The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Not everyone is stupid!
Lionel Shriver’s new novel satirises our blind faith in equality, but its humorous edges are so blunt as to verge on pointless
MANIA by Lionel Shriver
288pp, Borough Press, T £18.99 (0808 196 6974), RRP£22, ebook £12.99
Lionel Shriver has two hats. She is, on the one hand, a prize-winning author of 16 novels; and, on the other, a “relentlessly contrarian” who likes to court controversy on culture-war issues. (It’s a curiosity that she gained fame by winning the women-only Orange Prize for Fiction for her 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, the sort of positive discrimination we might now expect her to denounce.)
With her new novel, Mania, the gap between novelist and provocateur is narrow. In it Shriver takes aim at offence culture, where people shy away from directness for fear of causing upset. You don’t have to look far to see that this is a real thing. Teachers now mark wrong answers with a dot and not a cross. In my son’s Beano comic, Spotty from the Bash Street Kids is now Scotty, Fatty is now Freddy, and Plug retains his name only because modern readers don’t remember the phrase “plug-ugly”.
In Mania, set over the last decade in an alternative America, things have gone further. The doctrine of Mental Parity has been established, and “we support cognitive neutrality” is the battle cry. In other words, it has become taboo to distinguish between people who are intelligent and those who are what the book calls “the S-word”. A founding text is titled The Calumny of IQ: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ is the Last Great Civil-Rights Fight.
Mania is the memoir of Pearson Converse, a tutor at a university in Pennsylvania. Brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness and estranged from her family, Pearson has three children: two from a sperm donor she chose for his high IQ, and one from her husband’s sperm: Lucy, who is of average intelligence. “Lucy bored me,” admits Pearson, who rails privately against the new regime in the safety of her memoir. But more horrifying to her is that her friend, Emory, once contemptuous of the system, has switched sides and is rising through the ranks of talk media by loudly supporting the Mental Parity doctrine.
So the stage is set, and the book proceeds largely as you might suppose. There are many pages of comic examples of how everything is worse: for example, now that doctors don’t need to be clever, patients choose local rather than general anaesthetic for operations because “you had to keep your wits about you”. There are many pages of dialogue in which the characters get to complain and argue about the issues. And there’s the expected peril, where Pearson is threatened with the sack for assigning Dostoevsky’s The Idiot for her students.
This is fun, as far as it goes. What you don’t get is a sense of literary style, with the prose so plain and functional that the occasional nice line – when Pearson tries to save her job, her boss “wore the look of a television viewer waiting for the ads to finish” – sticks out. Shriver has fun, at least, by chucking in things we don’t expect novelists to say any more, such as characters having “shapely legs” or “formidable breasts”, or by using “queer” in its original sense.
Does any of this pass the smell test, as a scenario sufficiently within reach to merit a novel? Some of it does: railing against elites – ie people who know more than you do – is a popular sport today. So is indulging the stupid, as a quick glance at our TV guides and bookshop shelves will tell you. But to keep us interested, a book needs to surprise us. Shriver makes a few feints in this direction, as when Pearson acknowledges the value behind the doctrine that “we shouldn’t judge others primarily by their intelligence, an accident of birth”. But for the most part, Mania feels mechanical and, worse, predictable. If you want to read a satire about the inanity of believing everyone is equal, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 story Harrison Bergeron gets it done in seven pages.
Still, Shriver is an experienced novelist and delivers a few surprises in the last quarter of the book, when everything changes and the story becomes more about Pearson and Emory as characters, rather than vehicles for viewpoints. Throughout Mania, what we see is what we’ve learned from the culture wars: that everyone involved is angry most of the time. The truest line in the book, then, might be Pearson’s observation that “deeply held convictions are a ball and chain”. If you want to be happy, stop giving a damn.
In a world of official ‘mental parity’, doctors don’t need to be clever to qualify