The novelist Lionel Shriver has a passion for pariahs. Think Eva Khatchadourian, the reluctant mother cast out by her community after her son commits a horrific school massacre in “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” Nor does she seem to mind being a pariah; her 2016 address at the Brisbane Writers Festival, in which she defended cultural appropriation in literature, earned her widespread internet scorn. An outspoken contrarian who has never met a bear she couldn’t poke, her fiction bristles with discomfort, and her protagonists, not surprisingly, sail against stiff currents.
Enter Pearson Converse, the defiant, stubborn, and very much out-of-favor center of Shriver’s new novel “Mania.” The story is set in an alternative recent past, in which Western society, led by the US, has decided there is no such thing as being smart. The Mental Parity movement cracks down hard on anyone who uses the S-word — that would be “stupid” — and insists that those who can’t cogitate as well as others are merely engaging in “alternative processing.” School admissions standards have been relegated to the dustbin of history, which presents challenges to Pearson, who, though she insists she isn’t terribly smart, teaches literature at Voltaire University, named for the southern Pennsylvania town where she grew up. She lands in hot water when she assigns Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” for her international lit course — the I-word is also forbidden — but the real unraveling is yet to come.
Parts of “Mania” play like a higher-brow version of the Mike Judge movie “Idiocracy,” which, unlike Shriver’s novel, takes place in the distant future, not the recent past. We learn that the overly-smart Barack Obama was replaced on the 2012 Democratic ticket by plainspoken Joe Biden, and that “any portrayal of advanced intelligence even in eternally rerun classics had to be expunged for being an expression of cerebral supremacy. The scriptwriters of ‘Family Guy’ had their haughty genius baby Stewie meet a swift crib death.” More gravely, most professionals, from teachers to doctors to engineers, are now grossly unqualified, as expertise is seen as “smartist,” and intelligent, specially trained job candidates have been shunned and dismissed, replaced by people who are, well, stupid.
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At times “Mania” threatens to become a laundry list of this brave new world’s consequences, some of which, admittedly, are quite funny, especially when they entail semantic gymnastics: “‘Deep’ could unfairly distinguish the profound, so the ‘deep end’ of a swimming pool might more cautiously be identified as ‘the part with more water in it.’”
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Fortunately, Shriver has also granted Pearson an internal life, a tangy narrator’s voice, and a backstory that dovetails nicely with her status as lonely truth teller. She was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, which gave her early practice in living as a pariah (at least among her school peers). She left the faith, and her family, as a teen, and was adopted by the family of her effortlessly popular and stylish friend, Emory. In adulthood, Emory has become the epitome of go-along-to-get-along expediency, championing Mental Parity in her commentary job for NPR (and then CNN), at least until the wind blows in a different direction.
Pearson’s persecution hits close to home. She has two genius-level children, conceived through artificial insemination. She also has a daughter with her life partner, a stoic tree surgeon, and this offspring isn’t the sharpest saw. The kid is also vindictive, quickly reporting her mother to Child Protective Services for using the S-word. (There’s nothing terribly sacred about children to Shriver. See, again, “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”)
There’s enough here to sustain a pretty short novel, and at 277 pages, that’s what “Mania” is. 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. Here’s Emory’s father, a quietly dismayed history professor, sizing up a 2016 presidential candidate who is now running as a Democrat, not a Republican: “The tiny vocabulary? The repetition of the same words over and over? The incomplete sentences? He checks every lowbrow box in the book. He’s crude. He’s crass. He’s a boor. He has garish aesthetic taste. He’s fat. Better still, he routinely wears that slack, brutish expression, and he never reads.” In the climate of “Mania,” he’s set to succeed bigly.
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When I mentioned the premise of “Mania” to an English professor friend, he remarked that it doesn’t sound far off from where we are today. After all, it’s been 61 years since Richard Hofstadter wrote “Anti-Intellectualism in American Society,” and the trend toward devaluing knowledge and expertise was building even before then. The specifics of “Mania” are the stuff of bleeding satire, but the novel’s guiding concept cuts close to the bone with no anesthesia. 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.
MANIA
By Lionel Shriver
Harper, 277 pp., $30
Chris Vognar, a freelance culture writer, was the 2009 Nieman Arts and Culture Fellow at Harvard University.