Shriver’s ‘Mandibles’ is financial dystopia with bite
IT WAS the death of a grandfather at 96 that pushed writer Lionel Shriver to look more closely at her own ageing probabilities.
What she found terrifying were the good odds for a long life, and that she thought strange because most of us don’t want to die. Why would that scare her?
But it was her view of how the world is going to evolve based on current frightening events that made her think this way. Shriver, in her more recent books, has been someone who taps into an issue on the minds of many and then enters it in a most unusual or perhaps unexpected fashion. Take, for example, We Need to talk about
Kevin, which was her most popular book, seemingly dealing with school shootings. She looked at it through the eyes of the mother who was wondering about her parenting skills and whether she had turned her son into this monster.
In Big Brother, she looks at morbid obesity by focusing on the relationship between a brother and sister. Healthcare is also something she has written about, but this time, with The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047 (The Burroughs Press, R229), she has tapped into the zeitgeist even more sharply with a topic that affects everyone.
Her story is set from 2029 to 2047, yet reachable for many readers to make it real. It starts in 2029 for obvious reasons, if you go back a century to the the Wall Street crash. She has more even devastating predictions about the ageing baby boomers and their parents because of the dire effects on the generations to follow. She points out as it goes forward, her children will be paying for her hip and knee replacements and when they get to that place, they will have to find the money on their own if they need these treatments. “My parents and I, because of living longer than previous generations, have taken more than we have put back,” she says as she looks ahead at what that might mean in the future.
That’s why, with The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047, her dystopian future doesn’t focus on climate change, because she feels there’s been many novels with that theme. Hers deals with America’s financial collapse because of a soaring national debt which can never be repaid. The rest of the world responds with an invented international currency designed to replace the dollar.
And this sets a whirlwind of catastrophes in motion which she tells through the eyes of four generations of one family, the Mandibles.
“I’m interested in intergenerational problems,” she says, again referring to the fact that the people ageing are leaving a burden behind for future generations which is unimaginable.
That’s why the book so cunningly deals with finances and families, fraught topics if ever there were any. In this troubling tale, the patriarch is 97 and the family in their many manifestations is financially on hold as they wait for their turn of the family fortune. Then there’s a financial meltdown and millions of Americans’ savings are wiped out.
Basically what Shriver manages is to illustrate a world in collapse on a personal level. She sets her story in a city because she believes cities in particular are interlinked on every level and when one thing collapses, nothing works. “It needs everything to work to function,” she says.
All it takes here is for grocery stores to run out of products or when products appear, the price is so prohibitive few can afford to purchase even the basics. And that’s the thing with Shriver, even if you feel like slitting your wrists because the world she is sketching is so vivid, her writing is so imaginative she keeps you massively entertained and delighting in her black sense of humour.
On a lighter note, she concedes her choice of capturing herself as one of the characters was partly to humiliate herself.
The character’s name, Nollie, is an anagram of her own name giving readers a hint but she’s also a writer and, says Shriver, the titles of her books are the working titles of her own novels which she has kept silent about until now. We Need to talk about Kevin was initially titled from Cradle to Grave. –