…Shriver isn't the kind of writer who lets her themes rise gently to the surface. She seizes them with an almost animalistic ferocity and interrogates them for all they're worth. Her smart, satirical fiction is old-fashioned in that it serves as a vehicle for investigating political and social questions, but it's also almost uncannily of its moment…Shriver has always seemed to be at least a few steps ahead of the rest of us, but her new novel establishes her firmly as the Cassandra of American letters. Like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas or Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, The Mandibles depicts a world that is at once familiar and horribly altered…Shriver's dystopia is imagined as minutely as a pointillist image, with every detail adding another dot to the overall picture…Like Franzen, Shriver is a shrewd social commentator with a fine ear for irony…I don't remember the last time a novel held me so enduringly in its grip.
The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047
Narrated by George Newbern
Lionel ShriverUnabridged — 13 hours, 45 minutes
The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047
Narrated by George Newbern
Lionel ShriverUnabridged — 13 hours, 45 minutes
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Overview
With dry wit and psychological acuity, this near-future novel explores the aftershocks of an economically devastating U.S. sovereign debt default on four generations of a once-prosperous American family. Down-to-earth and perfectly realistic in scale, this is not an over-the-top Blade Runner tale. It is not science fiction.
In 2029, the United States is engaged in a bloodless world war that will wipe out the savings of millions of American families. Overnight, on the international currency exchange, the “almighty dollar” plummets in value, to be replaced by a new global currency, the “bancor.” In retaliation, the president declares that America will default on its loans. “Deadbeat Nation” being unable to borrow, the government prints money to cover its bills. What little remains to savers is rapidly eaten away by runaway inflation.
The Mandibles have been counting on a sizable fortune filtering down when their ninety-seven-year-old patriarch dies. Once the inheritance turns to ash, each family member must contend with disappointment, but also-as the U.S. economy spirals into dysfunction-the challenge of sheer survival.
Recently affluent, Avery is petulant that she can't buy olive oil, while her sister, Florence, absorbs strays into her cramped household. An expat author, their aunt, Nollie, returns from abroad at seventy-three to a country that's unrecognizable. Her brother, Carter, fumes at caring for their demented stepmother, now that an assisted living facility isn't affordable. Only Florence's oddball teenage son, Willing, an economics autodidact, will save this formerly august American family from the streets.
The Mandibles is about money. Thus it is necessarily about bitterness, rivalry, and selfishness-but also about surreal generosity, sacrifice, and transformative adaptation to changing circumstances.
Editorial Reviews
04/04/2016
Shriver’s latest opens in 2029, five years after a large-scale cyberattack called “the Stonage” destabilized the American economy and shifted all its transactions off-line. Now President Alvarado addresses the nation to deliver the news that the U.S. is once again under attack by a coordinated international effort to sink the dollar and replace it with a new global currency called the bancor. America’s response is to default on all its loans, including the T-bills held by American citizens. And just like that, the inheritance of the Mandible family, created by an industrialist forebear and stewarded by patriarch Douglas, disappears. With wit and insight, Shriver details the impact of this new era on the Mandible clan, who are forced to come together to weather the crisis. Soon Douglas and his wife, Luella, are kicked out of their retirement community and begin bunking with his “boomerpoop” son, Carter (a journalist back when there were still newspapers), and his emotionally fragile wife, Jayne, in their Brooklyn brownstone. Carter’s sister Avery and her economics professor husband, Lowell, and their three children arrive on the doorstep of her do-good sister Florence, whose job working for the homeless is more stable than Lowell’s academic career. What’s remarkable about the Mandibles is how poorly they adapt to the new normal, perhaps with the exception of Florence’s son, Willing, a teenager with prodigious knowledge of macroeconomics and a dismal worldview formed by the Stonage. Shriver’s (Big Brother) vision has a few blind spots, and a time shift forces significant plot points to be recounted by characters later. Nevertheless, Shriver’s imaginative novel works as a mishmash of literary fiction and dystopian satire. (June)
A provocative and very funny page-turner…” — Wall Street Journal
“….[A] powerful work...Prescient, imaginative and funny, it also asks deep questions.” — The Economist
“Hilarious, brilliant new novel...” — Elle
“Known for tackling big contemporary issues head-on, Shriver deals skilfully here with the implications of economic meltdown. The novel, set in a near-ish future, tells of the plight of the once wealthy Mandible family and the decline of four generations into penury, thieving and prostitution.” — Financial Times (A Summer Pick of 2016)
“[Shriver has] a sharp social eye and a blistering comic streak, and her focus on nailing down the economic nitty-gritty of her plot is only one piece of the great, disconcerting fun she has in sending the world as we know it so vividly to hell.” — The New Yorker's Page-Turner Blog
“Shriver has always seemed to be at least a few steps ahead of the rest of us, but her new novel establishes her firmly as the Cassandra of American letters….I don’t remember the last time a novel held me so enduringly in its grip.” — New York Times Book Review
“It’s scaring the hell out of me.” — Tracy Chevalier
The world that the Mandible family must negotiate is evoked in seamless detail… One thing I really like is her coining of made-up slang for her younger generation of characters and her resolutely materialist analysis of what could be coming. — Jane Smiley, The Guardian
“Distinctly chilling.” — Independent (UK)
“This is a sharp, smart, snarky satire of every conspiracy theory and hot button political issue ever spun; one that, at first glance, might induce an absurdist chuckle, until one realizes that it is based on an all-too-plausible reality.” — Booklist (starred review)
A provocative and very funny page-turner…
[Shriver has] a sharp social eye and a blistering comic streak, and her focus on nailing down the economic nitty-gritty of her plot is only one piece of the great, disconcerting fun she has in sending the world as we know it so vividly to hell.
Shriver has always seemed to be at least a few steps ahead of the rest of us, but her new novel establishes her firmly as the Cassandra of American letters….I don’t remember the last time a novel held me so enduringly in its grip.
This is a sharp, smart, snarky satire of every conspiracy theory and hot button political issue ever spun; one that, at first glance, might induce an absurdist chuckle, until one realizes that it is based on an all-too-plausible reality.
Known for tackling big contemporary issues head-on, Shriver deals skilfully here with the implications of economic meltdown. The novel, set in a near-ish future, tells of the plight of the once wealthy Mandible family and the decline of four generations into penury, thieving and prostitution.
….[A] powerful work...Prescient, imaginative and funny, it also asks deep questions.
It’s scaring the hell out of me.
Distinctly chilling.
The world that the Mandible family must negotiate is evoked in seamless detail… One thing I really like is her coining of made-up slang for her younger generation of characters and her resolutely materialist analysis of what could be coming.
Hilarious, brilliant new novel...
A provocative and very funny page-turner…
Known for tackling big contemporary issues head-on, Shriver deals skilfully here with the implications of economic meltdown. The novel, set in a near-ish future, tells of the plight of the once wealthy Mandible family and the decline of four generations into penury, thieving and prostitution.
Sharp and wryly unpredictable, The Mandibles is also chilling because, set in the very near future, it’s so eminently plausible.
01/01/2016
Several generations of Mandibles have planned on the big fortune presumably coming their way with the death of their nearly 100-year-old patriarch. But then sovereign debt slaughters the dollar, which is replaced by a new global currency even as the president proclaims that America will default on its loans. Various Mandibles can't afford assisted living or olive oil, but doofy cousin Willing's self-taught economic brilliance could save them all. From the author of the Orange Prize winner We Need To Talk About Kevin.
The new dystopian novel by Lionel Shriver tells of global economic collapse in 2029. The story unfolds matter-of-factly, and narrator George Newbern mirrors that same tone. As the world falls apart around them, the Mandible family, a menagerie of desperate heirs, waits for the fortune they will inherit from their 97-year-old patriarch. As prices skyrocket, Newbern captures the family members’ schemes for survival and hopes for a better future, followed by their shock when they discover that the money isn’t coming. Newbern uses his talented voice and sharp intellect to create a world in which the characters tiptoe between the comic and tragic. This smart oddball tale is as entertaining as it is thought provoking. R.O. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
2016-03-17
Shriver, nobody's idea of an optimist about the present day, delivers a dire vision of near-future America. The collapse of the United States arrives in 2029, not via climate change or airborne viruses or zombie hordes, but international monetary policy: foreign governments establish their own currency, the bancor (a concept first proposed by economist John Maynard Keynes), and when the U.S. resists, it's effectively locked out of global trade. America speedily goes into free fall, with rampant shortages and inheritances vaporized by high costs, unemployment, and human longevity. The Mandible family is just barely hanging on: Florence, who has one of the few stable jobs left (working at a homeless shelter), is forced to open her Brooklyn home to desperate family members, including a humiliated economist brother-in-law, a sister whose career as a novelist tanked along with all print media, and her once-wealthy grandfather who has only a silver service left to his name and whose second wife suffers from violent dementia. Almost gleefully, Shriver (Big Brother, 2013, etc.) catalogs how this upper-middle-class clan gets knocked off its perch in ways both small (toilet-paper shortages, overcrowding) and large (rampant theft and violence, starvation, zero health care, general erosion of humanity). Politically, this may be the only novel Mother Jones and breitbart.com can both take an interest in, though it might tire them both, too: the closing chapters, set in a scorched-earth 2047, are overly didactic on themes of individual rights, taxation, and citizenship. "Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present," as Florence's brother-in-law puts it, and Shriver's biggest fear is that, between numbing technology and nanny-statedom, we've lost our capacity to live by our wits. This novel is a bracing vision of what happens when we're forced to, though the lecturing tone sometimes grates. An imperfect but savvy commingling of apocalyptic and polemic.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170036813 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 06/21/2016 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 760,040 |
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