Name: Monicap's review of The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver
Item: The Mandibles
Rating: 5
Author: Monicap

Lionel Shriver

With dry wit and psychological acuity, this near-future novel explores the aftershocks of an economically devastating U.S. sovereign debt default on four generations of a once-prosperous American family. Down-to-earth and perfectly realistic in scale, this is not an over-the-top Blade Runner tale. It is not science fiction. In 2029, the United States is engaged in a bloodless world war that will wipe out the savings of millions of American families. Overnight, on the international currency exchange, the “almighty dollar” plummets in value, to be replaced by a new global currency, the “bancor.” In retaliation, the president declares that America will default on its loans. “Deadbeat Nation” being unable to borrow, the government prints money to cover its bills. What little remains to savers is rapidly eaten away by runaway inflation. The Mandibles have been counting on a sizable fortune filtering down when their ninety-seven-year-old patriarch dies. Once the inheritance turns to ash, each family member must contend with disappointment, but also—as the U.S. economy spirals into dysfunction—the challenge of sheer survival. Recently affluent, Avery is petulant that she can’t buy olive oil, while her sister, Florence, absorbs strays into her cramped household. An expat author, their aunt, Nollie, returns from abroad at seventy-three to a country that’s unrecognizable. Her brother, Carter, fumes at caring for their demented stepmother, now that an assisted living facility isn’t affordable. Only Florence’s oddball teenage son, Willing, an economics autodidact, will save this formerly august American family from the streets. The Mandibles is about money. Thus it is necessarily about bitterness, rivalry, and selfishness—but also about surreal generosity, sacrifice, and transformative adaptation to changing circumstances.

A Family, 2029-2047

The Mandibles

Sian Wadey

Monicap

What a good book. 

I was surprised to find myself wanting to pick this book up every time I set it down, which is something that has never happened before with literary fiction--it's really opened me up to reading more literary fiction in the future!

I think reading this, as an American, a month before one of the most contentious elections in history just made the situation of it more immediate. The characters and their ideological divides as specific representations for american culture at large really worked for me--you could see where both Florence and Avery were coming from with their arguments, and both points of view made sense. I also liked how neither liberal Florence nor conservative Avery were demonized, which I feel a lesser book might've. 

Willing was fascinating. I think we should all embrace his theory of triangulation, getting opinions on a matter from three different points of view and forming your opinions based on that rather than simply regurgitating what you're told by your own political media. 

In the later portion of the book, which brings up issues of agism and underemployment was very interesting as well, especially as I can see now how the mindset Willing's generation adopted towards work--do just enough to get the job done and not get fired, and not an ounce of effort more--already exists today. Many of my coworkers at a grocery store have the same mindset and have urged me to adopt it, too. I was struck when a couple months ago, I came in exhausted from pushing carts, and one of my coworkers told me "You get paid by the hour."

Overall, a interesting and balanced take on many topical issues, a gripping page-turner, wonderful writing, and characterization and world-building... just great. I highly recommend this book.

Taylor

Long, boring, but surprisingly satisfying.

Tracey O’Rourke

Another thought provoking, but not easy or enjoyable novel by Lionel Shriver. A little too possible a dystopia as it comes out in the midst of the 2016 elections.

Evan Petrack

** spoiler alert **
           A decent-sized novel with an even larger vocabulary, I was really excited to read this book. Truthfully, it was simply disappointing. While the prose itself is (most of the time) well-written,and the premise strong, I found the book took awhile to find its legs. As I sit here tapping out this review, I can’t help but think of the dialogue as “Aaron Sorkin smokes a giant libertarian joint”. At moments sharp, funny, ironic, sardonic, and witty, the novels seems to just reach past better options (Goog and Bing? Cmon, Apple is at least an existent name) that would have better illustrated the author’s point anyway IMHO. Overall it just feels a bit like the author is loudly talking her own political and fiscal opinions at you, and the book would have been MILES better if that had been reined in a bit...or at least done more elegantly. That said, the ending did wrap everything up and tie a nice bow on it, reminding the reader that two things are always certain: death and taxes.

Lea de Sousa

2.5/5 ⭐ (rounded up to 3)

Shriver's dystopian take on the future of America has left me with mixed feelings. It took me about 140 pages to want to continue for reasons other than it cost $12. 

The story follows the lives of the Mandible family during the decline and downfall of America. It starts off in 2029 when we get introduced to the entire family (I'm talking grandparents, great grandparents, siblings, cousins, you name it) and follow along with them as their lives fall apart alongside their country. Tbh, it was pretty difficult to feel pity for a rich American family losing all of their money. 


My favourite part of this book: The aspect of family and how it can bring everyone together and also completely destroy people. 

My least favourite part: Besides the fact that there are way to many characters to actually form a connection? WAY too much finance jargon. Paragraphs and pages full with heavy, dense and unnecessary details of it. I think this is probably the biggest error as it disconnects the reader from the story (unless you're in economics and you're actually able to follow).

Yes there were enjoyable aspects to the story, like watching a crisis bring vastly different individuals together in the name of family or witnessing the strength in some characters. Overall the experience wasn't really a good one though.

Sophie Shrimpton

Yet another book I thought I would love but struggled through. Is it me or is it Shriver? It seems that the celebrated authors I have indulged in recently are much more determined to show off their wit than tell a good story. I'm looking at you Sally Rooney.

I never thought I cared about plot. I thought I was all about ambience, insight, perspective - living underpinned by theory. Turns out that doesn't matter if (a) the insights skim the surface (b) the characters are one-dimensional (c) there is all tell no show (another dialogue about LIBOR and I will cry) and (d) just as the plot reaches it's climax the author fast forwards to a decade in the future and focusses on one character out of a cast of 10+ (what the fuck Shriver). 

There's something exhausting about characters rabbiting whatever the author wants to communicate in endless technical dialogues about the economy. I often dream that people would just talk in theory to spare the agony of small talk. Now I see that that would be its own nightmare. 

The one thing Shriver achieved was embedding a sense of fragility in my consciousness. All forms of subsistence are dependant on a complex system which can fall out of sync relatively easily. It'll be interesting to see if this sense of insecurity is here to stay. I already had a sense of precarity and paranoia - maybe this book will enhance that feeling over time as it sinks deeper into my intuitive self.

Shriver's ending also hints at a belief in the creeping oppression of the state. That governance will be cyclical - the government will grow too large and overbearing, there will be revolt, we will start again with a minimal state and a free-ish market, and it will begin all over again. I'm not sure I'm convinced by this. Governing trends shift and change according to external factors all the time. There isn't a perfect path of progression - for governance or anything else. 

Some quotes:
"Collapse is a sudden, involuntary and chaotic form of simplification" - James Rickards, Currency Wars

"What Carter craved was not so much furniture and electronics, cruises and wine-tasting tours - whatever he might buy - but a feeling. A sense of ease and liberation, of generosity and savor, of possibility and openness, of whimsy and humor and joy. Granted, he expected too much from mere money, but he'd be happy to find that out, too."

""The point is, non of what you told me the president announced on TV has anything to do with us, okay?" "Everything has to do with everything else""

"At Barnard, she'd never have imagined herself mopping up vomit with the best of them, save perhaps in a charitable capacity, in some brave, brief experimental phase before getting on with her career."

"While crude survival from one day to the next might be every human's ultimate goal, for generations the Mandible family had managed to dress up the project as considerably more exalted."

"Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present. They aren't about the future at all."

"Like so many of the absurd objects that wealthy people both manufactured and attracted, the goblets were merely money reconformed."

"I was never shy. I was waiting to have something to say."

"Deprived of his mighty financial cudgel, Douglas Mandible was just a very old man with a host of heartbreaking vanities, no influence, and scads of dead friends."

""I can't believe this is happening!" "You don't have to believe it for it to keep happening," Lowell said. "Reality's funny that way.""

"... the boy's involvement in the many topics about which he held such fierce opinions was essentially rhetorical. He'd yet to make a visceral connection between a high school debate over some balmy balanced budget amendment and an interstate highway system so underfunded that hundreds of Americans per year were dying in pile-ups on I-85 from potholes alone - a connection that registered the very real possibility that one of those casualties could be you. Distinguished by the same precocity at Goog's age, Lowell wondered whether this purely rhetorical relationship to the pressing issues of his profession dogged him to this day. Avery constantly rode him for caring too much about being right. But maybe he didn't care about being right, actually and truly right, which would have mattered. Maybe he only cared about winning."

"To participate, at all, in any economy, down to getting paid and buying pork chops, means having faith that the rules of that economy won't upend. There is no insurance against game change."

"Caught up in money-as-game, they mistook their raffle tickets for the prize."

"... Lowell couldn't think of a soul who did not have powerful feelings about [their] capital, regardless of its amount... to truly pull of proper apathy about the stuff would require so much energy, such contrived ideological zealotry, that the indifference would amount to a kind of caring."

"Her relationship with the downy older bills in her wallet was surprisingly emotional. They were primitively associated with her earliest experiences of agency, reward and sacrifice... The soft green tender was inextricably bound up with her experience of loss and gain, achievement and inadequacy, caution and imprudence, calculation and abandon, benevolence and malice, taking advantage and being taken advantage of."

"Of course, for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary - just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners... thought money was real."

"He had been lulled by what was regular, by what was expected and customary. No doubt all ages have their usual things, about which no one at the time thinks twice... when drowning in the is-ness of the widely accepted present, it must be hard to tell the difference - between traditions like burying your dead and having dinner at 8 p.m. and other, just as mesmerizingly normative conventions that will later leap out to posterity as offences against the whole human race."

"... what started as a reasonable, straightforward arrangement, whereby everyone throws in a little something to cover their modest communal requirements, like roads and a cop on the corner - it's morphed into one of those complex systems you're always harping on about, Noll, the kind that courts 'catastrophic collapse'. 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. All that effort, and you've only managed a new unfairness."

Libby

The new novel from the author of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN and POST BIRTHDAY WORLD. This novel deals with money, power and society's steady march towards extinction, seen through the eyes of one family.

Sian Wadey &
The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver

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Sian Wadey &The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver

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Sian Wadey &
The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver