‘Mandibles’ author sees sad days in future for America
George F. Will
Although America’s political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly — Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (1945) and “1984” (1949), Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.
There is, however, a more recent and pertinent presentation of a grim future. Last year, in her 13th novel, “The Mandibles: A Family, 20292047,” Lionel Shriver imagined America slouching into dystopia merely by continuing current practices.
Shriver, who is fascinated by the susceptibility of complex systems to catastrophic collapses, begins her story after the 2029 economic crash and the Great Renunciation, whereby the nation, like a dissolute Atlas, shrugged off its national debt, saying to creditors: It’s nothing personal. The world is not amused, and Americans’ subsequent downward social mobility is not pretty.
Florence Darkly, a millennial, is a “single mother” but such mothers now outnumber married ones. Newspapers have almost disappeared, so “print journalism had given way to a rabble of amateurs hawking unverified stories and always to an ideological purpose.” Her Americans are living, on average, to 92, the economy is “powered by the whims of the retired,” and, “desperate to qualify for entitlements, these days everyone couldn’t wait to be old.”
The government monitors every movement and the IRS, renamed the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, siphons up everything, on the youdidn’t-build-that principle.
Social order collapses when hyperinflation follows the promiscuous printing of money after the Renunciation. This punishes those “who had a conscientious, caretaking relationship to the future.”
In her novel, she writes: “The state starts moving money around. A little fairness here, little more fairness there. ... Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who don’t, and from the young to the old — which is the wrong direction.”
Laughing mordantly as the apocalypse approaches, Shriver has a gimlet eye for the foibles of today’s secure (or so it thinks) upper middle class, from Washington’s Cleveland Park to Brooklyn. About the gentrification of the latter, she observes:
“Oh, you could get a facelift nearby, put your dog in therapy, or spend $500 at Ottawa on a bafflingly trendy dinner of Canadian cuisine (the city’s elite was running out of new ethnicities whose food could become fashionable). But you couldn’t buy a screwdriver, pick up a gallon of paint, take in your dry cleaning, get new tips on your high heels, copy a key, or buy a slice of pizza.”
The (only) good news from Shriver’s squint into the future is that when Americans are put through a wringer, they emerge tougher.
Speaking to Reason, Shriver said: “I think that the bullet we dodged in 2008 is still whizzing around the planet and is going to hit us in the head.” If so, this story has already been written.