In her latest novel, Lionel Shriver brings the country to the brink of economic apocalypse Photograph by David Azia / AP

If you think times are tough now, just wait until 2029. The good news is that the United States has hung on for another thirteen years. The bad news is everything else. “Dryouts” are commonplace, though it’s not clear whether scarcity of water or the dilapidation of the infrastructure meant to distribute it is to blame. Americans are still reeling from the Stone Age of 2024, when the electric grid crashed, wreaking technological havoc: pileups on unlit roads, airplanes dropping from the skies, pacemakers pumping double-time, looting and riots from sea to shining sea. But those disasters are minor compared with the latest: an economic collapse set in motion by the introduction of the bancor, a new global reserve currency meant to replace the dollar on the international market and backed by a coalition of countries led by Russia’s ruler-for-life, Vladimir Putin. Furious, President Alvarado, America’s first Mexican-born head of state, announces that the U.S. will default on its loans. The Fed goes into overdrive, printing new money to cover its debts. In short order, a greenback is as worthless as a Weimar cigarette rolled with a fifty-billion-mark note. Hard-earned savings go up in smoke. A meager cabbage costs thirty dollars one week, forty the next, and that’s when there’s still cabbage to buy. So long, superpower nation. Hello, hyperinflation.

This is the world according to “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,” Lionel Shriver’s new novel, her twelfth. Much of Shriver’s work operates in a speculative vein; she likes to let her fiction sprout from the germ of “what if”-type thought experiments, unconfined by genre. “What if my son became a school shooter?” is the prompt that gave rise to “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” her astounding seventh novel, which made her name when it was published, in 2003. Shriver was forty-eight at the time, and had spent years writing in obscurity. (A movie adaptation, starring Tilda Swinton, followed, in 2011.) “What if I kissed a man who wasn’t my husband?” led to “The Post-Birthday World” (2007), which traces the alternate lives that a children’s-book illustrator might lead depending on how she answers. “What if I had to care for my obese sibling?” yielded “Big Brother” (2012), a fictional playing-out of an autobiographical scenario which, painfully, never came to pass in actual life; Shriver’s older brother died from complications related to obesity, in 2009.

“What if the United States collapsed?” is a question that has been asked by any number of novelists, to say nothing of the rest of us Americans squinting toward November with mounting apprehension. It’s been on Shriver’s mind for some time. “And that was your perspective on your country as well: that it was not forever,” Eva, the narrator of “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” writes to her husband, Franklin. “That of course it was an empire, though that was nothing to be ashamed of. History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had ever dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did.” Eva’s tone is elegiac, a toast written for some future wake to be held in honor of the glorious, impending past: “But you said that if the U.S. were to fall or founder during your lifetime, collapse economically, be overrun by an aggressor, or corrupt from within into something vicious, you would weep.”

The Mandible family doesn’t have the luxury of weeping. The future imagined by Franklin and Eva is their present; they have to roll up their sleeves and deal with it. Carter Mandible is a newspaperman by trade, put out to pasture when the Times went bust. His daughter Florence works at a Fort Greene homeless shelter; her sister, Avery, is a D.C. practitioner of PhysHead, a hybrid of tai chi and talk therapy. Thanks to the wealth amassed by an industrialist forefather, they are each counting on a sizeable inheritance—or were, until the investment portfolio managed by Douglas, the clan’s ninety-seven-year-old patriarch, falls victim to the bancor’s sabotage. For a moment, Douglas holds out hope that all might not be lost. “I’ve steered clear of index funds,” he says, “but only because I’ve got a piece of every company listed on the Dow…. That aspect of the balance sheet could be grim. But I hold gold ETFs, mining stock, even the title to bullion in a safe-deposit box in downtown Manhattan. I always keep 10 percent in cash—with which one will still be able to buy a loaf of bread in the country, and you don’t have travel plans, do you?”

No zombies, explosions, or sentient robots: this dystopia is served up wonk-style, and whether your heart sinks or sings at the sight of the passage above may depend on whether you, like me, are a person who must Google “gold ETFs” before you can fully decipher it. (Once you do, you’ll understand why it’s so bad for Douglas and the rest of his family when President Alvarado, like President Roosevelt before him, calls in all private gold reserves, a few pages later.) A great deal of cheerful economese is spoken by everyone in “The Mandibles,” experts as well as laymen, or laychildren, as the case often is. I’d be hard pressed to think of another novel in which a thirteen-year-old boy says something like, “He figures if he can deprive even American allies access to the US market, he can strangle the baby currency in its crib.” And he’s not even the smartest thirteen-year-old boy in the book.

In part, this is because Shriver has an agenda to push. As she wrote in February, in a Times Op-Ed called, rather defensively, “I Am Not a Kook,” she is a libertarian, in the socially progressive, economically conservative sense of the term. There’s a reason that her villains are not bankers who gamble with people’s mortgages and life savings but rather an inept, bloated government screwing its overtaxed citizens by messing with the money supply and stomping all over their civil liberties. But she’s also a novelist, one with a sharp social eye and a blistering comic streak, and her focus on nailing down the economic nitty-gritty of her plot is only one piece of the great, disconcerting fun she has in sending the world as we know it so vividly to hell. Much of the novel is set in Florence’s East Flatbush house, which rapidly comes to serve as a cramped refugee camp for her struggling relatives. When the book begins, the neighborhood is as blandly gentrified as today’s Williamsburg waterfront, its Caribbean residents long ago pushed out by the “watercress-and-wasabi set.” Soon, it’s the well-off who find themselves displaced. At the shelter where Florence works, people arrive wearing L.L. Bean, their babies swaddled in cashmere blankets. Laid-off hedge-fund managers hold people up outside the supermarket with fancy German kitchen knives, and that’s to say nothing of the situation in Manhattan. The homeless camp out on the meridians dividing traffic on Broadway, or squat in prewar apartments. Zabar’s has been vandalized: “Someone slashed graffiti over the plywood, eat your salmon.”

All of this is liable to produce an uncanny sort of double vision, particularly if you happen, as I did, to encounter “The Mandibles” in situ. To lounge on Prospect Park’s Long Meadow, surrounded by joggers and toddlers at play as a couple nearby discusses the virtues of cooking with duck fat while simultaneously reading a scene in which the same stretch of lawn is transformed into a sprawling tent city for the homeless upper-middle class, is to feel like a Cassandra, bewildered by the world’s indifference to its imminent demise. But, of course, our world already operates in double vision. That morning, a doctor on the radio had been discussing the state of urgent care for victims of mass shootings in the United States following Orlando. “If_ you live depends on where _you live,” he said. It’s a sentence Shriver could have written.