To accessorize for the occasion, Shriver, a White woman, donned a sombrero. Like the Yippies in 1967 who deployed outrageous spectacle as a way of protesting the Vietnam War (gathering outside the Pentagon, they attempted to levitate it into space), Shriver knew that her ludicrous hat was an image that would linger.
The sombrero incident is key to understanding not only Shriver’s cultural politics but also her method as a literary provocateur. The social satires that followed her 2003 breakout novel, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” — novels such as “So Much for That” (2010) and “The Mandibles” (2016) — stretched absurd situations past conventional limits in service of lampooning targets like the U.S. health-care system and the illusion of economic stability.
A contrarian, Shriver has also steadily pushed back against “woke” culture in interviews and essays. Though she voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and supports reproductive rights, in 2022 she endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in his failed presidential bid. Of late, her most controversial statements have addressed transgender people and the influx of immigrants, both legal and undocumented, into the United States and Britain. Shriver — who lived in the U.K. on and off for three decades before recently setting up shop in Portugal — has advocated the preservation of what she’s called a “coherent culture” in Britain. As some commentators have pointed out, it’s hard not to read “coherent culture” as a code for “White culture.”
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.
The story takes place from 2011 to 2027 in an alternative America where, for most of that time, something called the Mental Parity movement holds sway. In the novel, the so-called last acceptable bias — discrimination against those considered, um, not so smart — is being stamped out. Words such as “intelligent” and “sharp” are forbidden, thus making problematic the question of how to refer to books like “My Brilliant Friend” and everyday devices such as smartphones.
When the novel opens, our main character, an adjunct professor of English named Pearson Converse, is sitting around the dinner table with her partner, Wade, her best friend, Emory, and her three young children, all of whom attend the Gertrude Stein Primary school in Voltaire, Pa. Darwin, the eldest at 11, has just gotten in trouble for calling another kid’s T-shirt “stupid.” Darwin complains that the Mental Parity movement is forcibly leveling the classroom so that no answers are considered wrong, only different. Emory, who hosts a local NPR arts program, summarizes some of the ways the Obama administration has just expanded the Clinton-era “Don’t ask, don’t tell” guidelines to cover any information related to a person’s intellectual profile:
“Don’t ask where anyone went to school. Don’t tell anyone where you went to school, even if you went to Yale — well, especially if you went to Yale! … Don’t ever mention, or fish for, IQ, obviously, but also SAT and ACT scores or grade point averages. You’re even meant to keep your trap shut about how well you did on newspaper quizzes on the major stories of the week. And forget asking or telling about a performance on Jeopardy!”
Barack Obama, in this alternative America, is doomed to be a one-term president because, by 2012, “the whole notion that one might want to look up to anyone in a position of authority had become preposterous.” Instead, the “impressively unimpressive” Joe Biden steps in, after which, in 2015, the Democratic Party seizes on Donald Trump as its “shoo-in” candidate for, among myriad other reasons, the fact that “he never reads.”
Pearson broke away as a teenager from her Jehovah’s Witness family and has little patience for dogma. Finding herself increasingly hemmed in during her international literature survey course, where students talk and stare at their phones throughout her lectures, Pearson (much as Shriver did) decides to introduce an incendiary object into the lecture room: She switches out Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” for a later novel of his — “The Idiot” (wink, wink). In the anti-brain-shaming era of Shriver’s creation — where “the fool” has been edited out of Shakespeare’s plays and fictional eggheads such as Sherlock Holmes and Victor Frankenstein have been banished from the curriculum — Pearson is put on probation and must abase herself before her class. Not to do so would endanger the already skimpy income that keeps her family afloat.
Like any good satire, “Mania” tethers itself to — and exaggerates — real-world trends, such as “completion grading” (giving students full credit for simply turning in assignments), the death of the expert and theories of different learning styles in the classroom. It also must be acknowledged that none of the characters here are intellectually challenged, thus allowing Shriver to avoid darker and even more sensitive implications of her mockery. The chief target of the novel is the bedrock tension in America between the unfulfilled promise of egalitarian democracy and the reverence for the profitable “practical” knowledge of, say, a Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs, along with the kind of anti-intellectualism that historian Richard Hofstadter identified in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize winner “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” In Shriver’s hectically escalating narrative, the Mental Parity movement is taken to its absurdist outer limits when Wade, an arborist, is injured on the job. Hospital surgeries have become more fraught since anyone can attend medical school, where, presumably, they can graduate without taking any exams.
“Mania” is 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. Shriver’s vision of America is of a country degenerating into the stupid and standardless, and her fears about the many are often alchemized into laughs. But the many are many things, and the few, our great writers, might imagine their — our — humane possibilities, too.
Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.
