tools. The scenario now is post-apocalyptic: the novel focuses on a family’s strive for survival in the aftermath of a gruesome financial debacle. My lackluster economic skills prevent me from offering you a three-dimensional explanation of what exactly is going on, so let’s just say that the year is 2029, and the United States is undergoing the most violent financial crisis in its history. The dollar has plummeted; the president has officially defaulted the national debt; and inflation levels are skyrocketing. In practical terms, what happens is that previously affluent families soon find out that their resources are dwindling with every passing day, and misery’s walking towards their door at an unprecedented pace. Imprecisions aside, I think you get it: this is a time and a place in which money is progressively rendered worthless, and everybody’s life needs to be reorganized around that.



In her previous books, Shriver has attempted to demonstrate how distressing or calamitous situations can significantly interfere upon human behaviour. In Double Fault, for instance, what started out as a healthy, vibrant love relationship between two individuals is slowly corroded by competition’s ever-flowing drops of venom. In So much for that, a lifetime saver is forced to make a choice between trying to save his wife’s life and savoring the long-awaited rewards of a lifetime of self-denial. In The Mandibles, Shriver’s main argument is that much of what we take civilization to mean hinges directly upon our consensual reliance on money, regardless of how unfair capitalism may be. Money helps us ascribe value to ourselves and others; it tinges and restrains our behaviour; it consolidates our goals and dreams; it even helps us make sense of what failure is. What happens when our all-important currency becomes nothing but fragile paper?



To illustrate her alarming points, Shriver will focus on four generations of the Mandible family: people who, because they were born at different times and under different circumstances, have developed different relationships with their dollar — which means that, when the national economy goes awry, each will experience collapse in a different way. Shriver’s a very gifted storyteller, and she understands that the only way of making her book seethe with diversity is by giving voice to a myriad of equally diverse characters. And that’s what she does. Most of the book is crisscrossed by heated arguments between characters – grandparents and grandchildren, men and women, upper-class and middle-class individuals, all caught up in the same never-ending task of making sense of financial death. Much of the dialogue is quite riveting, but it’s true that Shriver is highly prone to pontificating: her characters often come up with elaborate, unreal explanations of the situation around them, and the information overload can at times feel dull. One gets the impression that certain parts of this book would have been more successful as essays: both because they ring hollow in the ears of a non-specialist readership, and because they compromise the book’s verisimilitude. Goog and Willing, for instance, are two teenagers whose absurd eloquence in the topic of violence reminded me of an old Victorian motif: that of the angel-child, early deprived of innocence, but always splendidly articulate.



Another downside is the fact that, despite the various opinions they embody, and despite the fact that they have lead substantially different lives, most of the characters in this book seem to have more or less the same voice. The magnanimous ninety-something great-grandparent? The rebellious brother who runs his own farm and barely keeps in touch with the family? The nineteen-year-old wannabe art student? They all adopt the same sharp inflection which characterizes much of Shriver’s work. While she has certainly succeeded at populating her novel with divergent viewpoints, she has not been quite as brilliant in the task of giving her characters authentic voices. They all have exactly the same sense of humor, the same proclivity to sarcasm, the same easy manipulation of little-known words. Which, in turn, brings about a major problem: the fact that, at times, one can fail to distinguish between characters. People lose individuality and richness when they get reduced to their adamantly expressed opinions.



Those two problems aside, I would thoroughly recommend The Mandibles to every single reader out there who’s even slightly preoccupied about what looms ahead. Even for people who don’t have as profound a knowledge of economics as Shriver seems to boast, the future she conjures sounds eerily possible. She’s playing at that thin line between the likely and the absurd, and quite often the former prevails. Furthermore, in spite of characters’ unlikability and frequent unreality, the storyline she weaves is too good to put down. I found myself reading page after breathless page, wondering what would happen next, how they would cope with having to let go of yet another everyday necessity – how do you live without toilet paper, for instance? Just as she’s done in her previous novels, here Shriver brings together the best of both worlds: her social commentary has the pungent accuracy of a sharpshooter, and her chapters have the easy-to-follow melody of a bestseller. If this book lacks anything, it’s definitely not sophistication. In fact, maybe its weaknesses all stem from the fact that, at certain points, Shriver could have tried to be a bit less sophisticated.