Mania

by Lionel Shriver

What if calling someone stupid was illegal? In a reality not too distant from our own, where the so-called Mental Parity Movement has taken hold, the worst thing you can call someone is 'stupid'.

Everyone is equally clever, and discrimination based on intelligence is 'the last great civil rights fight'.

Exams and grades are all discarded, and smart phones are rebranded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word and encouraged to report parents for using it. You don't need a qualification to be a doctor.

Best friends since adolescence, Pearson and Emory find themselves on opposing sides of this new culture war. Radio personality Emory – who has built her career riding the tide of popular thought – makes increasingly hard-line statements while, for her part, Pearson believes the whole thing is ludicrous.

As their friendship fractures, Pearson's determination to cling onto the 'old, bigoted way of thinking' begins to endanger her job, her safety and even her family.

Lionel Shriver turns her piercing gaze on the policing of opinion and intellect, and imagines a world in which intellectual meritocracy is heresy. Hilarious, deadpan, scathing and at times frighteningly plausible, MANIA will delight the many fans of her fiction and journalism alike.

Genres: Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Book Club, Audiobook, Politics, Literary Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 9, 2024

About the author

Lionel Shriver's novels include the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the 2005 Orange Prize and has now sold over a million copies worldwide. Earlier books include Double Fault, A Perfectly Good Family, and Checker and the Derailleurs. Her novels have been translated into twenty-five languages. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.

Author photo copyright Jerry Bauer, courtesy of Harper Collins.

Reviews

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh boy. I love Lionel Shriver. Or rather, I love her novels. I've not met one yet that hasn't made me laugh, gasp, growl or cry to some extent.

In Mania (as far as I read it) we have the perfect allegory for our times. A new scourge called Mental Parity is the dish du jour. Everyone is equally intelligent. Smart people are no longer afforded better jobs or higher pay or any kind of benefit due to their IQ. In fact they are castigated for it. What does that leave you with - the whole of the US being run by mediocrities. And worse.

Lionel Shriver gives us a look at our world where just one law has meant dystopia. Since "everyone is equally intelligent" there are no need for exams or degrees -- or formal education. So what you say?

Well would you be happy being operated on by a surgeon who hadn't passed any kind of exam? Would you take drugs that were no longer tested? Would you accept a vaccine from a lab where no one is expected to be smarter than the average bear (sorry Yogi).

What is most horrifying about the world that Lionel Shriver has created is that our politicians are already acting it out. In the US and UK the rise of populism has given us leaders like Trump and Johnson (who may well have a degree but wallows in the bumbler persona he loves to portray).

Our protagonist Pearson Converse rails against this new anti-elitism with dire consequences whereas her best friend, Emory Ruth, embraces the new Zeitgeist. Mania is Pearson's faithful record of the fallout for everyone she knows and loves.

It's a brilliant novel. Even the acknowledgments are funny - all in a somewhat terrifying way. Mania is a chance to look at the world should the lunatics ever truly take over the asylum.

Loved it. Very highly recommended.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Harper Collins for the advance review copy. I am most grateful.

[Wherefore Art Thou · Rating 1 out of 5]

Digging in her heels, Shriver looks to fight the real issue with society today — tone policing and woke language, you know, the worst and the most tired aspects of cancel culture discourse. To do this, she deprioritizes character, plot and story, instead focusing on a quick and dirty crafting of a world where sensitivity in language has been taken to the extreme, a world where colleges aren’t allowed to reject applicants because it may hurt feelings, nobody is allowed to say “stupid” and even chainsaw operators need not be experienced or capable of running dangerous equipment for the sake of equality.

I feel like if you’re going to try and do Orwell in 2024, you have to try and write at least as well as Orwell (I’m not much of a fan of Orwell) who knows how to captivate an audience and especially doesn’t pepper his sentences with big words when smaller words would actually work better. I’m all for big words, (Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner) but you need to justify their use. She sets up conversations only as a means of furthering her narrative, it seems. It is poorly structured, dry, and more of a screed than a novel.

Curious who the audience for this book would be — she acknowledges that racism and sexism are real problems early, so it can’t be conservatives — liberals and leftists are typically more concerned with actual issues, so… is it just the rare, semi-intellectual fiction reader divorced from politics and isolated from real problems yet says “everyone is so offended these days” with some form of frequency?

“Ruthlessly funny” says the summary - yet I don’t think there was even an attempt at a joke yet, in the ~20% I was barely able to make it through. I’m sure the remaining 80% was filled with an abundance of laughs but I will not be there to figure that out.

[The Cats’ Mother · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mania is a bleak but brilliant satirical speculative/dystopian fiction novel set in a recently altered version of the USA, where political correctness has overcome the last great source of societal discrimination - intellectual ability. Lionel Shriver is one of the most polarising writers out there - I’ve only read We need To Talk About Kevin, and her 2022 collection of essays, titled Abominations, but that’s enough to recognise how much of herself she has poured into her provocative protagonist.

Pearson Converse is an English lecturer at a small university at a time when the Mental Parity movement has overtaken America, with the seductive notion that all human brains are equal so no one can be smarter than anyone else. Tests are outlawed, the supposedly intelligent are shunned, whole swathes of fiction and media are disappeared due to problematically gifted main characters, and you can lose your job for using the wrong word. Pearson and her best friend Emory, a TV journalist, are happy to mock the system in private, until one goes too far and faces losing everything.

This book certainly won’t be for everyone - the humour is vicious and the subtle mockery of many aspects of modern culture relentless. The premise seems far-fetched, until you think about cancel culture and the hysteria unleashed on social media - and therefore the increasingly feeble news media, every time a celebrity “fat-shames” or “slut-shames” anyone. The “heroine” is not likeable - an intellectual snob, despite repeatedly protesting her own relatively low intelligence, she uses a lot of big words (yay for the search function on my Kindle that allows me to look up their meanings) and selected the father of her artificially inseminated children based solely on his IQ score and Japanese ethnicity.
I still thought this was very clever, as the predictably disastrous consequences of the movement play out on a National level, but I didn’t know how it would all end.

Thanks to NetGalley and the Harper Collins for the ARC. I am posting this honest review voluntarily.
Mania is published on April 11th.

[Deborah · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointment from Lionel Shriver, who usually writes biting, funny satire about social issues but this time around delivers a highly implausible, unfunny mess that seems to plod on interminably. Here, she tackles cancel culture in an alternative US, in which around about 2007 a specious bestseller triggers a social tsunami in which “all human brains are the same,” ie, no one is more intelligent than anyone else, hence IQ tests are done away with, as are entrance exams/requirements, no student can be failed, no employee can be considered inadequate to the task, etc, etc. Before you know it, surgeons have no idea what they’re doing, new buildings and bridges crumble, planes fall out of the sky, cars burst into flames, and so on. And in a country that glorifies stupidity, Trump becomes president (though on the Democratic ticket). Ha ha. Hasn’t this lampooning of a world that insists everyone is equal and penalizes the gifted to make sure it stays that way been done before? Kurt Vonnegut wrote the classic short story Harrison Bergeron that touches on the same themes, doing more, much more effectively, in far fewer pages.

[Dane Tyson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lionel Shriver is one of my favorite authors - intelligent, incisive, and often very funny. But “Mania” is just not good - Shriver’s incisive scalpel has been replaced by a a dull knife. This might have been an amusing short story, but stretched to novel length, it’s just tedious and almost totally lacking in subtlety. It might also have been better written in the 3rd person - the “cranky intellectual” voice of the narrator is basically just Shriver’s own voice, and her vocabulary, syntax, etc., feels very much at odds with the claims about the narrator’s “average” intellect.

My 2-star rating is something of a compromise. If this were a first novel by a new writer, I might have given it 3 stars. As a Shriver novel, it’s definitely 1 star - the worst of her books that I’ve read.

[Laura Riedemann · Rating 5 out of 5]

You’ll either love the book or hate it, but at the very least I found it very entertaining. As a liberal, I was initially unclear as to whether the author was intending to make a mockery of my sensibilities, but it really made me reassess my own biases, defenses, and pseudo-elitism. In the end, I think the author was mocking the whole of society, left and right political extremism, and since it’s written with contemporary references to today’s politicians and the Covid pandemic, and did a good job at satirizing the absurdity of the past several years, I had a hard time putting it down. Worth a read, regardless of your political inclinations.

[Meghan Vorisek · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is fuckin stupid.
Okay, now that I've gotten the initial obvious joke off my chest...this is the kind of book written by a well-off, educated white woman whose life problems have never been about her ability or her economic situation or whether other people perceive her as human, and in the midst of this relative comfort she's somehow gotten it into her head that being persecuted is glamorous and desirable and is therefore desperate to be oppressed. Unfortunately, the only attributes she has are desirable ones, so she invents a whole imaginary world where nobody likes that stuff and it doesn't get you respect or make life easier. She also doesn't know this is what she's doing; *she* thinks she's sticking it to The Man (only she'd have to come up with some pithy term like 'the overly woke nonbinary individual' because she'd be convinced that saying 'sticking it to the man' is no longer allowed if you're a leftist) If you asked her, she'd say that of course she doesn't want to be oppressed. Oppression is bad. Just see what it would be like if it happened to smart people, like me! But she's telling on herself. Too bad you can't get oppressed for being boorish and self-absorbed.

[CPE · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I used to take the Spectator magazine, one of the highlights was Lionel Shriver’s fortnightly column. She is acerbic, forthright and has no patience with people who engage their mouth before their brain. The main character of her new novel, Mania, is a woman who is acerbic, forthright and has no patience with people who engage their mouth before their brain. Hmmm….

The novel is excellent. Given the universal (and rightful) realisation that race, gender, nationality and many other characteristics are completely irrelevant to whether someone can perform a job well or not; and given society’s reluctance to challenge individuals’ perceptions of themselves, c.f. recent newspaper stories about teachers supporting children who insist they are a cat or a horse, it is conceivable that a movement could arise, insisting that intelligence should no longer be highly regarded. The Mental Parity (MP) Movement starts, like so many slippery slopes do, with reasonable requests: don’t call it a smartphone, just call it a phone. TV programmes such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire, University Challenge and Jeopardy promote the idea that smartest is best – they should be cancelled. And lo, they are cancelled or (we can’t say dumbed-down any more) “refreshed”. One question on Millionaire is “What is your name?”. The original series of Star Trek is withdrawn because of Spock’s obvious higher intelligence.

Pearson Converse was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness but ran away from home when a teenager. The parents of her best friend, Emory, took her in and the two girls / women have remained best friends ever since. Converse is a teacher at a local university and Emory is a TV presenter. They are both concerned about MP but Emory brings a boyfriend round for dinner at Pearson’s one night and Pearson’s world is rocked. It appears that Emory has embraced MP’s tenets and no longer mocks the movement but Pearson cannot do the same.

The novel follows this alternative world’s timeline from 2011 to 2023 with a coda set in 2027. Neither we nor Pearson can decide whether Emory really does believe in MP or whether she’s jumped on a bandwagon; and as MP’s demands grow, so does Emory’s support. The growth of MP is both believable and very, very chilling. If society puts the idea that brightest is best into history’s waste disposal unit, it follows that we should not laud intelligence and thus exams are a Bad Thing. Exams and all other tests should either be scrapped or no-one should ever fail them. If you can’t fail a test, why do any schoolwork – or take driving lessons? Intelligence and ability are no longer requirements for getting a job. If you don’t learn anything but you’re given a job as a musician in an orchestra, what consequences will that have for the quality of live music? What about motorways where no-one has passed a driving test? What about hospitals…?

This book is a wake-up call for everyone who passively allows minorities to make unreasonable demands disproportionate to their constituent population. It is right that society should not stigmatise any minority – and there could probably be many improvements to the way we talk about and cater for minorities – but we should never placate those minorities by ignoring the needs of 99% of the population.

#Mania #NetGalley #LionelShriver

[P K · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lionel Shriver is fully done writing and is just lecturing now. Absolutely would not recommend.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagine a time when this country prizes ignorance over expertise, “cerebral acceptance” over talent, and every word you utter is trolled to make sure it meets rigid PC standards.

What, you say? That time is here? Well, it’s hard to blame you if you think that way, with phrases like “birthing people” replacing “pregnant women”, and when one of the stupidest men on earth is running another hate-fueled campaign for president.

Lionel Shriver satirizes this moment when culture-warrior, egalitarian-obsessed, "woke" progressives and anti-credential, anti-intellectual, anti-science MAGAs agree on one thing: it’s time to address the last civil rights frontier, which is mental parity. Long live incompetency! Let dumb people have their moment in the sun! In this new society, all words that can be construed as a nod for intelligence (including smartphone, quick, deep, and more) are grounds for firing and the D-word (dumb) is as offensive as the N-word. Mensa is considered the greatest threat to American civic order. SATs and college entrance exams? Gone! We’re now all equal, hurray, hurrah!

Pearson, a one-time Jehovah’s Witness, and her husband, a tree surgeon, are caught in the midst of this. They have three children. The oldest two were test tubes babies from the sperm of a highly intelligent Japanese donor, and are very bright. The youngest, Lucy, is just a regular kid. But, just like in the book 1984, Big Brother is watching and young Lucy is paying close attention to make sure her parents don’t even hint that she is “less than.” To make matters worse, Pearson’s best friend Emory Ruth has become unreliable as she boosts her TV career by pretending (?) to endorse Mental Parity.

Needless to say, things don’t work out so well, as everything from the space program to the health care system falls apart at the seams. Books like Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” and Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot’ are outlawed. Osama bin Laden is not caught; in fact, he lives to bomb the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. And, of course, – let’s say the D word -- dumb Trump is poised to be president.

The book might be compared in genre to John Boyne’s The Echo Chamber, which I loved. Lionel Shriver’s book is far more heavy-fisted. It relies too heavily on hyperbole and not enough on the nuanced humor (think: Mark Twain or yes, John Boyne) to engage the reader fully and it hammers too hard at its one-note theme. It’s fun, yes, and there's warnings and wisdom a plenty, but Lionel Shriver has written better. 3.5 stars.

[Mary Lins · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Mania” by Lionel Shriver, is at times hilarious, but mostly horrifying.
Imagine an alternate history where in 2010 the Mental Parity movement asserted that innate intelligence is a myth and it was “smartest” the assert that people’s brains were different. This new world saw everyone equally intelligent, and it was basically “hate speech” to use words like “stupid”, “idiot”, or “dumb”.

In this world, Cognitive Equality is “The Last Civil Right”.

Shriver, in her inimitable and erudite (ironically) writing style, tells the story a Pearson, a mother of three, who thinks the whole Mental Parity thing is…well…stupid.

Shriver’s speculative fiction is spot-on and chilling. As we follow Pearson and her family over the years between 2010 and 2027, we see the havoc wrecked by policies that favor those of lower intelligence over those with higher intelligence, and that “cancels” and vilifies anyone who points out the absurdity of merit in any form.

Thought-provoking and alarming; I couldn’t put it down.

[Marianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mania is the sixteenth novel by prize-winning, best-selling American author, Lionel Shriver. Anyone who thinks that political correctness is sometimes carried a bit too far, who considers that sensitivity measures occasionally tend towards overkill, who sees all children in a race or competition awarded a prize and wonder how they will cope in the real world, those readers will likely enjoy Lionel Shriver’s latest offering.

She gives us USA in ALT-2011, where “smart” is a dirty word, and calling someone “dumb” or something “stupid” will bring you to the attention of the Mental Parity Champion. Because now, even the intelligentsia have to agree that “Human brains are all the same; Wisdom is the preserve not of the few but of the multitude” and some “display merely a difference in processing”

Thirty-nine-year-old English teacher at Voltaire University, Pennsylvania, Pearson Converse has been called to her son’s school when precociously intelligent eleven-year-old Darwin has made a comment of the wrong sort, something that sees him in danger of suspension.

In discussion later with her partner, Wade and her best friend Emory Ruth, an afternoon arts program radio host, both urge her to accept this new situation, if temporarily, because “Maybe it’s a passing fad, and it’ll all blow over. But in the meantime, we have to make it to the other side of this thing in one piece.”

Having been raised in a Jehovah’s Witness family until Emory’s parents rescued her, compliance goes against the grain: all Pearson’s life, reactive defiance has been her go-to, believing “I’ve long trusted that the incendiary resentment I pooled in childhood would propel me all the way through to an acrimonious old age.” Pearson refuses “to be bullied into embracing a ludicrous paradigm that flies in the face of what I’ve observed about other people my whole life.”

But Emory explains how she has had to cultivate scrupulous verbal habits in order not to jeopardise her career. Pearson, too, has had to modify the way she teaches in an environment where students are no longer graded, don’t need to sit qualifying examinations, and constantly monitor Pearson’s performance to check it aligns with Intellectual egalitarianism principles.

Years on, Pearson feels things have only become worse: banned are chess, Rubik’s cubes, any number of movies, TV shows and books in which comedy is at the expense of the mentally stigmatized, IQ tests, and words deemed inflammatory. A sense of mischief sees her setting her students a text that threatens her job, bringing her to the attention of the Department of Cognitive Equality.

A mandatory six-week class in Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity results. Usage of words is thoroughly discussed: “The “dimmer switch” was now the “knob that raises or lowers brightness”—though once again Timmy kicked himself, because “bright” was also forbidden, so he amended hastily, “Or maybe the ‘knob that raises or lowers how seeable everything’”

Pearson’s two eldest children were fathered by an anonymous genius level IQ sperm donor, while her youngest, Lucy, is the daughter of her arborist husband. Darwin and Zanzibar are smart enough to learn despite the school’s shortcomings, but young Lucy gains only a militant adherence to Mental Parity ideals. When Pearson personally tries to teach her to read, she falls foul of the Mental Parity movement and the family comes under a very real threat from the Pennsylvania Child Protection Services.

Meanwhile, Emory has advanced her career with opinion pieces that sound like genuine advocacy of Mental Parity principles, but surely this is a convincing act, and not her real belief? After a thirty-year friendship, Pearson avoids listening to them so as not to endanger their valued relationship.

But soon enough, “The people who suck at stuff get to do it, and the people who excel at stuff are annoying and show up the sucky people and have to be squelched”. The pendulum has swung too far the other direction, and reverse discrimination was ensuring that droves of highly skilled employees were out on their ears. Eventually, there’s a final straw, and Pearson’s meltdown is glorious.

Published in April 2024, parts of the story have proved quite prescient with regards the US election in November 2024, and its aftermath. Even as the reader laughs out loud at just how ridiculous things get in Shriver’s USA, they will be nervously looking over their shoulders at how the majority of the country voted, and who is being appointed to positions of power.

Shriver skilfully applies her insight, her talent for argument and her succinct prose to this interesting topic. Provocative and utterly brilliant!!
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Harper Collins UK.

[Tooter · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars

[Angela Juline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a huge Lionel Shriver fan...and I don't understand why this book doesn't have a higher rating. It is a multi-layered story that really offers lots to think about. I know her writing can seem pretentious, but I can't complain considering this book's main premise of dumbing down society. The story tackles how easily society falls into absurdity - it can make you feel crazy if you are pushing against it. Even with the media, you can rationalize and say the they are just playing along; but at some point, the media folks must start believing it as well.
"Sure, what they believed was nuts, but that merely made them just like everyone else."

[EmG ReadsDaily · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightfully dark and satirical take on common sense and Culture Wars, following the introduction of the Mental Parity movement.

A wildly entertaining read!

[Jane Weinermoate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Friends, what was this? Truly, what did I just read? In this obvious allegorical tale meant to scare us into what the world is coming to, Pearson Converse (ugh) lives through an alternative version of 2011 and beyond in which the Mental Parity movement (where all brains are considered the same and the concepts of intelligence and stupidity no longer exist) has taken hold and made everyone lose their dang minds!

In alt-2010, a book was published that posited the categorization of intelligence lead to trauma and decreased opportunity for the so-called "alternative processors" (people who may have previously been called unintelligent). Somehow, in only a year, the book takes a firm grip on American society and the entire culture and government shifts. Words like stupid are now considered slurs, schools can't administer tests because they potentially make alternative processing students feel less-than, and nobody is allowed to be turned down for any job on the basis of their abilities. This "mania" described in the book has a clear inspiration, and that is the current fight for trans rights. I'm not just assuming this, but basing this in the opinions of the author, who is out here railing against trans women having the right to compete in sports under the insulting guise of "caring about women's sports" (read: caring about *real* women, read: caring about AFAB women, read: she never gave a shit about women's sports before but she's a TERF so now she can have a fig leaf for her argument that she doesn't want trans people to have rights).

Besides my clear political disaffiliation with the author, my biggest problem with this book is the world building, and the fact that it doesn't hold up to reality (especially considering we have to look at the inspirational source of our current reality). In an extremely short period of time, an extremist view of intelligence has fully taken over society. That means that public schooling changed seemingly overnight, and government organizations like NASA stopped assigning jobs on the basis of ability (leading to the destruction of the Mars Rover because a formerly-known-as-dumb person was randomly given provenance of the project with no explanation as to why), and certain types of media is being "outlawed." The problem with creating a dystopia where the US government has way to much of an overreach is that it has to feel insidious and creeping. The Handmaid's Tale gave us a world that changed over years, with slight changes here and there that no one noticed right away until it was too late. Mania gives us a world where everyone's opinions changed in the blink of an eye and only Pearson (and a few noble holdouts hiding in the shadows) could still see reason.

Schools no longer teach anything because it could hurt a stupid child's feelings. Math problems can be solved with any answer because every answer is valid. So, why have school? Why does school continue to exist? Anyone can hold any job because to not give a person a job based on lack of qualifications is now seen as discriminatory. So, why have jobs? Why does NASA still exist? Why not just eliminate everything but the most necessary and basic needs of society? Why all of this silly play-acting? Teaching her own child how to read at home gets Pearson a call from CPS and a threat to get her child removed from her home. Why does CPS even exist at this point? How does a government agency function when everyone is allowed to behave in whatever way they want without worry of being corrected because no one is allowed to correct anybody? Media is changed or taken away if it portrays stupidity, but also if it portrays intelligence. Yet, media persists. Sitcoms are still made, plays are still produced, movies are still watched. How? How could this world possibly exist? It's nonsensical and pointless.

Slippery slope world building like this is so frustrating to read because it's meant to open our eyes and make us say, "Oh, my God, we ARE doomed!" But at the same time, very real existential threats like climate change and COVID are sneered at and ridiculed as goofy little nothings. A bunch of Chicken Little scientists making us worry over fairy tales, while they really are rounding up our children and forcing them to have sex change operations at school. There are litter boxes in the classrooms. They're eating the cats and dogs! I SAW IT ON TV!!!

She likens media portrayals of stupidity, like the movie Dumb & Dumber, to minstrel shows (or at least that's what this crazy world she's living in has decided). So let's talk about minstrelsy and blackface. These forms of entertainment largely fell out of favor by the 1950s and there weren't a lot of mainstream media portrayals of blackface by the mid-20th century. That didn't stop blackface from appearing in media, of course. It just was largely being used as an edgy humorist's version of "social satire" (like the Lethal Weapon 6 episode of It's Always Sunny). Most of the time, the comedians using blackface were trying to *say something* about race and society, and trying to show that *they* were the enlightened ones and were supposed to making fun of the people who did blackface in earnest. Or you had "edgy" partygoers, using blackface in their Halloween costumes to shock and amuse their friends. They weren't truly racist, of course, but were *making fun* of racists. The bottom line is, people have been getting away with doing blackface for close to two hundred years, and finding a million excuses as to why they're doing it, despite there really never being a good reason for it (and I say this as someone who really enjoys It's Always Sunny, btw).

The point is, minstrelsy is alive and well. The style may have changed, but the substance is still there. No one is being thrown in jail for doing blackface. Some episodes of television shows featuring it as a joke were pulled from streaming services post-BLM, but those DVDs featuring those episodes weren't forcibly seized from people's homes. Song of the South was pulled from Disney's archives, not by the government, but by an extremely powerful corporation that had the resources to scrub the internet of what it realized was a pretty big misstep in its history. Pearson looks at being denied the ability to watch Stewie on Family Guy or continue to enjoy the Big Bang Theory as a true horror, and is clearly comparing the government's overreach into this type of media to the "scrubbing" of racist portrayals of Black people or the snowflake necessity of adding disclaimers to the beginning of Disney movies to let people know that they may see something that will offend them. The gag is, we can all still watch Peter Pan sing about "what made the Red Man red" and Bing Crosby donning black makeup in Holiday Inn every Christmas on Turner Classic Movies. The government never stopped these images from being shown, and still puts no effort into that. For the type of people that are obsessed with screaming about how our freedom of speech is being taken away, they sure do forget that we literally have the whole world's horrors available at our fingertips any time we want to see them, with no legal consequences for the viewer.

But that's the real point here. There's no *legal* consequences. There's no government body stepping in, no police force knocking on your door, and no jail time for being a bigot. What does exist are social consequences. Your employer in an at-will state may no longer want to work with you. Your spouse may be disgusted by what you find humorous. Your children may estrange themselves from you because of the views you have that directly effect their lives and the lives of their friends. And, perhaps worst of all, you may have to deal with the fact that some strangers on the internet don't think you're that cool of a person. The problem with the viewpoint expressed by this author and her character is that she does have the absolute legal right as an American citizen to be a bitch. She's allowed to be a bigot, to think that trans people are beneath her, and to think that eugenics is the right path forward for our society. She is allowed to think and feel whatever she wants, with impunity. And yet, she and her ilk are obsessed with the idea that they "aren't allowed" to say what they feel anymore. The fact that people push back, have different opinions, or feel personally offended by their views, their voting patterns, or their out and out hate speech is considered to be unfair, uncivilized, and, in fact, extremely offensive right back in the other direction.

I think the most abhorrent part of this book, considering its thinly veiled allegory about trans rights, is that Pearson connects so many mass shootings with the MP movement. "If only we had been able to continue to push down the dumb masses, they wouldn't have felt empowered to go ahead and do something dumb like shoot up a school." The moral implications of using real mass shootings committed by real people with real terrible unchecked mental illness that took the lives of real innocents aside, the idea of saying a movement meant to make people feel less othered and poorly treated in American society lead to those people acting up and causing crimes is despicable. Point me to the trans mass shooters. Point me to the people that have been given the right to change their name, to change their gender identity on government documents, or to politely ask to be referred to in a way that they feel is appropriate, who then said, "It's cool that I'm being treated with respect. Time to go a-murdering!"

Bottom line: this book is trash. We are not headed towards whatever poorly conceived world this author is slippery-sloping us to. Society has not gone crazy because it is shifting towards more tolerance and kindness. When people ask to live their lives in a way that makes them comfortable in which they are asking to take nothing of anybody else, reacting with, "And I took that personally," is so silly. You want the government out of your business so badly, then stay out of everyone else's.

[Pilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Siempre me imagino a Lionel Schriver como una heroína de Jane Austen, por aquello de que en sus obras revela constantemente las hipocresías y limitaciones de su época a través de la ironía y la sátira social. En sus entrevistas se muestra continuamente de lo más liberal, siempre retorciendo los acontecimientos, levantando ampollas por igual a diestra y siniestra. Anagrama viene publicando estos años varias de sus sátiras - y una fabulosa colección de cuentos sobre los problemas de la propiedad privada, que me encantan-. Ahora le toca el turno al fenómeno de la histeria social en Estados Unidos, la Manía provocada por el Movimiento para la Paridad Mental, un proyecto nivelador no discriminante por razón de coeficiente intelectual. Resulta ser una de esas polémicas que se ponen de moda entre ciertos sectores, como pudiera ser en la actualidad el asunto trans, el MeToo, la obligación del lenguaje inclusivo... que duran unos cuantos años, polarizan a las sociedades y luego, se acaban diluyendo.

Al final, Lionel Schriver me resulta tan provocadora como el Richard Ford de Frank Bascombe y el Philip Roth de La Mancha humana, aunque mucho más corrosiva. Leyendo, a veces he tenido miedo por lo profético de la situación -quién no se ha encontrado a lo largo de su vida bajo el yugo de ignorantes con poder-. Lo que empieza siendo tan solo una prohibición del uso de determinado vocabulario en un ambiente de fascismo filológico del Movimiento, deriva en una cascada de cambios sociales y políticos tan irracionales, que lo cierto es que en varios momentos incluso creía que el sarcasmo era desmesurado y la sátira acabaría saliéndose de su cauce. Lo que Schriver intenta es hacer ver que esto no es una cuestión de izquierdas o derechas, sino otra de tantas tonterías de la especie humana. Pero el gran problema es que en el momento la gente no puede disentir, a menos que la cancelen. Esto es lo que le ocurre a la protagonista, una profesora con hipoteca que pagar e hijos que criar, de inteligencia media, pero con un temperamento revolucionario, que no comulga con esa ideología pero que debe vivir en sociedad. ¿Es inteligente ser conformista? ¿O ser disidente? ¿O es mejor ser una cínica oportunista como su amiga? Porque lo cierto es que esta no es solo una novela política, también es una novela sobre la amistad (de esas amistades tan anglosajonas envueltas en continuas charletas con una copa de vino en la mano), y de lo difícil que es mantenerla en medio de semejante distopía.

Extrañaba de Lionel cierta mesura, pero lo cierto es que me he reído bastante, sí, sobre todo con las referencias, jeje, a mi admiradísimo Benedict Cumberbatch.

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

My initial thought as I read Mania was, ‘Go on Lionel, get it all off your chest’. In the author’s envisioned world, the Mental Parity Movement means discrimination on the basis of intelligence is forbidden. No more tests or entry qualifications, no more calling someone dumb (the ‘D-word’) or, equally, calling them smart (the ‘S-word’), no more suggesting you’re better at doing something than someone else, even if you are. Using long words is frowned upon so in this alternate history Barack Obama doesn’t get a second term as US President because he’s too eloquent; Joe Biden is elected instead. The fact you don’t have to know anything about a subject to be appointed to a position, even in the higher reaches of government, has geopolitical consequences too.

From the beginning we’re made aware that Pearson is a person with defiance in her DNA. It started in childhood growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness. (I guess the author chose this as an example of a religion requiring strict adherence to its doctrines rather than any particular hostility towards it.) Pearson rebels against its constraints and is taken in by the family of her friend, Emory.

Pearson finds the Mental Parity Movement ridiculous and is vocal in her disdain for it. She believes Emory holds similar views and is dismayed when she discovers that’s not the case. The irony is that Pearson might be considered an example of everything the Mental Parity Movement set out to dismantle. Her first two children were conceived by artificial insemination by a donor she deliberately selected for their high IQ and she is gratified that Darwin and Zanzibar turn out to be exceptionally bright. She’s equally dismayed that her daughter Lucy, by her husband Wade, is not and Pearson sets about trying to correct this with the same relentless zeal her mother imposed on her.

Wade’s an easy-going man generally whose skills are practical in nature. But even his patience is tested by Pearson’s rebellious attitude. ‘What would you sacrifice by giving in? Just – accept. Everyone’s equally smart. Then move on. Get on with your life.’ Ignoring his advice, and in a moment of madness, she deliberately provokes the university where she works as a lecturer by choosing as a set text for her class a novel with a provocative title. It has serious consequences for herself and her family. The author also shows us the danger of overcorrection.

The book is genuinely laugh out loud funny in places. One of my favourite episodes is when Pearson is required to attend a Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity course. The author has a lot of fun here. Words such as ‘dumbstruck’ or ‘dumbbells’ can no longer be used. Fog cannot be described as ‘dense’, a piece of wood cannot be ‘thick’ and rooms with poor lighting can no longer be ‘dim’ and definitely cannot be fitted with a ‘dimmer switch’. Dangerous vocabulary extends into the kitchen; mention of the herb sage is definitely a no-no.

When I read an extract from the book, I wasn’t sure if its satirical premise could sustain a full novel. I think it just about does and I enjoyed it more than I expected. My first experience of Shriver’s writing, Mania is a witty, satirical and at times surreal take on cancel culture and the temptation to conform to the prevailing orthodoxy.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Look, I like her. I admired The Mandibles and thought that Should I Stay or Should I Go was clever, the only COVID-themed book I've bothered to read. And I follow her on The Spectator and in media.

But this overplays its hand. The framing of a harried professor cancelled is promising. But Shriver does not know how to draw back her satirical punch. She stretches beyond credulity in piling up the increasingly laughable, and yes, often entertaining and clever and cutting as one'd expect from her, instances of dumbing down. But Kurt Vonnegut in "Harrison Bergeron" made the same point far more concisely. We get it, in how she flip-flops the lack of merit or rigor in the mad rush for equity.

The plot sputters, the characters aren't very engrossing, and this might have worked better as a short story or novella. It overstays its welcome, trying too hard to force this past the point where she makes her moral clear. I was disappointed, given her past track record. But I admit that in her journalism of the past few years, she shows similar tendencies of not knowing when to stop, once her position is solidified. Again, I admire her chutzpah, but as a storyteller, this drifts as harangue.

[Jenni Ogden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Lionel Shriver's writing and her cynical, intelligent, brave take on human idiocy (can I even write that? I was going to say "stupidity" but that is definitely and perhaps reasonably not woke). She is truely a unique writer (and speaker, if you ever get the chance to hear her). Oh those apparently true stories we hear about teachers having to support kids who insist they are a dog (today, perhaps they'll be a cat tomorrow?); woke gone wacky. It is a must-read for any thinking rational person, and not only is it so refreshing it is also laugh-aloud funny (Gallows humour perhaps?) Shriver's Mental Parity (MP) Movement is scarily likely...and in the US let's face it, Trump is considered by a lot of folk to be a the best presidential candidate and it sure has nothing to do with his "intelligence". I say, Shriver for president (except she is far too 'intelligent' to want that!

[ˋ°•☆&;josie.ೃ࿐ · Rating 4 out of 5]

My original thought, "'1984' meets 'Idiocracy' stands.

In an alternate reality, not particularly different from our own, intellectual superiority gets cancelled. Which means you can't call people dumb, slow, stupid, etc... everyone gets carried away, then you can't educate children because it belittles their intelligence.... frankly it gets ridiculous.

Not for the apolitical. It's a little rocky to begin with but once past the 30% mark it carries a little better.

Entirely too self-aware and fairly meta in style, the layers of intelligence and relevance here are frankly disturbing.

The last chapter floored me.

[James Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite my affection for Lionel Shriver, I was initially leery about “Mania”. With a plot that, on its surface, sounds like right-wing propaganda and an endorsement from John “You can’t even make jokes about minorities anymore because of woke” Cleese, this could have been a nightmare-fuel screed against everything that is “wrong” with society today. Luckily, Shriver is anything but someone you can easily fit into a box; she knows how to pick apart an idea and whittle it down to its bare essentials without worrying about it being perceived incorrectly.

“Mania” takes place in an alternate timeline where the U.S. has been overtaken by something called the “Mental Parity” movement. Essentially, everyone is declared to have the same level intelligence and any suggestion that someone is “dumb” (known as “the D-word” in the book) or has lesser intelligence is essentially outlawed. It’s anti-intellectualism on steroids, a right-wing grievance mixed with left-wing identity politics. Shriver is smart in how she constructs the novel. She starts at the beginning of the movement where everything is beginning to take hold and the protagonist, Pearson, is flabbergasted at how quickly people have capitulated to this movement. What sets this apart from simple propaganda is that Pearson is a bit hung up on intelligence. She’s an English instructor at a prestigious college. She’s not afraid to pepper her conversations with large words. She outright admits that she chose her children’s sperm donor because he had a high IQ—and it’s increasingly clear that she far prefers her “smarter” children from this donor rather than her “average” child with her partner. It’s clear from the beginning that there is something in this movement that could be good for her to reflect on.

Of course, however, the movement only ratchets up and things get crazier. Shriver, as she did in “Should We Stay or Should We Go”, is great at imagining future worlds with some basis in our current reality. The alternate America in “Mania” is clearly a hyper reaction, but it’s also not too inconceivable either. What makes “Mania” work is that where the America of this novel takes this Mental Parity movement is a gross overexaggeration: can you imagine a coalition in the U.S. government that would work together to implement this so speedily and agreeably? But this specific movement is not the point; this novel could have been about giving dogs the same rights as humans and it would have done the same thing. Shriver’s warning isn’t about anti-intellectualism or wokeism or cancel culture. It’s about getting caught up in reactionary waves and working so hard to right the (valid) sins of our forefathers that you completely forget to stop and think if your corrections will have unintended consequences. In our era of online activism, it’s so easy to espouse the right ideas, align your beliefs to whatever is in vogue, and police those that don’t follow your rules. But we also live in a real world where it’s so easy to overcorrect into something even worse.

[Girish · Rating 5 out of 5]

The brilliance of Lionel Shriver is the commitment to go the whole nine yards with an idea. The idea could be an allegory for our times where the woke people go onto condition people on the new ways of thinking and ostracize anyone who does not jump the bandwagon. And it is not too dystopian given the amount of taboo topics we have anyways today.

In the 2013, a new idea is floated called "Mental Parity" (MP) which means everyone is equally intelligent. Words like stupid, dumb and idiot can get you into trouble and soon exams are ways to discriminate and hence banned. There is no such thing as "smart" phones and kids can report their parents if they use these words. In such a setting two friend Pearson and Emery find themselves in a fix.

Both of them find the concept totally "dumb" to start with. Pearson chooses the path of idealistic resistance while Em becomes the pragmatic adopter and face of the movement on CNN. It does not help that Pearson is also an English teacher and she had two kids through a sperm donor whose primary qualification was a high IQ. The idea keeps building on itself with movies being banned (Rainmaker and Forrest Gump needed a revamp) and books being scoffed at as instruments of discrimination till employees go out of way to recruit misfits to demonstrate MP.

Unable to help herself, Pearson has an "in the mood" day where she prods her students with an assignment on Dostoyevsky's "Idiot" earning her a suspension. The facade gets to her after her third daughter who believes in the MP movement, due to her mom's partiality towards her elder siblings, reports her to the authorities. One more such outburst goes viral and puts the entire family on a downward spiral.

An ordinary author would have stopped with the above. But Lionel Shriver had the audacity to go 4 years on where her viral video makes her the icon for the reclaim movement - a pendulum swing to the other extreme. Throughout what is happening there is an idealism vs pragmatism debate, the responsible vs irresponsible, the impulsive vs measured.

The book is scary and ridiculous in equal parts. A recommended reflection.

[Shoshana G · Rating 1 out of 5]

I loved one of Shriver's books and have not followed her career that closely, but this book was exhausting. I understand the point she's trying to make about cancel culture and mostly agree with her but this book was repetitive. It felt like a screed instead of a story.

I have an e-ARC through NetGalley and I may try to finish this someday but idk...

[Jeffrey Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Note: Received ARC via Goodreads Giveaway). An acerbic take on the culture wars couched in an alternative history and using "intelligence" as its central tenet. One could substitute just about any current outrage into these pages and the results would ring through, and all too true -- a real testament to Shriver's keen sense of our quirky world and the grotesque people who populate it and her keen ability to weave an entertaining and thought-provoking tale. You will recognize the situations and characters driving this book and find both all too familiar (and just as terrifying). Highly recommended (release date April 2024).

[Anni · Rating 5 out of 5]

How could you not admire a writer who can conjure word-smithery such as “by the age of eight she’d become the Caravaggio of the crayon”?
In this novel’s parallel universe (not too dissimilar to our own) political correctness has not only ‘gone mad’ but beyond lunacy (a word that would never get past the ‘Mental Parity’ censorship test) and Shriver’s devastatingly hilarious critique does not disappoint.
In all my years as a reader, librarian and book reviewer, I have never found any fiction chronicler of modern life to be as astute and entertaining as Lionel Shriver.
I’m running out of superlatives, so judge for yourselves!

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you for this ARC - I have loved Lionel shriver since we need to talk about Kevin and post birthday world …. This is exceptional. A bit handmaids tale, a bit Vox, as run through the Atlantic…. And entirely new and engrossing. Must read.

[Os Livros da Lena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aquele livro que me deixa a pensar: será que isto é um livro inteligentíssimo e cheio de ironia e sarcasmo ou é literal e acho só estúpido?

Não sei, mas com tanto EUA paralelo (?) que se podia criar no tempo retratado, pareceu-me mais uma palestra dúbia do que uma obra ficcional «distópica».

Enfim, ri algumas vezes e gostei do vocabulário vasto, pois que sou fã de palavras. Valeu por isso. 🤓

[Nerea Merchan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lo que más me ha atrapado es su forma de narrar: amena, cercana e inteligente, de esas que te hacen avanzar sin esfuerzo, pero te obligan a parar a pensar.
La protagonista, cínica, realista, obcecada y profundamente firme en sus valores resulta bastante incomoda y lúcida a partes iguales (para ella misma, sus familiares y allegados) No busca caer bien y precisamente por eso me parece tan humana.
Me ha fascinado como Shriver aborda la idea de que, a base de eslóganes, campañas políticas y consignas se puede llegar a revertir el sentido común y diluir un poco aquello que está en nuestro ADN humano. Ya lo he leído y visto en otros libros y películas, pero da cierto vértigo lo fácil que resulta normalizar lo absurdo cuando se presenta como virtud.
Uno de los temas que más me han removido es esa dicotomía constante entre ser fiel a lo que uno piensa y a sus valores, o traicionarlos para escalar, agradar, encajar socialmente (al final necesitamos que nos quieran y nos acepten, muchas veces se paga un alto coste por esto) Lo inquietante no es sólo la máscara, sino como esa fachada mantenida durante el suficiente tiempo acaba convirtiéndose en una realidad…¡que se lo pregunten a su amiga!

Me ha parecido una lectura brillante y muy muy actual, de esas que no te sueltan una vez has cerrado el libro y te dejan pensando largo tiempo. Si os gustan este tipo de lecturas, recomendado 100%.

[Martha Muckleroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scathing, at times uncomfortable satire about the absurd efforts to make everyone “equal”. In this story no one is smarter than anyone else. And yes, I had to look up a lot of words. I have no trouble admitting that the author(at least) is smarter than me!). Will not give a synopsis here. I loved it! If you have not read “The Motion of the Body Through Space”, give it a look. Another clever book by Lionel Shriver.