Mania

A Novel

By: Lionel Shriver

Narrated by: Abby Craden

""A fantasy that hews uncomfortably close to today’s reality, where facts and the truth are selectively recognized at increasingly subjective whims . . . . The specifics of Mania are the stuff of bleeding satire, but the novel’s guiding concept cuts close to the bone with no anesthesia. Shriver isn’t one to tip-toe around her subjects. She still knows how to poke the bear. In this case, the bear is us.” — Boston Globe

Set in a parallel yet all too familiar near past, a brilliant subversive novel about a lifelong friendship threatened by culture wars, from the New York Times bestselling author.

In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is ""the last great civil rights fight."" Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word (“stupid”) and encouraged to report parents who use it at home.

A college English instructor, the constitutionally rebellious Pearson Converse rejected her restrictive Jehovah’s Witness upbringing as a teenager, and so has an aversion to dogma of any kind. Made impotent in the university classroom, she’s also enraged by the crushing of her exceptionally bright children’s spirits in primary school. Fortunately, she enjoys the confidence of a best friend, a media commentator with whom she can speak frankly about her socially unacceptable contempt for the MP movement. Or at least she thinks she can . . . until one day the political chasm between the two women becomes uncrossable, and a lifelong relationship implodes.

With echoes of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, told in Lionel Shriver’s inimitable and iconoclastic voice, Mania is a sharp, acerbic, and ruthlessly funny book about the road to a delusional, self-destructive egalitarianism that our society is already on.

Thoroughly enjoyed this

Shriver envisions a world created by Ellsworth Monkton Toohey and it’s every bit as incompetent and frightening as one could imagine.

Really smart thoughts and writing. I was very impressed by the authors take.

This was really a brilliant book with great observations and better yet hallucination on those observations. This definitely reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984.

Clever premise, tortured execution.

Oddly it was a bad review of the book that piqued my curiosity. The reviewer, writing in the New York Times, expressed an admiration for Shriver's work generally but felt that the symbolisms and metaphors in Mania stretched both patience and credulity. I loved the premise though: intelligence has been outlawed. There are numerous clever sentences in the book, but the puns, plays in words, and satirical revisions of recent history are often too obvious or too much of a stretch. The narrator is unlikable, but not "likable in her unlikability." The voice actress hired for the audio does a great job, but by the end I was treating finishing the book as an assignment rather than a pleasure. Before I go on to read something actually intelligent, I'm going to treat myself to something innocuously stupid - a Graphic Novel maybe.

Agree with NY Times

Another reviewer put it perfectly. Read review titled Clever Premise, Tortured Execution. Tedious and frustrating.

LS’s scathing social commentary.

Lionel Shriver is incredibly smart. What better way to point out blatant (practically) to-the-minute conformity, than in a snack-like book that pokes fun while illuminating the lasting harms caused by group think. Listening was like eating (insert your favorite unstoppable snack) while talking with a friend who’s shiny mind gets yours, and you’re b*tching about the state of world, and you can’t help but laugh at it all.