Mania
A Novel
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
"A fantasy that hews uncomfortably close to today’s reality, where facts and the truth are selectively recognized at increasingly subjective whims . . . . The specifics of Mania are the stuff of bleeding satire, but the novel’s guiding concept cuts close to the bone with no anesthesia. Shriver isn’t one to tip-toe around her subjects. She still knows how to poke the bear. In this case, the bear is us.” — Boston Globe
Set in a parallel yet all too familiar near past, a brilliant subversive novel about a lifelong friendship threatened by culture wars, from the New York Times bestselling author.
In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is "the last great civil rights fight." Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word (“stupid”) and encouraged to report parents who use it at home.
A college English instructor, the constitutionally rebellious Pearson Converse rejected her restrictive Jehovah’s Witness upbringing as a teenager, and so has an aversion to dogma of any kind. Made impotent in the university classroom, she’s also enraged by the crushing of her exceptionally bright children’s spirits in primary school. Fortunately, she enjoys the confidence of a best friend, a media commentator with whom she can speak frankly about her socially unacceptable contempt for the MP movement. Or at least she thinks she can . . . until one day the political chasm between the two women becomes uncrossable, and a lifelong relationship implodes.
With echoes of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, told in Lionel Shriver’s inimitable and iconoclastic voice, Mania is a sharp, acerbic, and ruthlessly funny book about the road to a delusional, self-destructive egalitarianism that our society is already on.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shriver (The Mandibles) suffuses this cogent tale of a toxic friendship with contrarian political commentary. The story begins in an alternative version of 2011, as the misguided Mental Parity movement takes over the U.S. Its adherents seek to eliminate distinctions between the "cerebral elite—academics, doctors and lawyers, scientists" and the hoi polloi. Words like stupid are verboten; variations in people's intelligence are explained by "processing issues." Shriver's protagonist, Pearson Converse, is highly skeptical of the Mental Parity line. Not only does she teach in Voltaire University's English department, she also chose the sperm donor for her two elder children based on his high IQ (she's "bored" by her youngest, age six, who was conceived naturally). Meanwhile, her best friend, the sleek, confident Emory Ruth, appears to be riding the "craze of intellectual egalitarianism" to advance her television career, even as the constitutionally defiant Pearson finds herself in increasingly precarious positions as the movement grows more sinister in reach. Shriver devotes a bit more time than necessary to explaining the nuances of the Mental Parity movement; the novel's best parts concern the prickly, sinuous relationship between Pearson and Emory. Those sympathetic toward Shriver's anti-groupthink message will find much to enjoy.
