Book review: Mania opens with the novel’s narrator being summoned by the school of her 11-year-old son, Darwin, to collect him following a bullying incident. His crime? Ridiculing one of his classmates, employing “language we consider unacceptable in a supportive environment”.
For his mother, Pearson Converse (a thinly disguised Shriver), whose leafy Pennsylvania neighbourhood features signs proclaiming “We support cognitive neutrality” and bumper stickers offering “Honk if you hate brainiacs”, this only fuels her outrage regarding her society’s efforts to stamp out meritocracy.
The reader is catapulted into the absurd parallel world of the Mental Parity Movement, in which every citizen is treated as cognitively equal and no one is made to feel inferior. The feelings of those less educated or less intelligent are prioritised to the detriment of those who value education, science and achievement based on merit.
In this dystopia conceived by Shriver, a well-known iconoclast who is unafraid of poking a stick at shibboleths, it is heretical, even illegal, to call anyone stupid. Iconic films and TV shows featuring smart, witty characters are banned. IQ tests are illegal. As a result, the entire United States has been dumbed down. Anyone can become a doctor or a pilot, with disastrous consequences. Blackouts become more common. The country’s manufacturing and productivity decline. “The public at large bought into this improbable ideology virtually overnight and in no time forgot that they had ever believed anything else.”
The term for this collective mania is “alternative processing”. The country becomes a laughing stock to the rest of the world. Anyone with brains and talent flees.
Pearson is a literature teacher at Voltaire University. Without being permitted to test and grade students, her job becomes untenable. Her tree surgeon husband, Wade, accuses her of “constantly taunting people”. Pushing back against the new ideology, Pearson defiantly sets Dostoevsky’s The Idiot as a required text for her students and is then obliged to eat humble pie to retain her job.
She feels the sting of betrayal when her long-time best friend, Emory, a high-profile TV journalist, falls on the opposing side in this new culture war. After Pearson loses it in a wild rant to her students, her words go viral. Emory lambasts her on CNN and, in a tit for tat, Pearson makes public Emory’s hypocrisy. Contrarian Pearson pays “a terrible price for being out of sync”. She loses everything and everyone, becoming destitute.
Mania is the book Pearson writes to tell her story, channelling Shriver’s razor-sharp wit and take-no-prisoners approach.
For hardcore fans of the author, Mania will by turns provoke and captivate. It’s fair to say that the early chapters sometimes swerve close to didactic exposition. And there’s something of an abrupt segue that takes the reader from 1972 to 2010, excavating Pearson’s past and the events leading up to 2011 which have coloured her responses.
Her rejection of her strict Jehovah’s Witness family and their religion explains why her outrage at the new Mental Parity ideology runs so deep. It’s personal. This isn’t the first time those with power over her, whom she regards as idiots, have attempted to crush her intellectual life and constrain her freedom.
The world inhabited by Pearson often feels not entirely dissimilar to the present reality in which individuals can be “cancelled” for daring to publicly question a prevailing narrative. Pearson is under no illusions about the scale of the catastrophe. “The wholesale embrace of a flagrant lie by an entire population has inevitably opened the gateway for other lies. We have severed our connection to truth, thereby losing faith in the very existence of truth.”
The novel ends in 2027. Will the pendulum eventually swing back and common sense prevail?
Mania by Lionel Shriver (Hemlock, $36.99) is out now.
