The Mandibles: 2047, Chapter 1 (Getting with the Program)

Friends, bloggers, netizens, lend me your ears;
I come to bury The Mandibles, not to praise it.
The evil that hacks do lives after them;
The good is oft interred in their pages.
So let it be with The Mandibles.

All right, five chapters left until we're done. I've peeked ahead a little bit and not only am I more convinced than ever that this was meant to be a duology, I'm beginning to think that maybe Shriver was hoping for a trilogy. The 2047 chapters are radically different than the rest of the book. With only around 160 pages left - between 35k and 40k words using my estimates - we're going to meet new characters, learn that some of the existing ones have died, and absorb a titanic amount of worldbuilding (including more terrible slang) - and all without giving up on the author's beloved speeches. This really feels like it should have been a novel in its own right rather than an overlong denouement, but frankly it's not like I would have read another novel by this woman so maybe that's for the best.

We're back with Willing, slightly less obnoxious as an adult, headed back to the house that in the narrative he abandoned 15 years ago and in the book we saw about 15 pages ago. Yes, after contriving a home invasion to get the characters out of that particular set, we're now back in the wink of an eye.

Asserting his claim to 335 East Fifty-Fifth Street also entailed having its current residents evicted. Now paid handsomely in dolares nuevos linked to the mighty bancor, the NYPD undertook such tasks with forbidding relish...Oh, Sam, Tanya, Ellie, and Jake had long ago been replaced by other usurpers. If the condition of the house was anything to go by, recent residents had been less genteel...

Wait, why are we talking about this? What about the last fifteen years and the great exodus to Gloversville?

In 2032, he had raided gardens, pilfered orchards, and held up convenience stores to feel their bedraggled party on the long trek north...

...Working the land at [the farm] was never the same after the federal government nationalized the farms. The Mandibles were demoted to sharecroppers.

You can see why Shriver couldn't depict any of this. If she actually included anything interesting in her novel, then she'd lose all of her literary writer cred.

A few more little details pop up. Willing now has a girlfriend, Fifa, who is...well, horrible, but I'm sure you could have guessed that. We'll be getting better acquainted with this 11th hour acquaintance in the following chapters. For now, we've got more fast-forward worldbuilding to dispatch:

When Willing was small, people made a great brouhaha over pedophilia...

Uh...I don't like where this is heading.

Willing was raped.

Willing was not raped, and I'm glad because I really didn't need to see this author try to depict sexual violence. Rather, this was one of those metaphorical rapes that tasteless authors love so dearly, in this his being "chipped." The rest of the chapter concerns the dreaded chip, frequent flyer in many a terrible near-future book. This is the big change in the 2047 chapters - Shriver abandons that whole "Most Realistic Dystopia Ever" shtick and turns the novel into a fairly generic near-future sci-fi tome, complete with the usual THE FUTURE! notes and even more right-wing tropes.

So let's talk about this chip:

He fought a rising panic as she swung a mechanism behind him and leveled it at the base of his skull - a soft, tender depression, undefended. Glass and chrome maybe, but the device looked like a gun.

Yes, it goes in the base of the skull. Some of you who've actually read up about RFID chips (perhaps because of that implant database that convinced a lot of wingnuts that the scenario we're about to see was plausible) might find this a bit hard to swallow, if for no other reason than the fact that such implants need to integrate into fatty tissue such as that found in the arm or leg. Hell, even putting it in the hand like in some awful evangelical subculture novel seems like it would make more sense. Well, Shriver has an explanation for this was to "keep you from digging it out." That's hilarious to me, as it's also established that the chip is so absurdly sensitive to biochemical changes that it's capable of stopping an intoxicated person from gambling or even stopping a person held at gunpoint from making transfers by sensing their stress. Yet apparently there's no way to stop someone from removing the damn thing except by jacking it straight into his spine, in a way that seems like it could cause paralysis or massive generalized pain if it shifts at all.

Most of this chapter is what I've previously called "plot spackle" - introducing a new plot element and then inserting more plot to cover over the holes that some nasty ol' critic might find. For example, my first thought was that all of this seemed unnecessary - after all, it the Evil Future Government wanted to track people and financial transactions without anyone's consent, why not use biometrics? That technology already exists, and with sufficient accuracy and ubiquity it could be used to facilitate money transfers and even follow people around a la the Cybercog FASTR system from The Oasis is Burning or the similar system in The Fabulist (what can I say? Surveillance defines my world). But that won't work, because "hackers had learned to duplicate [them] as fast as the novel authentications had been brought in." Well, that's convenient.

All right, so what about hackers? And what about mundane network failures that would put an end to all transactions and send the system into turmoil? In the first part of the book, we're told that electronic transactions are virtually unheard of thanks to the "Stone Age," so why is everyone cool with it now? Well, it seems that the chips are "unhackable" (because why not just say that?) and everyone is now cool with those electronic transfers that they once feared because the Future Evil Government paid them off, the dumb sheep. And as far as network failures...well, I guess that doesn't happen, either. It's not like complex systems ever fail or anything.

All of this is part of a scheme by the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance (read: the IRS) to tax everyone to death. We'll deal with them later, as they're the villains in this briefest of sequels. For now, all you need to know is that the filthy Keynesians are taxing people at 77 percent, with negative interest rates for savings because SAVINGS ARE BAD. Keynesians believe that, right? That's totally a plausible policy in the Most Realistic Dystopian Novel Ever Written.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 14 (A Complex System Enters Disequilibrium)

A.K.A. Nothing Says "Hostage Situation" Like An Academic Term From An Organizational Studies Textbook

Chapter 14 is the last chapter before the big fifteen year timeskip. That means we have just thirty pages to scoop up all of the fragments of plot and paste them into a coherent whole before starting our great expedition into the future of THE FUTURE! Does our fearless author pull this off? Well...kinda. It helps that the whole story has been designed (contrived, one might say) to lead to this very point. So let's try to clear this bastard out of the way as efficiently as possible that we might get to what I'm told is the really bad shit.

Since we've already established that Willing, in addition to being soulless, is also smarter than the rest of the cast combined, it's fitting that we start with him. It turns out that Willing has prepared a bug-out bag because of course he has. He'll also spend most of this chapter ordering everyone around - you know, I really didn't think I could hate the little bastard anymore, but here we are. He's even put together enough to crack wise with the hostage taker:

"Can't you shut [Luella] up?" Sam pleaded.

"Greater men than I have tried," Willing said.

Anyway, the plan is to head out to the Prospect Park homeless camp Kurt mentioned many chapters ago:

"Take warm clothes," Willing directed. "Wear multiple layers so you don't have to carry them. Remember to bring something waterproof. Fill the plastic bottles in the old recycling container with tap water."

What the blue fuck? What tap water, you little freak? There's no tap water! There hasn't been any tap water for 441 pages! The very first goddamn line in this book is about how there isn't enough clean water for three people, let alone thirteen! How do you forget this? What kind of hack...

...I'm sorry, I seem to have had a fit. I'm okay now.

All right, let's skim...Willing is basically psychic, we've established that...ah, the family makes one last attempt to take out the invaders:

Looming on the stoop in the open doorway, Carter raised both hands high behind Sam's back. As his blanket flew backwards, he plunged a gleaming foot-long implement into the interloper's shoulder.

For the record, Carter just stabbed the gunman with this:

He even cracks a joke about it:

"Asparagus tongs," Carter declared unapologetically, eyes wide and black. He nodded at the gun. "Go ahead. Make my day."

I'm sorry to say that no one gets shot in this scene. Each and every one of these miserable bastards will be alive at the end of the chapter.

So, the camp. This part is from Lowell's POV - I have no clue why, but once you've read far enough into any bad novel you quit questioning why your torturer does anything. I'm not entirely sure how long they stay here, but this section can't span more than a few days. There's a little talk about food and a lot of talk about defecation (because it's transgressive!). Savannah still isn't back and won't be returning. Then Florence - the one source of income - leaves her job after a man attacks her with a blow torch. In short, we've reached the Final Chapter.

Quick question - how many of you think that this book sucks so bad that the author would actually use the term "Final Chapter" in the dialogue? Would anyone reading this be shocked at all?

"He's right. You've done your part, Mom." Willing had reappeared. With an obscure glance at Nollie, he announced, "We've reached the Final Chapter."

I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. Actually, I'm mad and disappointed, but not at Shriver. I save those emotions for the industry and the literary circles that prop up this garbage.

This isn't actually the final chapter, although I feel like it was meant to be. Like Agenda 21, my previous incursion into terrible dystopian fiction, The Mandibles has the feel of a two-volume set. The timeskip gimmick is so conceptually awkward that I don't believe at all that this was the original intention. We can explore that possibility further once we get to the other side of that barrier, but I wanted to put the possibility out there.

This is where it all comes together. A whole bunch of disparate points from earlier in the novel are now assembled and pasted together with generous amounts of serendipity and coincidence. Here's what goes down, in convenient bullet point form:

• The new destination is Gloversville, home to elusive prepper Jarred and his farm (mentioned first in Chapter 2). Those menacing farm hands just left after awhile, so I guess I was right after all.
• Willing trades one of the goblets (saved from the government goons in Chapter 6) for a gun (which he mentioned in Chapter 12). You know, it's funny that this armed stranger in this criminal urban nightmare didn't just rob Willing. It's also surprising that anyone in this situation would trade a utilitarian device for a lump of metal with no practical value. Whatever, I'm long past caring about small shit like this.
• The people in the camp are building shutters to protect the things, so the Home Depot hinges that Avery was buying up back in Chapter 11 are suddenly tradable for food. Yes, really.
• Savannah isn't coming along on this voyage, but everyone else is - thirteen people in all.
• Oh yeah, almost forgot - this is the point where they're walking Luella on a leash. I must just be numb to everything because I'm not as shocked by this as I should be.

Here's where it gets tricky. The family had to abandon the car along with everything else when Sam et al stormed the house. That means that they're going to have to walk nearly two hundred miles to reach prepper Jarred's farm. Two hundred miles - that's not such a tall order for a single healthy adult or a small group. Perhaps some of you have hiked this far. But this is a far different scenario. There are thirteen people here carrying limited supplies and wearing clothing and footwear that are likely inappropriate for the journey. Several people in this group are elderly, including one man (Douglas) who's pushing one hundred. And with society in a state of legal and moral freefall, there's no telling what kind of monsters they could find out there. Sure, the unimpeachably brilliant Willing insists that everything's fine outside of the cities, but I'm not sure how his crystal ball extends to the interstate.

We're looking at a brutal, weeks-long trek into unknown territory. It's highly likely that several people will die along the way. This is shaping up to be sort of a weird contemporary urban Oregon Trail, and much like that game I'm sure that at least some of these people will shit themselves to death. For that briefest of moments, it feels like this novel and this writer could finally produce something interesting.

And then...

2047

...it never happens. We skip over the whole thing.

You heard me. One moment, we're gearing up for a hazardous journey. Then it's fifteen years later and we're looking back over what happened.

466 pages. 466 pages of speeches about economic theories, dinner party chatter, off-hand discussion over things happening elsewhere, volumes of detail on characters voiding their bowels, and dozens and dozens of pages of internal monologue courtesy of a spectacular set of assholes. And just as soon as something interesting comes up, we skip over it.

Did I mention that this chapter ends in a murder-suicide? No? Well, that's because I initially missed it. Yes, it seems that our author decided that she didn't want to deal with Douglas and Luella any longer, so she disposed of them. Then the chapter ended. No mourning. No shock from the characters who just witnessed a gruesome act of violence by and against members of their own family. That's very appropriate, because I feel like the story just died here (even though it's going to lurch onward for another 150 pages or so) and I feel nothing.

A fifteen-year gap...you know, it occurs to me that I wrote a novel - The Fabulist - that has parallel narratives set fifteen years apart. Most of it covers a man's trek across a post-apocalyptic state (Illinois, in this case), often saddled with weaker people who slow his progress. There's violence, natural hazard, moral decisions, and personal discoveries. It took two years to finish up the final manuscript. Would that I could have approached it the Lionel Shriver way. Would that I could have made money by writing an account of Storyteller sitting in a bunker, watching him manage supplies, keeping very close track of his bathroom activities, and occasionally having him pontificate at length about how everyone else is less intelligent than he is - and then, once the vault opened, skipping ahead to the end of the grand journey and having him reflect on all those things I didn't show the audience.

Actually, no. No, I don't wish that at all. That sounds like it would be as boring to write as it would be to read. More so, even. Literary writers never seen like they enjoy what they do - oh, they derive some sense of self-satisfaction out of their scribblings and the literary community's reactions, but they don't find any joy in the craft, not like those littlebrain genre writers. I find it hard to believe that Shriver liked writing the previous 466 pages, not like she would have had she actually described the great journey that was about to unfold.

Tune in next time, when we'll find out what's on the other side of that time skip. Maybe we'll be surprised and it'll be great. The odds technically are not zero.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 13 (Karmic Clumping II)

So you're not going to believe this - I still don't believe it - but here, at the two-third mark, we're finally going to get some genuine tension. For the first time in close to 100k words, Shriver will forego her efforts to create a Les Miserables for the wine and cheese set and actually put in something that an average person might find compelling.

...In the second half of the chapter. The first half is SOP, starting with six pages of Carter complaining (internally) about how much he hates having his dad and crazy ol' Luella around. There are also some more scatological references - gore and kink don't shock 'em like they used to, but poop always does the trick - not to mention some real laffers about politics:

Naturally, the Republicans were a write-off; the leading GOP contender had branded Dante Alvarado "Herberto Hoovero," an epithet widely decried as racist.

Two things. One: I know that all of you are currently laughing at the prospect of a Republican presidential candidate losing the election for saying things offensive to Mexicans, but as far as I can tell this was not intended as a joke. Two: The more I read, the more I suspect that Shriver's speech about being oppressed was a planned stunt and the only thing that really went wrong was that more people didn't complain about the racism.

Yet the president was battling a serious challenge for the nomination from the leftwing grandee Jon Stewart...

Because only a bunch of stupid liberals would ever be foolish enough to nominate someone they saw on TV.

...Seriously though Shriver, you really need to lay off the topical humor, you're no good at it. Each one of these jokes is an icepick in my side.

This dismal scene concludes with Luella somehow setting the house on fire. That's not the tense part - it's over in one paragraph with nary a casualty sustained. However, it is an excuse to cram the last of the Mandibles into Florence's home. At this point, some of you might be struggling to keep track of everyone in this house, so here's a little chart to help out, with POV characters marked in bold:

• Douglas - A.K.A. "Grand Man." Currently not doing much of anything.
• Carter - Grandfather to the protagonists. Currently waiting for Douglas and Luella to die.
• Jayne - Grandmother to the protagonists. Currently hiding from everyone.
• Florence - Soft-headed liberal. Currently taking care of everyone.
• Willing - Alpha precocious child and burgeoning sociopath. Currently annoying me to death.
• Esteban - Florence's boyfriend, token Hispanic, speaks perfect English con ciertas palabras en Español. Currently cooking mucha comida Mexicana.
• Avery - Florence's right-wing jerkbag sister. Currently pretending to be a good person so that Florence doesn't show her up.
• Lowell - Avery's husband. Fallen economics professor, latent pervert. Currently losing the last of his marbles.
• Savannah - Incest bait. Currently prostituting herself.
• Big Pete - Beta precocious child. Currently...actually, I'm not sure what he's doing right now. Getting beaten up, I guess.
• Little Pete - Whiny moppet. Currently sneaking so much food that he's actually getting fat (How do you sneak food that's not precooked, anyway?).
• Nollie - Your zany aunt. Currently being an asshole to everyone.
• Luella - Douglas's feebleminded second wife. Currently being offensive to the reader.
• Kurt - Just some dude. Not a Mandible, terrible teeth, too nice for his own good. Currently blending into the background so that the author doesn't have to give him dialogue.

That's potentially fourteen characters to keep track of in every single scene. We've got something of a break right now because Savannah's gone, dropping us to lucky number 13. By comparison, I once had an agent reject Nerd World (with a grand total of seventeen named characters in the entire narrative, and never more than four in any given scene) because he felt it had too many characters and it was confusing to keep track of them.

...Come to think of it, a couple agents rejected Nerd World on the grounds that the multiple POVs didn't add anything because they weren't telling different stories (because who the hell would read a story featuring different unreliable perspectives on the same set of events?). Meanwhile, The Mandibles has a rather restricted omniscient narrator who can only follow five characters, constituting three households (Florence's, Avery's and Carter's), and four of those POVs have been in the same spot for a hundred pages, and now all five of then are.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear that all of these rules for writing are a dodge to keep the lowborn in their proper station while also preserving the myth that literature is not beholden to the same brand- and celebrity-driven furor that drives the "lesser" forms of entertainment, even as established (and this easily marketable) authors freely break the rules and write unreadable dross that's readily celebrated by a sycophantic corps of reviewers. But that would be cynical, and we're not cynics here, are we?

Anyway, I promised tension, and tension you shall get. After the jump, because I'm feeling puckish today.

But seriously, Aaron Baines Bellamy is a much more interesting teenaged sociopath than Willing Darkly. Any grindhouse hack can write a killer kid, that earns no points with me.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 12 (Agency, Reward and Sacrifice)

And then it all starts moving so very fast, and yet it's still such a tiresome, gray thing. Soon, we will come across the big time jump, launching us a full generation into the future, but for now we're trapped in this moribund hulk of a plotless universe. The author, perhaps dreaming of that future time when things will change and she'll no longer be shackled to this rotting beast, hurries forward, and yet the end is always one more page away. I can share this misery, the pain of filling out that agonizing stretch of uneven country road that runs between the thrilling start and the dramatic conclusion. Would that she given some thought to the lost souls reading these dismal passages and left some sign of life along the way.

...Sorry, I was rambling.

[Avery]...splayed the cash on the kitchen counter. "It's not the same quality of paper. The ink isn't right, either. It's brighter. Greener. Garish."

So begins six pages of old-fogey-friendly text of Avery expounding on the one dollar bill - it's design, it's symbolism. I remember a passage from The Handmaid's Tale in which the protagonist, living in a world of all electronic transactions, spoke of hard currency as totemic in nature. That was an interesting observation. This character, by contrast, just sounds very baked. Six pages - that's nearly one-sixth of this chapter. Probably around fifteen hundred words. In some of my books, that's a whole chapter.

A whole chapter on this image.

Now it's time for Lowell to whine about his life for a few thousand words. I'm so glad that Lowell is one of our POV characters, it's such a happy world inside his head.

Oh, it sounds like there's been another mini-timeskip. I think it's December now, I'm not really sure. So what happened during that little gap? Jarred showed up? That's great. Oh, we don't get to actually meet him? We just hear via Lowell what he did while he was there? So we've still never heard any dialogue from Jarred, and we don't know what he looks like, but we do know that he's making a killing in produce. I guess this means he solved that whole "held in thrall to scary farm workers" thing, huh? Will we hear how that turned out? No? Stellar.

Hey, have you been wondering what happened to the dinner party guests from Chapter 5? No? Well, too bad. They're doing fine. Tom and Belle are coasting on government money, while Ryan and Lin Yu are raking in money (that they can't actually spend because it's in bancors) through the masterful tactic of marking their book down to $0.99 on the future equivalent of KDP (And what do you know, people do still conduct electronic transactions). So that's the secret, is it?

Typically, too, Biersdorfer and his sexy Asian yes-woman spent little to no time in the US these days...

Lionel Shriver, I hate that you're doing this. You'll never understand why I feel such deep enmity over something so very small, but it's real. Perhaps one day I'll have a chance to go to Brisbane and give a whiny speech about you.

But then, an actual happening occurs. Lowell gets his back pay from the University, and goes to the supermarket, where he gets mugged at knifepoint. That's interesting, isn't it? A character getting shaken down by a pair of goons?

Perhaps their routine was sufficiently established that the duo was bored by it, for rather than focus on the business at hand, Lowell's new friends chatted between then about an all-agricultural mutual fund that was doing improbably well, then commiserated over their favorite sushi bar on Liberty Street in lower Manhattan having finally closed. Were they indeed former Wall Street financiers, the segue from one form of larceny to another could only have been graceful.

Oh, so it was just the setup for a joke? Ha ha ha. I am so wracked with laughter that I can scarcely type.

Now we're in Willing's head, trying to talk Nollie into letting the family use her books for kindling. I wonder what those books are about - you can never really tell from the titles. I guess that doesn't matter so much, much like this vignette.

Then there's another mini-timeskip, and now it's 2032. We've danced across almost half a year in just thirty-seven pages. I wonder what criteria were used to demarcate these chapters? They're not defined by time or POV or theme. This whole chapter just seems like a cluster of miscellaneous scenes that were too thin to stand on their own.

Our final scene here is Willing mugging a fifth grader for a bag of groceries. Yes, really. He uses a sock full of pennies to do it. It's not depicted anywhere, but I don't think this is his first attack because at some point during that last skip Willing must have taken Subtlety out to the countryside and beaten it stupid. This notion of poverty turning people into soulless predators eagerly devouring the weak is obviously despicable, but I'm sure it has some purchase with that same herd of literary swine who hail as "edgy" any novel with a sociopath for a protagonist.

Do you know what the final line in this chapter is? After Florence rejects the notion of getting a gun, Willing explains the need thusly:

"To protect us," Willing said, "from people like me."

The author's most famous work - earning her the full-throated and orgasmic praise of the brand-chasing pisshounds who stalk around at the edge of the literary world - concerned a homicidal moppet. That same work then generated a second wave of radiantly glorious praise from a different group of onanistic aesthetes when it was turned into a film. With that record, perhaps it was inevitable that she would try for a repeat performance. If pushing a button on this keyboard summoned praise and book deals, I'd press it a second time.

Oh, for an opportunity to push that button, even just once. But mine is only to analyze those results and wait until that $0.99 e-book to yield me a fortune like the characters in the story.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 11 (Badder Bitter Gutter)

We're past the halfway mark and still have no plot in sight. Instead, we've settled into a comfortable routine of observing and remarking upon the various indignities faced by a once-affluent family. Today's topics: Hoarding, waste disposal, criminality, elder care. I wish I could say that it got exciting but even the author seems a little bored at this point.

Avery, our faithful conservative mouthpiece, is continuing her slide into insanity (or possibly alcoholism as suggested in this chapter). She's now in the habit of buying whatever crap is on sale at local retail centers, regardless of its utility, because these things are "not made of paper, and they're not an abstraction." The ten people living in this house are now sharing the space with many boxes of weather-stripping, fungicide and sticky notes, among other things.

We learn from a newscast that this type of hoarding is becoming ever more common, and I'm just surprised that we still have newscasts. I can accept that the electrical grid and information networks are still functional, and I'll even swallow that the Mandible household is still able to pay for such things - the only things that have been specifically disrupted are water and shipping lines, so that's fair. What I can't quite accept is that the television news is still profitable enough for nightly broadcasts. So the whole nation is on the brink of destitution, but neither CNN or its advertisers have been affected? Shit, it sounds like journalism in the dystopian future is doing better than it is in the present.

Speaking of shit, that's our next issue - literally. You know how most post-apocalyptic novels skirt the issue of human waste management? Not The Mandibles, and this whole section really illustrates why this is so rarely addressed. To put it bluntly, this whole chunk of the chapter is gross. Sure, it adds veritas, but it's also uncomfortable to read. More importantly, I don't think this adds much. I've dabbled in this subgenre myself, but I never thought it would add much to describe how and where Storyteller takes a dump and what he uses to wipe (or, for that matter, where Pathfinder gets tampons, an issue that even Shriver seems a little squeamish about).

After that pleasant section, we jump forward a year. Yes, in the middle of the chapter, between two subsections. We're not told about the latest skip forward until the start of the next chapter, but it has to have happened here - the chapter starts in winter with Florence talking about Willing's fifteenth birthday in January, and then suddenly it's July and Willing is fifteen. Masterful.

Willing is the focus of the balance of the chapter. In the past eight-some-odd months, he's turned into a thief, and apparently a fairly skilled - or at least prolific - one. He learns about easy targets at Obama High (ugggggh) and then helps himself to whatever foodstuffs are easy to take. That a middle-class kid would resort to thievery is not surprising, but it is remarkable that he'd take to it so readily and without any guilt at all:

But Willing felt no need for rationalizations. He was refining a skill, like purifying water and building a fire - one that would later come in handy when thou-shalt-not-steal joined anachronisms like lactose intolerance. If Willing's descent to thievery signaled a broader corruption of the American moral order, the moral order would decay with or without him. The degradation of his mores was merely a matter of keeping up to date...

Between this and his terrifying affect, I'm thinking Willing might be a sociopath - not that this would stand out too much in this family. Incidentally, if you want to see what it really looks like when a nominally middle-class family turns to petty thievery, you can see a real-life example in Growing Up Empty by Loretta Schwartz-Nobel. Suffice it to say that people generally don't turn into amoral monsters just because times are tough, so there's nothing particularly realistic about the above. Then again, transgressive authors are very fond of sociopaths - being characters of very shallow personality, they're an easy dodge for a writer of limited talent but big ambition.

We get a brief update on the other kids. The Petes are doing badly, but that's not a shock. Savannah has started disappearing without explanation:

Yet she had a secret life, and that was irresistible. She was pretty, and it made him feel weak that this made any difference. Whenever he came home and she was gone, the air went flat.

Goddamn it, Willing, now you're perving on her? I think I understand why Savannah leaves so much - I too would want to spent as much time away from blood-related males as possible.

When he isn't stealing, Willing is going on errands to Carroll Gardens to visit the older relatives. Now, the state they're in...

In a dingy striped nightgown, strapped to a straight-back with her wrists duct-taped to its arms, Luella recalled a victim of the early electric chair.

...is something I'd just as soon not discuss. Instead, most of this section is Douglas speechifying about politics. This reminded me of how long it's been since we actually saw much in the way of politics in this story. The only policy we've seen enacted was back in Chapter 4, and we saw the results in Chapter 6. Within the narrative, that means that it's been a full two years since the President did anything. Presumably it's also been two years since anything of note has happened in the world - it seems like the contrivance of an ongoing nightly news broadcast is here to alert us to new complications, but all they seem to say on the news is that the economy still sucks.

Do you think they're talking about the election yet? This is right in the middle of 2031, and (as we all know far too well) that's right about the point in the neverending American election season when the representatives of Our Wonderful Newsmedia begin speculating on who might consider running for President. No word on that, though, but we do know that things still suck.

What else...oh, our old friend the past progressive tense makes an appearance:

"One of the primary responsibilities of government is to provide a functional currency," [Douglas] was declaring.

Hello past progressive tense. Not sure what you're doing tagging dialogue, but we're happy to have you here.

Oh, and Savannah's a prostitute now. Shriver just kind of slipped that in to the last few lines of the chapter, and no one really reacts at all. Ho hum.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 10 (Setbacks Never Bring Out the Best in People)

A.K.A. Make Those Chapter Titles A Little Longer, Shriver, I Can't Wait Until They Break Across Three Lines

So let's talk a little more about that whole "most realistic dystopian novel ever" thing. I've been making a lot of hay out a line in some of the promotional materials that took a shot at Blade Runner. I did this not because I'm particularly fond of Philip K. Dick but because of what it says about the author and the community from what she hails. Until recently, Serious Authors sneered at the entire dystopian subgenre - not just the novels themselves but the authors who wrote them and even (perhaps especially) the people who read them. The notion of any of them stooping to write in such a common and - heaven help us - popular style was unthinkable.

Lionel Shriver approached the subgenre in a manner much different than that of most non-Serious Authors. A science fiction or mainstream writer tackles the future-imperfect style because it gives him a chance to build an interesting world in which he can explore some personal concerns about the future - concerns that can actually be better understood against an alien backdrop that washes away preconceptions. Of course, any respectable genre hack knows enough to make the story entertaining first, otherwise the reader won't bother to finish it. By contrast, when a more highbrow author deigns to write in this style, they do so in the same way they tackle anything else - draining all the joy and excitement out of it in order to better focus on their grand ideas and artistic manipulation of the language.

That's the best explanation of Chapter 10, which is basically the worst Thanksgiving ever (complete with an outspoken right-wing relative). It's certainly not exciting - nothing of note happens in the whole chapter, it's just people bickering and thinking about how much they hate each other and hate being in close proximity in a too-small house. I can't deny that it's more familiar than the type of seen you'd see in a yarn by Philip K. Dick, or Bradbury or Atwood or anyone else. If you wanted to call it "realistic," I wouldn't argue with you. I would, however, argue that this chapter proves why "realistic" isn't always a good idea.

In this chapter, Avery and her family move into Florence's house - a house that, you'll recall, already contains quirky aunt Nollie and impossibly nice unlawful subleased tenant Kurt. You could potentially make this setup interesting. Hell, a particularly skillful writer - one with a special skill for dialogue and characterization and subplot management - could make an entire story this banal work. But as that would entail fewer speeches, that's not going to happen here.

On the plus side, some of the characters are developing personalities, which is to say that they're turning into bigger assholes. Avery deserves some kind of award for developing a mindset that is superficially open-minded but is really just extremely obnoxious:

Long insulated from misfortune by a successful practice and high-earner spouse, she felt as if she'd thrown off a quilt in an overheated house. A mildness had suffocated most of her adult life, and suddenly the late November air smacked sharp against her skin. Things seemed to matter again. It seemed to matter how she spent her time and what she told her children. Why, it was tempting to wonder whether, while the likes of the Stackhouses were musing idly over whether to cover the footstool in taupe or mauve, folks on the margins were living real lives, and making real decisions, and conducting real relationships, full of friction and shouting and moment - whether all this time the poor people had been having all the fun.

If you've been lucky enough to have never met a person like this, then just know that it doesn't take too long to realize that they've merely switched from hostile and chilly snobbery to a smiley condescension. They're still looking down on you, but now they're seeing you as a raggedy squirrel rather than a blob of gum on the sidewalk.

Many of the other characters are likewise becoming dicks, which is at least understandable given the circumstances. Dueling precocious teenagers Willing and Big Pete are acting like actual teenagers for the first time in the narrative. Lowell is now your creepy uncle who doesn't really talk to anyone and may or may not be writing a manifesto. Little Pete is now amazingly whiny. Nollie now wants to start fights, which we're told via infodump that is something she does I didn't see much of that in Chapter 9.

The big event in this chapter involves Lowell, Florence and Willing going to the supermarket, where some jerk takes the last container of oatmeal out of their cart and Willing swipes it back. Thrilling stuff. In fairness, the market - with its thoroughly raided shelves watched over by security goons - probably constitutes one of the best settings thus far, not that that's a high bar. And, returning to the section at the top, it's undeniably realistic. If you've ever visited a supermarket the day before significant snowfall, you've no doubt seen harried shoppers (motivated by the hyperbolic SNOWMAGEDDEON that now accompany any day with more than a few inches of accumulation) clearing out already picked-over shelves. But does it make you want to keep reading?

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 9 (Foul Matters)

We're coming up on the halfway mark of The Mandibles, which seems like a good time to say that I completely understand what Shriver is trying to do here. The dull family scenes, the plodding narrative, and the lack of a plot are all done to make the book feel more real to the intended upper-middle class urban audience. The notion that this book is at all "realistic" is absurd, but I can hardly deny that it is much more familiar than the works of a Phillip K. Dick or George Orwell or any of the recent popular dystopian novelists.

There are even a few moments where she pulls it off. It happens in Chapter 9, in fact. Sandwiched in between the usual ponderous speechifying, we get an interesting little scene from Adelphi, the shelter at which Florence works which is now packed well beyond capacity. Seeded throughout this scene are little touches that would have a lot of cachet with those privileged literary types:

Rats and roaches scuttled through the halls. Toilets overflowed. Drains backed up. Meal portions in the cafeteria were stingy. Fights broke out over dinner rolls. And still they came. Yet who arrived had changed. The slept-in clothes were from L.L. Bean. The strollers were wide-bodied, with snap-up plastic covers for inclement weather and expandable side pockets for shopping and snacks; baby blankets were cashmere.

That's an effective piece of imagery. One of the biggest problems faced by the dystopian novelist is that the real world is often more horrifying than anything they can dream up and make plausible. Here, Shriver sidesteps that problem by appealing directly to the reader - this is certainly not the worst of all worlds, but it is a situation far worse than anything that the audience could tolerate.

But maybe what makes it stand out is that this is a scene based on a character's observations. We're seeing this through Florence's eyes which is something of a novelty in The Mandibles. All of the action, the worldbuilding, the interesting moments that would normally be the heart of a novel all take place somewhere else while the main characters sit in one of a few predetermined sets and idly chat about economics. The result is that The Mandibles really feels like it takes place in a very tiny world, tiny and boring.

The Mandibles has a lot of problems but this is easily the biggest. I was drawn to this for the politics and the racially insensitive content, but the narrow focus is way worse. There are a lot of great writers who were racists, anti-Semites, misogynists and scumbags in their personal lives and who let that filth seep into their novels, and yet we still applaud those books because they're artfully written. In the end, the only unforgivable sin in literature is neglecting the craft.

With that out of the way, let's return to this boring-ass chapter, shall we?

Chapter 9 gives us our first face-to-face meeting with Kurt, Florence's unlawful tenant. Kurt is one of the few characters (outside of Savannah, Nollie, and I guess Luella) to have a distinct personality. He is the nicest, most understanding and most accommodating person on the planet, a cluster of traits that really set him apart given the jerks that we've been dealing with thus far. Of course, there's a reason for this - Nollie, now back in the States, wants to move in, and Shriver is going to make getting rid of Kurt as unpleasant as possible.

And, oh mercy, is Kurt willing to deal with a lot:

"If you could lend me a tarp, I hear the encampments in Prospect Park are [awesome]," he said with forced cheer. "Everybody singing, and playing instruments, and telling stories. Just like Woodstock! It could be a great experience. Something to tell the grandkids."

Kurt doesn't move out; Florence clears out the attic for Nollie, neatly avoiding a completely arbitrary problem that only existed in the first place due to an unnecessary character. Way to go.

Then Nollie shows up, and it turns out that she's a lot quirkier in person then she was over video chat. She dresses like a teenager, brings liquor and horsemeat as presents, and insists on bringing boxes full of her own books along for the ride. She is still a character in this book, though, so her first few scenes are lengthy discourses on complexity theory and whatever else the author felt like talking about here.

There are a few interesting odds and ends in here, some from Nollie and some from authorial mouthpiece Avery who stuck her head in just to annoy everyone. We finally learn what's been happening to Jarred, the forgotten relative whom I keep calling "Jessup" because we don't see him enough for me to remember his name. The workers Jarred hired to tend the ranch have moved in their families and more or less occupied the property, refusing to leave. Hey, that sounds interesting, doesn't it? Shame we don't get to see it. Even though we have an omniscient narrator and could wing on down to the ranch and sit on Jarred's shoulder any time we wanted, we're going to get news about his situation second-hand from Avery. Brilliant.

What can I say? I want to meet Jarred. The man's a survivalist - surely even this author could give him a distinct voice, right?

The chapter ends with Nollie heading out to speak with Mimi and find out if the old woman with the expansive estate is willing to help them. Again, we don't get to see this - Nollie relays an account to our POV characters once she returns. What Nollie sees is fairly surreal. Mimi's place has been overrun by squatters and is in a positively tragic state. The image I get in my head as I read Nollie's account is a drug den in an episode of Dragnet. Those of you who've never seen Jack Webb's conception of what the 60's drug culture looked like (a vision that was very trippy, but in an odd way) are really missing out. And while Shriver's version isn't nearly as square, it captures some of those same qualities:

"The elevator was broken, so I took the stairs. Some guy walking down bumped into me, hard, as if on purpose. His clothes where disheveled, with one exception: an immaculate white fedora...

...The peephole cover dropped, and spun around, as if someone flicked it. No one opened the door. I tried the bell again, and heard laughter on the other side. Youngish voices. Then the man on the stairs came back, carrying a bottle of gin. He shouldered me aside and said, 'Got a problem, lady?' He took out a set of keys. I recognized them. Looped with a red ORGAN DONOR tag. They had to have been my mother's That man didn't look like an organ donor, unless he was planning to donate someone else's...

...The place was a wreck. Trash, dried-up sandwiches, hypodermics on the floor. Someone sleeping or high in the hallway was rolled up in one of Momma's Persian carpets. A girl naked below the waist wandered past wearing the shreds of Momma's mink; that girl looked right at me and didn't see me...

Then the man in the fedora sauntered into the hall, down by the dining room, swigging from the bottle of gin. His eyes lit up, and he lunged toward me."

I'm supposed to cringing as I read this, my stomach churning as I ponder what might have happened to the nonagenarian in this building overrun by the scum of the earth. Really, though, I just want to hear from fedora man. True, he's a two-dimensional stereotype, but that's one dimension more than most of the characters we've encountered.

To be serious for a moment, though, I'd like to note that this way out suburban nightmare followed the one at the top of this post by just a few pages. I can only fathom that Shriver, having written the legitimately uncomfortable Adelphi scene, felt that it was much too subtle for her brilliant and visionary work of satire and then doubled down a few dozen times. That she left both in the book speaks to the fact that literary types never cut anything out. How else do you think they manage to produce those impressively thick tomes? Through content? Heaven forbid.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 8 (The Joys of Being Indispensable)

So I have an answer to a conundrum we observed last time. Old man Douglas's digs were suffering from serious neglect, so I speculated that a month or two must have passed between chapters 6 and 7. Turns out that I was way off - a full year has passed in the narrative. Yes, it's now 2030, and I have no clue as to when this mini-timeskip happened, but here we are. I guess I should update my titles, but if the author doesn't care enough to keep a clear and accurate accounting of time, then I'm giving myself permission to half-ass it on my end.

Anyway, we're back with Avery and Lowell and their horrible children for this chapter, and the parents are calling a family meeting to announce some changes are coming. Business is off for both of them (Lowell's salary is overdue and therapist Avery finds that many of her clients are cancelling) and that means sacrifice. Big Pete and Little Pete will have to go to public school - depicted here, as it so often is in the upper-middle class worldview, as a den of vipers - and Savannah might have to get a job instead of going to art school.

Savannah doesn't take this well. I didn't mention this in her initial appearance (which was dominated by her dad perving over her figure, something he does here as well), but she's probably the most realistically rendered character in the entire novel. Unlike Willing and Big Pete, Savannah isn't just a little adult. Shriver depicts her as the entitled, sheltered teenager that she should be, with lines like:

"Neither one of you has ever believed in my talent. You never wanted me to get an arts degree. Now you think you can browbeat me into something practical, like a degree in Mandarin."

 "When you have a bunch of kids, you're not supposed to throw up your hands and say, 'Sorry, we can't make any money, you do it!' My art teacher says I'm immense talented, and you're not going to ruin my life!"

The other characters are depicted as amateurishly as ever. Big Pete continues to talk like a financial advisor, while his brother...you know how literary novelists are supposed to be beyond the petty clichés that mar the work of their lessers?

It was [Little Pete] - cradling a crumple of bills, the allowance he'd been saving for a new violin bow. "I want to help," he said, offering his stash up to his father.

Yeah, I'm not seeing it.

We next get a section on Lowell's parents and...does it really matter? They were both scientists, they were both big frugal idiots, and they have names (Dave and Ruth) as does their other son (Aaron), so there's a good chance we'll be meeting these people later, too. Tremendous.

Cutting back to Avery and the kids, it seems like some anonymous stretch of time has elapsed - far less than a year, maybe a week, possibly not even that much. Is that lack of information annoying? Well, now you know what it's like to read and summarize it. This entire section is dull, merely an extension of the "family meeting" thing from the top of the post, and it's destined to become entirely moot once we cut back to Avery a few chapters from now.

I bring this section up for the sake of a single passage. You may recall that Avery's sons are not actually named Big Pete and Little Pete. This bit of 90's nostalgia is a personal gimmick so that I don't have to disseminate the awful names that Shriver actually gave them. But perhaps you are wondering - as I was - about the origin of these awful names? They remind me of Jennifer Government, a mediocre (if artfully marketed) near-future novel in which all the characters are named after the corporation for which they work. That's obviously not the case here, so why do they have such grating, awful names?

The boys when through phases of being close, but ultimately when she christened her two sons, Avery created competing search engines. (She was attached to their names, of course, which seems so fresh, quirks, and contemporary when she and Lowell chose them, and at this point she couldn't imagine the children called anything else. But perhaps it was the very products of trying too hard to be modern that were guaranteed to date...) (sic)

Oh for fuck's sake Shriver, you gave them those awful names. When they turn out to be grating and stupid and anachronistic and obnoxious, you don't get to pin the rap on a fictional woman.

We next take a brief stroll through the Washington National Mall circa 2029 2030, a zone of protests and graffiti. It's not terribly interesting, but there are some revealing moments:

Municipal authorities were unable to keep ahead of the graffiti that defaced...the border of the Lincoln Memorial's reflecting pool: THE BUCK STOPS. The abbreviated aphorism was chilling.

"This slogan I created is highly effective!"

The double-think reminded Avery of the Middle Eastern response to 9/11 when she was fourteen: the same Muslims who told pollsters the World Trade Center was toppled by the Jews also wore Osama bin Laden T-shirts in homage.

This is the kind of right-wing blogger mythologizing I've been excluding. The section preceding this was a throwaway set piece about stupid people protesting the rich. There's no connection between the two, it's just the wingnut author finding an excuse to remind us that the A-rabs are Bad Guys.

For our final segment, we follow Lowell to his job at the university and meet yet another character:

Ellen Packer was fat. Not pudgy or plump, but full-tilt, what're-you-lookin'-at fat, with a lack of apology that alone unsettled his expectations for this encounter. Of course, he'd never use the world fat in company, the judgmental adjective having joined the N-word...

All right, that's enough of that. Anyway, Chancellor Packer fires Lowell. You might wonder - as Lowell did - how it could be this easy to dismiss a tenured full professor. Ellen explains that tenure is an "anachronism" and the position's been eliminated entirely and if they didn't find an excuse to fire him then this tale of an upper class family's spiral into despair and destitution wouldn't work (I may have added one of those). Lowell has an understandably emotional response to this unexpected crushing blow:

"There are procedures for removing tenured faculty. But the protocol is elaborate - much more so than a single visit to the chancellor's office. Rare cases almost always involve accusations of sexual harassment or racial insensitivity."

Back in high school, a creative writing instructor informed me that the characters in my sci-fi/horror story were taking what was happening way too well. Yes, they were well-trained and hardened, but no one reacts that calmly and logically after discovering a bloody corpse. It's unrealistic behavior, and while an SF writer can get away with a lot of implausible or even outright impossible things, the character still need to act like actual people. Even at seventeen, I understood the one unbreakable rule of fiction - people need to act like people. They need to respond to crisis like people actually do - in ways that are messy and irrational and even unpredictable, but in ways that are understandable.

What I didn't understand, and wouldn't for many years, is that rules are for those filthy littlebrain commoners writing genre fiction. Once you've earned that "literary" label, you're free to have a character respond to a catastrophic setback by reciting verbatim a page from the employee handbook.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 7 (The Warrior Queen Arrives in Carroll Gardens)

Thoughts upon reading the chapter title:

Oh dear God. That "warrior queen" had better kill someone when she gets to Carroll Gardens. If this is a setup for another motherfucking speech, then I'm going to break something.

Can you believe we're a third through this thing? I can't. I can't believe it because we're still meeting characters. Spending this long on buildup is the kind of thing that peon genre writers are cautioned to avoid, but of course the literary master class is above such petty concerns as "pacing" or "not boring the reader to tears."

We're back with Carter who, once again, is driving out to Wellcome Arms to visit his father. Compared to Chapter 3 the place is in a state of neglect, which is curious since I didn't think that much time had passed. Shriver hasn't given us any definite indication as to the passage of time, so I assumed that all of these events (other than the flashbacks, of course) had occurred over a few days, maybe a week. But the degree of grime and disrepair on display makes it sound like there have been weeks if not months between chapters 3 and 7. Keeping track of time must be another one of those grotty little rules for genre writers.

Come to think of it, I don't even know what time of year it is in the novel. Just another thing Shriver has in common with Jerry Jenkins.

Douglas is getting run out of his home because he can't pay his bills, so I guess he was broke after all. Carter is here to take the old man and Luella...

"But I descend from the Warrior Queen of the Ivory Coast, Nana Abena Pokuaa! Who ruled the Baoule Kingdom of the Akans for thirty years! Dirty fears! I am royalty, and Mimi is common. Lemon ramen! From traders and shopkeepers. Raiders and peepers!"

...Let's not talk about Luella. Well, one thing - at least she doesn't speak in broken English.

We next meet Jayne, wife to Carter and mother to liberal Goofus Florence and conservative Gallant Avery. She's meant to be avaricious to the point where she blames her husband for not pushing harder for his inheritance. I say "meant to be" because, once again, this is all put across via narrative infodump. Jayne's actual dialogue makes her sound frustrated, but given that two people are moving into her house - one of them a profoundly disturbed woman in need of constant care - one can imagine an explanation other than anger at not having pallets of money.

Our last introduction is Nollie, Carter's sister, and Nollie is probably the person who's had the most characterization thus far. That's not to say that Shriver doesn't give her some informed attributes anyway, but at least in this case those attributes fit with her dialogue. She's sort of a spoiled, trend-hunting jet setter, one of the classic archetypes of the hateful rich. Nollie has been riding high on daddy's money and her one literary success and is clearly meant to be a disgusting person, though she's not that much worse than the rest of them.

Nollie shows up briefly via video chat (sorry, "fleXt") to explain that she won't be able to help. She's having trouble in France, where the locals are getting increasingly hostile to outsiders. Nollie's plan is to talk her way into a room in mama Mimi's sprawling estate, and she suggests that kissing up to Mimi could solve Carter's problem as well. But lest you think Nollie's appearance is entirely useless, she does have another function - talking about what a hellhole Europe is:

"At any given time, half the population is on strike, and what good is a great train system that never runs? They're apoplectic that they can't all retire at fifty-two. They all expect their child benefit, their gold-plated pensions, their token-pittance health care charges, their truncated workweek, and two solid years of unemployment at a salary most lawyers don't earn - all of which is a human right. Along with so many holidays..."

You get the idea, it's the whole conservative buffet. Oh, and in case you were wondering: Yes, there is a reference to "no-go areas." I'm going to level with you - this review is not a conclusive list of all the right-wing blogger tropes included in The Mandibles. If you've heard it from your loudmouth coworker or that high school friend whom you're obliged to be Facebook friends with, it's in this book. For brevity's sake, I've only been including the "plot" relevant ones.

But speaking of Mimi, she's another character we haven't met yet. We also haven't met Jarred, the prepper who was mentioned in passing a few times and has been so thoroughly ignored that I had to look up his name. Past the one-third mark and we're still not done meeting people. This book is truly a panoply of things that would incur infinite scorn had a filthy genre writer done them.

One more thing we learn in this chapter is that the "bancor," the coming world currency, is actually a Vladimir Putin project. Yes, Putin is in this story because we're really not even pretending that this is set a generation from now. As with every self-published political novel I've ever seen, the author brings in every bugaboo no matter how forced it is. The difference is that most of them don't get an audience to listen to them whine about their literary trials.

We end this chapter with a stab at pathos:

Deprived of his mighty financial cudgel, Douglas Mandible was just a very old man with a host of heartbreaking vanities, no influence, and scads of dead friends. Carter felt he could see his father clearly for the first time. There was no colossal edifice to rage against - just a half-broken man who needed his help...Whether or not Carter quite bought into the lyrics of this lullaby, he was finally able to like his father, and to like himself, too.

You know what would be nice? If Shriver had put this across in the dialogue. If, rather than filling page after excruciating page with didactic speeches about conservative fiscal policy, she had taken just a precious few sentences to have father and son talk with each other like father and son. I would have given her so very much credit if she would depicted one genuinely emotional moment, if she would have had her characters speak to each rather than at each other. If she could have put these feeling across through the small heartrending gestures that we humans recognize in other humans. If she could have shown me this, instead of telling me about it.

This is the practice of a neophyte writer afraid that she won't be able to capture those subtle, intimate moments, not a well-regarded literary author with a dozen novels and a film adaptation to her name. Yes, I know that within the world of True Literature, this kind of thing is accepted. Form and imagery and language tricks take priority over authenticity or connection to the characters. I can accept this. What I can never accept is this elitist notion that this clumsy linguistic trickery is somehow a higher form of writing.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 6 (Search and Seizure)

That chapter title makes it sound like something happens in this chapter, doesn't it? Well, it does...kinda.

Chapter 6 marks the resolution of that gold confiscation policy we heard about in Chapter 4. Littlebrain Florence finally remembers that, in fact, she does have gold in the house in the form of a pair of miniature goblets. As they have sentimental value, Florence decides to hide them and not report them. Turns out that the timing is sound, as a pair of Army goons show up to toss the place - a big sullen dude and a "subcontinental companion" with a "mincing" accent because we hadn't given any shit to Indians yet.

I suppose this section is meant to be tense, but it's not for a few reasons. One, I knew that Shriver wasn't going to have her favorite punching bag get arrested so early in the book. Two, I never bought it as a threatening situation. Yeah, the bigger guy is a jerk who knocks some things over, but that's it. This isn't exactly SWAT kicking down the door, rolling in flashbangs and shooting the dog. Hell, during my time living in an authoritarian state, I had my apartment searched by the cops under questionable conditions. It wasn't like this.

Some of you might be wondering about the logistics of doing a house-to-house search for gold trinkets. There were around 115 million households in the US in 2014. Assuming that nothing's changed, and a pair of goons can search a domicile in a mere ten minutes, then this task would take 18.4 million man-hours - not counting travel, paperwork/compliance, anyone they have to arrest, etc. Even with hundreds of thousands of people working overtime, it would still take weeks. Plus it's THE FUTURE! - they couldn't use a gold-detecting UAV or something like that to narrow this down?

"Think about it. All these houses. All the closets. All the floorboards and boxes. When stuff made of gold is so small. It's impossible. The house-to-house searches are ridiculous...They're trying to scare you. If they scare you enough, they don't have to find it."

Remember these arguments for your own novels, folks. It's okay to do something absurd if I acknowledge it. If this plot point makes no sense then it's not my fault for rushing the narrative, it's that the bad guys are dumb.

That last line was by thirteen-year-old Willing, by the way, because we didn't have near enough precocious kids in the last chapter. It turns out that he moved the gold from where his stupid liberal mother hid it and that's the only reason no one found it.

The rest of the chapter is Willing giving speeches. And I when I say "rest of the chapter," remember this: Chapter 6 is thirty-four pages long in the old fogey edition I'm using. The titular "search and seizure" only uses up twelve of those pages. Yep.

Where to even begin?

Writing dialogue for teenagers is hard. I'm not even talking about the window dressing that most neophyte writers sweat over, like lingo or fads. I'm talking about the challenge in writing a character that might have a grown-up intellect but lacks grown-up experiences. Ask most people what they were like in high school and they'll remember being dumb, but none of them can remember why they were dumb, and that's critical to writing teens well.

Some hacks try to sidestep this by making all of their teenage (and in some cases, younger) characters really precocious and erudite and gifted and then just treating them like little adults. That's not the way it works, though. The smartest thirteen-year-old on Earth is still thirteen. He still lacks perspective, and that's the critical factor in maturity.

But maybe that's beside the point. Yes, Shriver is clearly turning into all her young characters into unacknowledged geniuses so that she doesn't have to write them realistically. But I sense a different motivation in this case. I think Shriver hates her own liberal punching bag so much that she wants us to see this character humiliated by her own eighth-grade son. How else to explain shit like this?

FLORENCE: "Since I've heard we need regular inflation, like at least 2 or 3 percent, my whole life."

WILLING: "I know you have. You've been brainwashed." (Insert approx. 150 words on the history of the Pound Sterling)

I could expound at length on the psychology of a writer who despises her own creation, but Shriver's definitely going to give me more opportunities for that. Instead, I'd like to bring up something else, something I've sounded off on already but which is so much worse here:

"The city gets some funding from the federal government. That means your employers have access to the fake money. That's why you got such a big raise in March. And you'll keep getting raises. That's part of the problem. Lots of government payouts, like salaries, pensions, and benefits, are pegged to inflation. Meaning they have to keep printing more and more money to meet the budget, because they keep printing more and more money."

That's not dialogue. It's not how people talk, not in real life and not in well-characterized fiction. This is a speech, and no one likes speeches. The only time a speech is acceptable is when it's made by a villain. Villains make speeches because they're on the wrong side and have to rationalize what they're doing. When heroes make speeches, it only makes them sound like villains, and self-righteous villains at that.

But what really makes this a speech and not dialogue is that it's not a two-way street. You know how Florence responds to this?

"Nuts."

Once again with feeling: You can't prove anything through fiction. Yes, I realize that it's a lot easier to render one of your deeply-held arguments on the page than it is to hash it out in reality. In reality, the other prick gets to argue back. But in fiction, you can shove your argument in a character's mouth and have the other party stand there slack-jawed before responding with a hearty "You're right and I'm stupid." It's a lot easier. It's also lousy writing.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 5 (The Chattering Classes)

Shorter Chapter 5: Ungh.

Longer Chapter 5: Unnnnnnnnngh.

Sorry for that, but I'm going to have to stretch this post a little bit. Chapter 5 details a dinner party with authorial mouthpiece Avery and some of her insufferable faux-intellectual friends. There's still no plot, but there's also no worldbuilding here. Chapter 5 is complete filler.

Go figure, I didn't think I'd ever have cause to use that stupid little banner again.

Insofar as anything happens, this chapter introduces a whole bunch of completely forgettable characters. First we've got the children, starting with Savannah:

Savannah was one of those girls who managed to make brown hair seem exotic. He trained his eyes away from her long bare legs; she was a knockout, she had powers...

This is from her father's POV, by the way. I'd say something about that, but I won't because it's obvious that the shock artist...sorry, "transgressive literary novelist" wanted me to have a reaction and I'm not giving her the pleasure. Ditto a line a few pages later about his ten-year-old son being "ideal prey for pedophiles."

Speaking of which, we also have the two sons...ugh...Goog and Bing. Seriously, those are the kind of "clever" names that a high school NaNo writer would dream up after too much chronic. In fact, I'm not using those names anymore. You'll never see them again, not in this series. Until further notice they are "Big Pete" and "Little Pete" because if we're going to have pointless pop culture references in this thing, then it'll be on my terms, dammit. Not that it matters since they basically share a personality and are addressed as a single contiguous unit most of the time.

Next up are the party guests, each of whom gets a paragraph-length intro so unfortunately we'll probably see them again. Here's a capsule summary because I can't bring myself to care about 3/4 of this group:

• Ryan, the token pointy-headed liberal academic. He'll be the one setting up smashes for Avery. Beyond that I have nothing to say about him.
• Tom, a lawyer with the Justice Department and the fiscally conservative counterpart to Ryan. In lieu of a genuine voice, Tom has a Maryland accent, so occasionally Shriver will follow his dialogue by transliterating some of his words into their unreadable accented equivalent (i.e. "tear-ble, criminal bidnessmin").
• Belle, an oncologist who doesn't say enough for me to have an opinion on her.
• And finally my personal favorite, which is to say the one that made me cringe the most:

Half-Chinese, Lin Yu Houseman had reaped the best of both worlds - with the smooth, purified lines of a classic Asian face, but a Westerner's slender nose and wide eyes...Barely thirty, she combined that hint of the orient that fifty-ish men like Ryan found sexy...Intellectually as well, she'd melded the diligence of an Asian upbringing...with the earnest political passion of the East Coast liberal.

That's obviously truncated, but you get the idea - Lin Yu's entire description focuses on how very Asian she is, as thought you couldn't guess from the name (curious for a woman born in the United States with a Western surname presumably inherited from her father, but that's a small thing). It's nowhere near as inflammatory as the content about blacks or Hispanics, but it took me aback all the same and those of you who've heard me talk about my life can probably guess why.

This is the kind of trope that makes me deeply uncomfortable and just a little angry, which is a shame because it's pretty common. A lot of older white male authors have a latent Asian fetish that they work through by introducing nubile Asian women that their self-insert protagonists can bang. Literary authors are not immune - I'm looking at you, Paul "Marco had at last set foot in China" Auster. This being a female author, the purpose is not sublimated fetishism but appears to be twofold: Conventions of the form (which absolutely exist even in the mushy world of True Literature) and for the utilitarian purpose of having someone to talk about China, because we clearly need a Chinese character to do that.

Did that seem pointless and overlong? Well, it was, but in my defense I am really reaching to find things to highlight here. The whole chapter is just six self-important assholes arguing over economics using the same talking points you've seem dozens of times in comment sections, plus a few especially dismal strawmen (Ex: The liberal characters arguing that "your money does belong to everybody"). This is a chapter made to be skimmed. Which isn't to say there aren't any chunky bits in here. For example, this passage, spoken by a newcomer to the scene. See if you can guess who said it:

"Alvarado is playing a game of brinkmanship...He figures if he can deprive even American allies access to the US market, he can strangle the baby currency in its crib. But the American market is smaller comparatively than it used to be. So the question isn't whether we can live without them, but whether they can live without us."

If you guessed that this was said by the fifteen-year-old Big Pete, then congratulations, you're obviously familiar with the skillful hand that many well-regarded authors use to characterize teenagers. Shit, this is starting to give me White Noise flashbacks.

There's one other thing, and it's been bothering me for a while. Here's what started me thinking about it:

"Yup, all smuggled goods are impounded," Lowell said. "I gather these confiscations of cash are getting immense (sic) emotional, too. Fainting. Shouting matches..."

"...But what gripes me is that hundred-dollar limit. You can't get a taxi home from the airport with a hundred bucks." 

In light of the new restrictions on capital, business types are now resorting to taking briefcases full of cash onto airplanes like they're doing drug deals.

Because that's the best way they can think of to move large quantities of money.

If you're familiar with Fred Clark's Left Behind series (which I assume is all of you), then you'll know that one of the most enlightening aspects is the analysis of ways in which the LaHaye and Jenkins dystopia a) isn't all that dystopian and/or b) makes no practical or narrative sense. Clark might point out something like this: The Mandibles is set in THE FUTURE! No one has books anymore because it's THE FUTURE! All the cars drive themselves because it's THE FUTURE! No one smokes cigarettes because it's THE FUTURE! And yet, in THE FUTURE! people conduct all transactions with paper money and checks, which is why all these rich guys and gals are hiding money by moving cash around film noir style and using bills to pay for presumably driverless cabs.

Oh, there's an excuse: Shriver frequently refers back to the "Stone Age" to explain why people either don't trust electronic transactions or even aren't allowed to make them. But come on - this is a novel about international finance, are we supposed to think that it's being handled with ledgers and postal mail? Of course not, and the narrative even acknowledges this. We know that firms still carry out high-volume trades over networks. For that matter, while people apparently no longer trust point-of-sale technology, they do trust ATMs, which are mentioned several times. And yet the Masters of the Universe can't think of a way to hide their assets without shoving it all into their coat pockets and walking onto commercial flights while whistling.

This is supposed to be The Most Realistic Dystopian Novel Of All Time - far more plausible than anything that genre hack Philip K. Dick ever dreamed up. Hell, Shriver even takes a shot at other dystopia and science fiction writers in this chapter:

"Because when [2001: A Space Odyssey] was written, 2001 was in the future. Like 1984 - which seemed far away when Orwell wrote it, but then the real 1984 came and went, and it wasn't nearly as horrible or alien or sad as he predicted. (For fuck's sake, Shriver - Ed) Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present."

Subtle.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 4 (Good Evening, Fellow Americans)

This is going to be a long post with a lot more quotes than the last few. I could have broken it up but the post titles are already unwieldy enough without adding "The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 4 (Good Evening, Fellow Americans) Part I" to the mix, so we'll try to get back to a reasonable length starting with Chapter 5 (but no promises).

Chapter 4 gives us our first bit of conflict, or at least a convincing simulacrum thereof. Here, we're introduced to President Alvarado. Yes, we weren't truly doomed until we elected a Mexican (or "Lat," to use this book's terribly clever patois) President. Much of the chapter is taken up by a Presidential speech; it's a respectable simulation of an actual State of the Union speech, and I'll spare you the specifics in favor of the broad strokes. Here are the policy changes he announces:

• It is now illegal for an American to possess or trade in "bancors" (the international currency mentioned in the previous chapter). In fact, it's treasonous.
• Americans and American companies can't send more than $100 overseas until further notice.
• All gold reserves - up to and including jewelry - are seized by the federal government in exchange for "compensation by weight."
• Gold exports are prohibited.
• All Treasury bills, notes, and bonds are now void and will not be honored (a policy referred to as a "reset").

Not being an expert on fiscal policy, I couldn't tell you if any of these are justified, feasible, or even constitutional - the last one seems illegal, and the first one is simply insane. But as I said so long ago about Agenda 21, any respectable hack writer of political fiction can always claim that the absurd and/or illegal behavior of the government is merely proof of how stupid and/or corrupt the opposition is.

The rest of this fairly long chapter focuses on Florence and what a silly dunderheaded liberal she is. A few samples:

"And that newfangled money, well - I wouldn't know a 'bancor' if it bit me on the butt. Do we ever take 'bancors' to Green Acre to buy cereal? No."

"Off the top of my head, I bet that 'reset' you told me about will keep our taxes down. That's good for us."

"First off, this president borrowed hardly anything. He inherited the debt from other presidents, who couldn't stop rescuing jerkwater countries that only ended up hating us for our helping hand."

I could compare Shriver's writing style to those employed by any number of criminally overrated lit-circle darlings, but I have a feeling that, like me, she was inspired at least in part by the antifascist classic It Can't Happen Here. They share a number of elements, some not so positive (i.e. the affected speechifying). But here we see a very clear comparison. Sinclair Lewis peppered the opening chapters of his novel with intellectual characters airily dismissing the threat posed by violent populist Buzz Windrip with a simple "it can't happen here." Even when Windrip's paramilitary forces start hunting down dissenters, they're still not convinced that it's anything but a momentary disturbance.

It's not working for me here, though. Maybe it's because Florence is so underdeveloped, or because she's simply not as absurd as any of Lewis's intellectuals. Hell, maybe it's because Shriver seems to be mocking me here.

So by now, you might be wondering how one of the Mess'cans managed to get elected. In THE FUTURE! the Twenty-Eighth Amendment scrapped the natural born citizen requirement, and this never would have happened were it not for Arnold Schwarzenegger running for President. How timely! This chapter is studded with "satire" like this - pop culture call-outs that are just dated enough to give it that "stuck to the bottom of the wastepaper basket" feel. Examples:

On the ramp, they all agreed that the hardest part was not knowing what had happened. On every side, other pedestrians volunteered their sure-fire theories...Harold Camping's notorious prediction that the Rapture would arrive on May 21, 2011, was only off by thirteen years, nine months, and fifteen days.

"...Whatever happen to that idea of them 'wealth taxes' a while back? Platform Colbert run on."

Florence wasn't the only one who attributed the Terminator's surprise defeat to the eleventh-hour incumbency gimmick of nominating Judith Sheindlin - a.k.a. "Judge Judy" - to the Supreme Court.

Again, I hope you're laughing.

We're then treated to a flashback to Florence's experiences during the (ugh) Stone Age, which plunged the neighborhood into darkness while she was navigating a Bed, Bath and Beyond. That was when she met Esteban, and it wasn't exactly romantic:

Clutching her son's hand, she hadn't yet entered the world in which refusing to relinquish their new wicker laundry hamper was ridiculous...When a muscular Mexican attempted to take it away from her, she assumed he was undocumented and a thief, using the pandemonium to hustle.

You see, like most liberals, Florence is a hypocrite who says the right things while hiding a secret racist fear of all nonwhites. I just thought I'd lay that out in case the section opening "she'd put herself on notice that [she] was a racist" was a little subtle.

Back in the present, we follow Florence to her job at the Adelphi Family Residence. We get a chance to meet some of the staff and residents, and...oh dear God no...

What, you telling me there a shared baffroom? Where Dajonda gonna sleep, she sixteen - ain't she got a room with a door? What do you mean we can't have no microwave? Them sheets, they stained.

I had to type that.

"I love the pitcher of all them rich folk having to cough up they big piles of gold. Had my way, wouldn't get no 'compensation' for it, neither. Somebody got to level the playing field."

Don't call me racist.

"'Sides, I don't see why the gubment ever pay anything back. Pass a law say, 'We don't got to.' Presto. No more loan."

This would be the "Afri-merican" dialect that's "only partially discernible to honks," and if you ask me it's actually worse than Luella. Yes, the black-woman-as-pet is far more viscerally repulsive, but you could at least try to defend that on the grounds that it's not depicting Luella as subhuman because she's black, that it's coincidence. There's no coincidence here. All of the black characters we meet in this chapter are lazy and ignorant and speak a broken form of English that's not shared by the white or even Hispanic characters.

Oh, also we're introduced to Kurt, the downstairs neighbor who's not important enough to show up. If that felt tacked on, well...so is Kurt.

We're almost done here, but I'd like to point out something small that jumped out at me. The end of this chapter contains a typesetting error:

There's too much space at the end of this line, a small but noticeable flaw. I did this kind of thing for a living for a too-brief period of time, so I think I can explain what happened: Text in print books is right justified, leaving that nice smooth right edge. Even the most basic of word processors will adjust the spacing between words to make this work, and most can be set to split words with hyphens. But throw in one of these obnoxiously long hyphenated phrases and the computer gets confused - it sees one giant word that it can't break. This might not have been a problem in the standard edition, which could explain why it was overlooked.

This is why I'm beseeching any real or would-be authors out there - don't do anything this obnoxious. There are ways to fix this (increasing the spacing between letters, for example), but it never quite looks right and it's a headache for the sap who has to do it. Have a little mercy for the peons who have to work on your literary masterpiece.

The Mandibles: 2029, Chapter 3 (Waiting for the Dough)

In our last meeting:

Is that a plot I see pulling into the station?

Short answer? No, we've got a while to go before we get a plot.

Chapter 3 introduces a few more characters: Carter, the father of liberal punching bag Florence and not-a-mouthpiece Avery; and Douglas, a.k.a. "Grand Man," the rich patriarch. The scintillating action in this chapter involves Carter driving out to an assisted living facility to speak with Douglas about his inheritance. Thrilling stuff. I think my favorite part was when Shriver dedicated one-quarter of this chapter to Carter thinking about how disappointed his life has been because his rich father hasn't died yet.

Okay, Carter isn't that unlikable, but that's mostly because - like every other character we've met thus far - he's underdeveloped and lacks a distinct voice. He's meant to be trapped in some sort of strained and neverending adolescence due to his obsession with his inheritance but this is strictly an informed attribute, one mentioned in an internal line but never put across in the narrative or dialogue.

And by "dialogue" I obviously mean series of speeches, but we'll get to that.

There's more worldbuilding and background here. We finally learn that the Stone Age/Stonage is basically a Y2K-like event that shut down the internet (presumably just a few specific networks but that's beyond the scope of the narrative) for a few weeks in 2024. Later chapters suggest that this event was as critical as 9/11, though it doesn't seem like it had any lasting effect and Carter described it as pretty uneventful.

Now we get to Douglas and his nauseatingly plush digs. Douglas was once the head of a literary agency and keeps a lot of valuable books on hand, even though no one has books anymore (because it's THE FUTURE!, in case you forgot). Oh, and there's one other thing about Douglas that I was supposed to mention...

"So how's Luella?"

That's the one.

You may recall that it was a criticism of this character that triggered Shriver's transformation into one of her own self-pitying characters. Having read this chapter, it's easy to see why. Luella is Douglas's second wife, but we know very little about her personality or appearance save the fact that she's black (sorry, "Afri-merican") and suffering from dementia. Also this:

Relieved of his wife's day-to-day care by Wellcome staff, Douglas now modeled his marriage on the relationship of master and pet. He fed Luella treats, to which she responded with the human equivalent of a tail-wag - when she remembered to chew and swallow...

The wealthy white man has a profoundly disturbed black woman as a human pet. Yep.

It's pretty clear that this whole section was one of those cheap shock elements that's referred to as "transgressive" when it appears in a literary novel or an arthouse film. Shriver put this in so that people would consider her outrageous and edgy and then threw a fit when someone pointed it out. That sounds about right.

The rest of the chapter is filled out with endless eonomic speechifying courtesy of Grandpa Douglas, most of which is meant to hint at something dire: There might not be any money left, and even if there is it might soon be worthless thanks to the "bancor." The short version is that the bancor is the sum total of every hyperventilating right-wing prediction about the Euro but I'm sure we'll be able to go into depth in future chapters. For now, the message is: The family is fucked. And I care because they solicit my sympathy, much more than they usually do in genre science fiction.

One more shot before we move on:

"The Fed chief was emphatic. Krugman said the limits were for a few days, max."

Hurr hurr, stupid Paul Krugman thinking he understands the economy just because he won a Nobel prize. Truly a biting and incisive satirist, that Lionel Shriver. And this is not the end of it - expect to see more People Liberals Like showing up in future chapters.