I was disappointed the action didn’t go to Jarred’s upstate New York farm instead.įlorence and her son Willing are sympathetic main characters, but Nollie was my favorite player and didn’t show up until the one-third point. But, to the novel’s detriment, Shriver then leaps ahead about 15 years, looking at the aftermath and taking her few surviving characters to the rogue splinter state of Nevada. At one point I thought we were headed for full-blown The Road territory, as hyperinflation and competition for resources drive New Yorkers to crime. When she finally gets around to the crux of the matter – the entire extended Mandible family descending on Florence’s small New York City house – it feels like too little plot, too late. This means that the first third or more of the novel feels like prologue, setting the scene. Instead of making America’s total financial collapse a vague backdrop for her novel, Shriver takes readers through it event by agonizing event. I nearly gave up at 25% (and probably should have) because I was tired of dull economics lessons. One character is an economics professor, another a teenage prodigy who spouts off just as much theory. Worst is the sheer information overload: tons of economic detail crammed into frequent, wearisome conversations. This could have been fun, but there are a few big problems. Here she aims at Atwood-style near-future speculative fiction and takes as her topic the world economy.

health care system in So Much for That and the obesity epidemic in Big Brother. Shriver does a good line in biting social commentary, attacking the U.S. One of our sharpest observers of human nature, Shriver challenges us to think long and hard about the society we live in and what, ultimately, we hold most dear. from Paris after many years abroad, to her precocious teenage nephew Willing, who is the only one to actually understand the crisis, to the brilliant Georgetown economics professor Lowell, who watches his whole vision of the world disintegrate before his eyes.Īs ever, in her new novel, Shriver draws larger than life characters who illuminate this complicated, ever-changing world. The Mandibles can count on their inheritance no longer, and each member must come to terms with this in their own way–from the elegant expat author Nollie, in her middle age, returning to the U.S. The American President declares that the States will default on all its loans–prices skyrocket, currency becomes essentially worthless, and we watch one family struggle to survive through it all. In a coordinated move by the rest of the world’s governments, the dollar loses all its value. The very essence of American life, the dollar, is under attack.

The year is 2029, and nothing is as it should be.

Lionel shriver the mandibles review