This is a book review submitted to Amerikaner.org by Grant Norman. If you would like to submit your own content, please email AmerikanerContributions@proton.me
Fiction and nonfiction appeal to different audiences, and there are people who retain more information from a story than from a how-to manual. For those individuals, “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047” by Lionel Shriver is a valuable primer for economic collapse. The chief value of this novel, I found, is less in the details about the how an economic collapse could happen (a Mexican is elected President of the United States and repudiates the country’s debt in response to the dollar’s displacement as the world’s reserve currency), although there is plenty there to spark the curiosity of an interested reader.
In my reading, I found the most educational part of The Mandibles to be the description of how a collapse changes the people affected by it, and how one needs to adapt to rougher, tougher circumstances to survive. The novel initially follows four generations of the same family, the titular Mandibles. The family’s patriarch at the story’s start is in his nineties and living in an assisted living facility with full control of his mental faculties and an impressive fortune. His two children are a conventional-minded retired businessman and his sister, a flighty, childless author who wrote one successful novel and then moved to Paris.
The businessman’s two daughters are a single mother living with her teenaged son and live-in Mexican boyfriend, and a socialite mother of three married to an insufferable economics professor at George Town. Lastly are the great-grandchildren, the quiet, economics minded Willing, and his three cousins, Google, Bing, and Savannah. The novel starts just before the president’s announcement of defaulting on the U.S. national debt.
Five years earlier, in 2024, the internet went dark for three weeks and the resulting lawlessness and shortages are still on everyone’s mind. The fact that this seeming collapse was overcome lures most of the characters into optimism when the effects of the U.S.’s economic isolation and collapse begin to be felt. After all, “nothing ever happens”.
The bulk of the book is dedicated to the experiences of this one family as their challenges increasingly pile up. Middle-class concerns like paying for college and private school tuition quickly escalate to rationing water and managing grocery bills in a period of rapid inflation and shortages of goods. Public services become practically nonexistent, except when the army goes door-to-door confiscating gold for the government to bribe China not to declare war.
On top of everything else, the family is increasingly cramped into a single dwelling with all of the challenges that entails. I mentioned the mental changes that the characters go through as the most valuable part of the novel. Reading The Mandibles gives the reader insight into how many aspects of life in 21st Century America we take for granted. Things like flushing toilet paper and receiving your paycheck on time prove to be luxuries once the veneer of stability is stripped away. Since reading the book I have found myself thinking more about how I would act in a similar situation of collapse. More important than knowing specific skills or having certain resources may be the willingness to act when things breakdown. But when things breakdown, how can they be built back up again?
As bad as the current atomized state of American society is, there is still much, much farther to fall. Once social trust has been completely eroded and looting and home invasions become commonplace, what lies ahead? Therein lies the chief weakness of this work. The novel is broken into two sections, one taking place in 2029 and the other in 2047. The question of how things got from where they left off in 2029 to how they are when the narrative picks up again in 2049. A great deal of human drama is left to be merely referenced, and the breezy way that Shriver paints the dystopia of 2049 is much less impactful and insightful than the world she depicts in 2027.
Instead of the looming dread of waiting for the next shoe to drop, the United States of 2049 is a paint-by-number rehash of 1984. The characters get together for one last quest, absent much if any suffering, to the promised land of Nevada, which has seceded from the government. The end of the novel sees every one of the surviving characters (which is nearly all of them) get a happy ending which feels forced and unearned.
The Mandibles great strength is that it takes systemic, societal issues in our society and brings them down to the level of a family and its members. This makes it easier to empathize with the characters and invites the reader into the mindset of someone struggling to survive in the ruins of the American Empire. By contrast, the second part of the book paints too broad of a picture of the society which has emerged and, in doing so, fails to invite the reader to become more than a mere observer of the novel’s events.
The other chief quibble that I had with this book is the strange libertarian asides that the author makes. I do not know the author’s personal politics, and I admit that it is inevitable for a book about economic collapse due to governmental monetary policy to pay homage to libertarian thinkers and ideas. But there is a line to be drawn between exploring the merits of deflation and minimizing the effects of pedophilic rape on a teenaged boy. Perhaps Shriver wanted to fill her Stephen King quota of disgusting sexual acts in a modern-day novel, but that is no excuse.
Even so, The Mandibles still succeeds in creating a plausible economic disaster situation and navigates the changed lives of its characters with honesty, sympathy, and wit. I would recommend this book to those who need to put a human face on the economic story to be moved by it, those unfamiliar with monetary policy but would like to learn more, and those who enjoy the spectacle of a collapse.
The value of this novel lies in getting your head wrapped around what a sharp decline in the fortunes of the U.S. would mean. That is easily accomplished in the 2029 section of the book, which means you can consider skipping the 2049 section, with its lackluster plot, limp characters, and downplaying of pedophilia. 3/4 Stars.