The energy of Shriver’s style counteracts the remorselessness of her vision. The New York Times has fallen by the wayside nothing is said about the Guardian.
As the dollar collapses, American exceptionalism morphs into general lawlessness and disrepair, though a smartphone-like gadget called a “fleX” and the internet continue to be of use. He is well-intentioned, but will act outside the law if he has to.Īnd he has to, as does his cousin, Savannah, who had been intending to go to the Rhode Island School of Design but opts for the sex trade instead. He is simultaneously a snarky teenager and the most observant and perceptive commenter on the onslaught of misfortunes. The character who comes the closest to being Shriver’s protagonist is Florence’s son, Willing, 13 when the novel opens in 2029. The hard-to-handle cousin, Jarred, is a farmer upstate. Only his granddaughter Florence hasn’t really made it – she works at a homeless shelter and lives with Esteban, who works in an old folks’ home. “Great Grand Man” has an old-style fortune with its roots in manufacturing his daughter, Enola, is a prominent author and his son-in-law, Lowell, is an economist at Georgetown. To begin with, the Mandibles are a prosperous Manhattanite bunch. Your head may be spinning, because the details of finance are more abstruse than nuclear exchange, asteroid impacts or the second coming, but as she follows her characters through sufferings and accommodations, Shriver manages to make her case – that civilisation is a delicate network and what we have, even if that is only toilet paper and socks, is precious. The formerly wealthy, who had installed themselves in France, must now go home because the almighty dollar is worth nothing, replaced as the international currency by the “bancor”.
The devastation in The Mandibles is monetary – its effect is to destroy the US economy so completely that the impoverished hordes are fleeing to Mexico. T here are plenty of zippy novels about the end of the world, but Lionel Shriver has had a different idea.
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