MANIA

America is overtaken by an idiocracy in Shriver’s latest satire/anti-PC screed.

In this tale of alternative recent history, circa 2010 the word stupid has become verboten, thanks to the rise of a “Mental Parity” movement that insists nobody is smarter than anyone else. Narrating this lamentable turn of events is Pearson Converse, a college English teacher, mother of three, and fierce critic of the campaign against “smartism” and the “brain-vain” that strictly prohibits all variations of the S-word. (She’s nearly fired when she cheekily assigns her class Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.) In the years that follow, Shriver chronicles the intensifying catastrophe of this anti-intellectual effort: The crossword is canceled, the Mars rover crashes, Osama bin Laden gets away, gay marriage remains illegal, China tramples the U.S. on the world stage. On the home front, Pearson’s two very gifted children grow slack in the absence of academic rigor, while her third, less-bright child turns informant on her mom. Pearson’s partner, a tree surgeon, suffers for lack of competent assistance; her journalist best friend, once as exasperated with “cognitive justice” as Pearson, turns into its vocal supporter, a move Shriver depicts as vile Vichy collaborationism. Practically every Shriver book in the past decade has been a critique of liberal hobbyhorses; imagining a made-in-the-U.S.A. Cultural Revolution, for her, is business as usual. But without a clear sense of what kind of tyranny of the (lib) commons Shriver fears—DEI? the language police? socialism? virtue signaling? grade inflation?—the conceit is a better fit for a tart short story than an extended narrative. And given that today’s most robust anti-intellectual initiatives come from right-wing quarters—book bans, shutdowns of college liberal arts departments, efforts to drain public school funds—Shriver’s process for picking a target seems, let’s say, cognitively subpar.

A peculiar novel driven more by bogeymen than brains.