Jason Pettus's Reviews > The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047

2023 reads, #12. I read this on the recommendation of one of my freelance clients, in that his own dystopian day-after-tomorrow thriller was partly inspired by this one, plus of course I'm just a sucker for dystopian day-after-tomorrow thrillers to begin with. Shriver is a lit-fiction veteran with 18 novels now in her oeuvre, most of which are obscure MFA titles with only tiny audiences; the reason her name may sound familiar is because of the one and only big hit so far of her career, 2003's school-shooter psychological character drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, the winner of that year's prestigious Orange Prize and then adapted into a Hollywood movie with Tilda Swinton that itself was a multiple award winner.

Here Shriver is taking on a much bigger subject, which is showing exactly how a prosperous industrialized nation like the US could in fact devolve in the space of a mere decade into a lawless third-world country with no infrastructure to speak of. Shriver has mentioned in interviews that she wanted this to be the most realistic look possible at how such a thing could happen (as one of her characters astutely says in the book, science-fiction is never really about predicting the future, but rather commenting on the present); and so that makes this novel both queasily thrilling and nerve-wrackingly terrifying, in that every single plot development is based on a real thing that has actually happened in real-world America in the last couple of decades, only cranked up one or two notches and with no last-minute reprieve or savior that has (so far) allowed all of us in the 21st century to wipe our brow and give a huge sigh of relief every time one of these issues has reared its ugly head out in real life. For example, the event that starts this crisis is China giving the US a "margin call," suddenly demanding that we pay back the trillions of dollars that the country has loaned us over the years, feeling empowered after recently becoming the official biggest economy (and largest military) in the world; then when it becomes clear that the US neither has the money to pay off its national debt nor even particularly cares about doing so, the rest of the world suddenly devalues the US dollar as its main international form of currency and refuses to accept it as payment for anything, leading to a currency crash and hyperinflation situation much like Germany in the 1920s, where a loaf of bread at Whole Foods costs $20 on a Monday, then suddenly $50 on Tuesday, then up to $100 on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, under a far-left administration that happens to include the first-ever Latinx President in American history, the White House is still so obsessed with social-justice issues that they essentially ignore the economy altogether (a very telling moment is when Congress debates whether or not to change all federal government forms to Spanish, since Latinx people now technically make up over 50% of the American population, at the same time that most of America's police go on strike because their government-issued paychecks keep bouncing); and meanwhile, all the upper-middle-classers keep talking about how things are bound to get better if the unwashed, uneducated, mouth-breathing masses will just remain calm, while all the poor people are positively giddy over the destruction of these upper-middle-classers' wealth, most of them not realizing that it will only be a matter of a few more months before all that vanished money will result in basically a collapse into violent anarchy for everyone, a slow-motion "gentle apocalypse" that Shriver deliciously doles out in infinitely clever, infinitely nauseating detail. (And don't worry if you're confused -- another clever detail here is Shriver including a 16-year-old autistic son in our title family who basically acts like a walking Wikipedia, explaining to readers the actual real issues being discussed in this fictional novel, and why taking these issues for granted like we do [for example, why going off the gold standard is actually the worst thing the US has ever done in its entire history] will inexorably lead to the society-collapsing disaster our Mandibles live through over these 400-odd pages.)

Needless to say, I luuurved this book, although in a wrist-slashingly depressing way that makes me never want to read it or even think about it again, which of course officially makes me one of those millions of middle-classers with their head in the sand that has helped cause all these problems in the first place. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit, as a cautionary tale about all the bad things that can happen under such seemingly innocuous attitudes like, "A prosperous country like America can ring up as much debt as it possibly wants to with no repercussions whatsoever." A tough but great read like this will show you in graphic, infuriating detail exactly what can happen under that kind of attitude, so please understand in advance that you're in for a pretty harrowing tale here indeed.