Posted On: Monday - April 22nd 2024 10:37AM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Books Totalitarianism
In the interest of laziness, I'll leave it to the reader to go to either this post or our Books topic key to find links to Peak Stupidity writing/reviews on other works of Mrs* Shriver.
This always happens! I can't do this review in one post. However, as opposed to writing a 6-part review along the sequence of the book as with The Mandibles, this post will be a basic review without the major criticisms. I'll leave those for the 2nd post. Then, I'll get to the political stuff. Oh, boy ...
The story in the dystopic novel Mania is of American and White-Western society being in the grips of a hard-core flavor of Wokeness** and the end results thereof. While one might associate Wokeness with race/ethnicity, sex roles, genderbending stupidity, and whatever else they can come up with, the story in Mania is of one particular flavor, intelligence. "Mental parity", per the novel, is a form of Wokeness in which the whole concepts of stupidity and its converse, intelligence, are anathema to polite society, in order that nobody be offended. As I'll get to in the criticisms, this is not really a separate flavor of Wokeness from what we have now. It's well connected to the racial flavor, so the concept, rather than being read as an absurdity, is something we all see presently to a degree. Whether the author meant to use the seemingly ridiculous MP (Mental Parity) as a "dog whistle" - haha, a term she destroyed early in the book - for race/ethnicity wokeness or just a stand-alone extension of what she sees around her is a question I think I know the answer to. (Later.)
Instead of a near-future dystopia, as in The Mandibles***, Mania is mostly alt-recent-history with just 4 years of the near-future. I don't know why it was necessary to do it this way, but my guess is that Mrs. Shriver wanted to show that this style Wokeness has been building since 2011, per her story, or per her own noticing, and this way the ending could end up being pretty much NOW.
The first section, [Alt-2011****], has an introduction to all the main characters. The narrator doesn't have a funny foreign name this time, for a change, just a funny American name: Pearson Converse. She (yes, again) is a mother of 3 kids, Darwin, Zanzibar, and Lucy. Wade is her long-term live-in "partner", although they had their youngest, Lucy, together, they'd never gotten married.
In this beginning, the Woke program is already well-developed. The story starts with the bright son Darwin having gotten in trouble in school for his use of language. Words like "stupid" (yeah, this site would be in TROUBLE), "dumb", and also the converse, "bright", etc. are offensive by this point. The quickly growing mental parity movement, the "last great civil rights fight", says that people should be treated equally regardless of their intelligence.
I can see that Mrs. Shriver could have picked up on the idea from seeing the recent dropping of SAT/ACT requirements and other standards for university admissions recently. (Some have been reinstated.) It's almost as if Lionel Shriver has been reading Steve Sailer. Here too, regarding the "new rules", as expounded by Emory on page 8:
Don't ever mention, or fish for, IQ, obviously, but also SAT and ACT scores or grade point averages. You're even meant to keep your trap shut about how well you did on newspaper quizzes on the major stories of the week. And forget asking about a performance on Jeopardy!Haha! That's quite uncanny, but it must be canny because, as I'll get into, I'm starting to think that Mrs. Shriver wouldn't get caught dead reading Steve Sailer.
In the '11 section, it's still OK for this family and (some) friends to make fun of and decry the stupidity of this MP Wokeness at home. However, they've already realized that careers and other prospects can be ruined if one isn't extremely careful to go along with it in public.
I'm going to skip most of the narrator's, Pearson Converse's, background as described in the (note, NOT "alt") section [1972 - 2010], because it seems to me unrelated to the whole rest of the story with the exception of one point. I'll get to that also in the next post.
I will mention here the important background, which includes Pearson's story of her 2 older kids, Darwin (boy) and Zanzibar (girl) having been conceived by sperm donations.***** Both were from a high IQ Japanese man. This, with Lucy's normal procreation from Wade and Pearson, serves the story of the book very well. Lucy, being not all that bright, is extolled for this - well, this gets worse - and the very bright older kids have their bright prospects dashed.
Moving along finally, in the sections that cover Alt-'12, Alt-'13, Alt-'14, Alt-'15, Alt-'16 and the retrospective Alt-'23, this Wokeness program builds, affecting all of American society, as the story covers the plight of our narrator, the 3 children, Wade, and Emory. I think Communist style programs like that CAN move very quickly, as described here. In the novel the PM movement goes from watching what one says and the cancelling of all kinds of books, movies, and TV shows due to the antics of anyone stupid or bright, or who can be seen as such, to more sinister things like the removal of children from the home for offensive speech. Anyone who is not completely down is suspect. This sounds eerily familiar...
In this novel and in reality, most people try to get along in life without trying to fight the movement, whether true believers or not, and it's often hard to tell. The latter point is a major part of this story, involving the bright, beautiful, and composed, NPR/CNN reporter Emory. Careers are ruined, and careers thrive, depending on whether one has the innate desire to fight the movement or to go along like a Red Guard.
I suppose a literary person would be most concerned about the speech/writing aspects of the new movement that prevent discrimination ANYWHERE based on intelligence. (An employer will get sued otherwise.) However, this movement includes, of course, the hiring of, say, engineers and doctors, the latter being another sad part of this story. All of this is a slightly different explanation for the crisis of competency in our reality today that Peak Stupidity has written about many times.****** As one would expect, a country under a Communistic mindset like this would not last very long economically. The high-level domestic and foreign political aspect of this is something that the author is simply not very good at, as this was NOT writing of what she knows.
The big struggle in Mania is also within Pearson Converse's mind, as she tries to understand the part of her personality that makes her resist the madness to the detriment of her job and family. Don't get me wrong - I'm with her. I also see, as the character does, that small acts of resistance often accomplish nothing and just get us into bigger and bigger trouble. That doesn't stop us.
Should our goal be just to hold on until we get to the other side? Who will determine what the other side looks like? Will our souls be in one piece when we get there? These are questions generally posed in this novel.
Now, as to the readability of this book and such, I'll just write a little bit here with the rest in the next post. It's a fairly short book - 4-8 hours should do you, unless you are "the S-word". With the author being a woman, just as with The Mandibles being a prepper novel with only the female view - nothing on rigging up electrical generation, etc. - this one has way, way too much of that feeeelings, deep womanly conversations stuff that is a big part of the story. It was too much for me. I hadn't come up against this while reading the other 3 Lionel Shriver books I've read.
Still, there are good plot twists even as the mental parity Wokeness goes inexorably in one direction... well, I won't spoil the story for you here. Mania is worth reading, especially for those few non-Peak-Stupidity-reading folks who really don't know what we're in for with these Communist movements. They don't just stop when they've reached some advertised "goal". Societal destruction is the end goal. This is usually unadvertised.
In the next post on this book, my criticisms will go from quibbles to important failings. The latter will show that I am no longer the Lionel Shriver fan I was, I'm really sorry to have to say.
* For the record again, Mrs. Shriver's first name Lionel does not indicate that she has transitioned, unless one means a transition from Brooklyn, NY lefty to Brooklyn, NY lefty who at least sees the light in some places. She was Margaret Shriver until 15 y/o or so, when, considering herself a tomboy, she decided she wanted to be named Lionel. I don't know if this had anything to do with n-gauge train sets or not.
** Peak Stupidity describes Wokeness as Political Correctness on steroids with the long arm of the law behind it.
*** What I really liked in that one was that the financial stupidity story showed a century-metered rhyming of history. The full title is The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. The actions of the US Gov't were something of a repeat of the Roosevelt Great Depression 1.0 era, but Americans were no longer the self-sufficient, hardy, and united people they were a century back. Things went much farther than last time.
**** I'll continue saying this until HALF the century is over, I guess, but we're one quarter way into this one. Can we drop the "20" now, dammit?
***** I also mention this to note that, coincidentally, a week before I read this book, I thought of writing a post on this same topic of sperm donations and nature v nurture. It'll be here eventually.
****** See Hotel Haiti - on Competence - - Harvesting the fruits of a half-century of Affirmative Action - Part 5 - - Demographics to DIE
Comments:
Moderator
Tuesday - April 23rd 2024 3:23PM MST
PS: Yes, Lionel Shriver was very good on the Kung Flu and the vax. I wrote a couple of posts about that:
https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=2071
"Most Frightened Nation Status"
and
https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=2259
"Ya gotta like Lionel Shriver!"
It's really hard for me to describe exactly what turns me off about Mrs. Shriver's politics in this book (alone), but I'll try in the post. OTOH, I don't recommend this book that highly. It's not terrible though...
https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=2071
"Most Frightened Nation Status"
and
https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=2259
"Ya gotta like Lionel Shriver!"
It's really hard for me to describe exactly what turns me off about Mrs. Shriver's politics in this book (alone), but I'll try in the post. OTOH, I don't recommend this book that highly. It's not terrible though...
Moderator
Tuesday - April 23rd 2024 3:18PM MST
PS: Mr. Hail, firstly, regarding the ngram graph: The big peak must be due to the release of the movie "We Need to Talk about Kevin". (Our quick comparison of her book and the movie is here:
https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=1962
She has written - can't find it right now - that both the book and the movie brought her out of obscurity. The book is from ~ '02.
The new rise in her fame or familiarity, at least, must be due to her efforts both in writing and in talks to warn people about the wokeness and, yes, the immigration invasion too. I had thought she is real force for good, and maybe she still is. It's just that this book, where you KNOW the politics in this one as thought/spoken by the narrator have some real flaws.
I will respond to you here too, later on today hopefully, but I also am right in the middle of that criticism post. Most of the criticisms are not about the book itself but about a real let-down from Mrs. Shriver.
Anyway, I will address some of what you wrote here in the post or in a separate one, not about the book at all necessarily.
https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=1962
She has written - can't find it right now - that both the book and the movie brought her out of obscurity. The book is from ~ '02.
The new rise in her fame or familiarity, at least, must be due to her efforts both in writing and in talks to warn people about the wokeness and, yes, the immigration invasion too. I had thought she is real force for good, and maybe she still is. It's just that this book, where you KNOW the politics in this one as thought/spoken by the narrator have some real flaws.
I will respond to you here too, later on today hopefully, but I also am right in the middle of that criticism post. Most of the criticisms are not about the book itself but about a real let-down from Mrs. Shriver.
Anyway, I will address some of what you wrote here in the post or in a separate one, not about the book at all necessarily.
E.H. Hail
Tuesday - April 23rd 2024 12:20AM MST
PS
-- on Lionel Shriver's place in history --
Let me toss this in for now:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Lionel+Shriver&year_start=1980&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=0
This is an "Ngram" graph of appearances of the supposed rate of appearances of the text-string "Lionel Shriver" in a large-and-supposedly-representative corpus of English-language text by publication year.
You see that the name first appears in 1986/87. That happens to be the year of her first novel, and the year she emigrated from the USA to the UK (in the early 2020s she then left the UK for Portugal, a development covered here at Peak Stupidity at the time).
After 1987 name coasts along for a while, and she has a moderately successful woman-of-letters thing going on. It comes in the mid-2000s that she really "hits the big time."
There are significant jumps in appearances of the text-string "Lionel Shriver" in the Google-Ngram English-2019 corpus in these years: 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010. The peak is 2010-11.
If you look at her Wikipedia picture, supposedly from 2006, she can pass for considerably younger than her age at the time. Age 49 in that picture, how much younger could she pass for in that pic? I'll leave it to Peak Stupidity Female Photographic-Evaluation team's experts to judge that one. But she clearly has a long window of the power of attractive non-agedness, and right during the 2000s decade, so critical for her.
For 2012-2018, she fades back to a new higher equilibrium, equal to about the level that had held in 2008-09 (but down about 60% off the 2010-11 peak). Then in year 2019 comes another significant upward-jump.
Steve Sailer mentioned Lionel Shriver in two entries in the late 2010s: "How Mass Immigration Drives the Housing Crisis" (March 2018), in which he called her a "conservative-leaning American lady novelist"; and "Lionel Shriver on 'the Human Tide'" (Feb 2019).
Peak Stupidity (blogging since late 2016) first devotes an entry to Lionel Shriver in early February 2020, back in the pleasant days before the Big Mistake. Lionel Shriver was on the right side, being against the Big Mistake (i.e., the mistake of a "mandated" embrace of a social-hysteria for a few years). In the Feb 2020 entry at this website, Peak Stupidity claimed that John Derbyshire had been blasting his trumpet proclaiming her greatness, inspiring the Peak Stupidity Book Procurement Division to track down her latest novel, The Mandibles.
It's interesting to me that many of Lionel's biggest jumps in popularity appear to align with when she inserted her voice into the Immigration debate, and that certainly includes the 2019 jump evident in Ngram (see also Steve Sailer's two entries devoted to her, 2018 and 2019). It's an interesting teaser, here in 2024 from Peak Stupidity, that "I'm starting to think that Mrs. Shriver wouldn't get caught dead reading Steve Sailer."
Lionel Shriver has been, now for about twenty years, a regular in the prestige press with columns and essays calling for immigration restriction of Nonwhite migrants and, quote, "asylum seekers," unquote, into Europe (not sure if she ever specifically called for White policy for the USA, which she has not resided in permanently since 1987). I wonder if she supports the UK policy of paying off Rwanda to host the "asylum seekers," recently passed into law. It's hard for me to judge what to make of the "Rwanda Plan," but if we go by press reports the deportation-to-Rwanda flights may begin soon. (The UK press is running interviews with outraged asylum-seekers who say they are disgusted at not being able to stay in the UK and angry.)
At some time in the 2000s, Lionel Shriver began to partly market herself as a liberal critic of uncontrolled anti-Whiteness and anti-White immigration policies (of course she would never use those phrasings, and a lot was dog-whistled or delivered i a shifted-register palatable to the newspapers and magazines publishing her). We can only assume these are her genuine positions on things, though maybe a certain kind of smug or cynical member of the Woke Left would claim she was demagoguing for higher visibility. I don't think there is good reason to believe that, because her immigration-restrictionist writings have the potential to really hurt her. She is like a small-scale, literary-world Gorbachev, someone using a kind-of inherited position of prestige within a system to try to do good, a kind of in-system dissident. This in part makes her so attractive to outside-of-the-system dissidents like Mr. John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer, and Peak Stupidity.
-- on Lionel Shriver's place in history --
Let me toss this in for now:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Lionel+Shriver&year_start=1980&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=0
This is an "Ngram" graph of appearances of the supposed rate of appearances of the text-string "Lionel Shriver" in a large-and-supposedly-representative corpus of English-language text by publication year.
You see that the name first appears in 1986/87. That happens to be the year of her first novel, and the year she emigrated from the USA to the UK (in the early 2020s she then left the UK for Portugal, a development covered here at Peak Stupidity at the time).
After 1987 name coasts along for a while, and she has a moderately successful woman-of-letters thing going on. It comes in the mid-2000s that she really "hits the big time."
There are significant jumps in appearances of the text-string "Lionel Shriver" in the Google-Ngram English-2019 corpus in these years: 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010. The peak is 2010-11.
If you look at her Wikipedia picture, supposedly from 2006, she can pass for considerably younger than her age at the time. Age 49 in that picture, how much younger could she pass for in that pic? I'll leave it to Peak Stupidity Female Photographic-Evaluation team's experts to judge that one. But she clearly has a long window of the power of attractive non-agedness, and right during the 2000s decade, so critical for her.
For 2012-2018, she fades back to a new higher equilibrium, equal to about the level that had held in 2008-09 (but down about 60% off the 2010-11 peak). Then in year 2019 comes another significant upward-jump.
Steve Sailer mentioned Lionel Shriver in two entries in the late 2010s: "How Mass Immigration Drives the Housing Crisis" (March 2018), in which he called her a "conservative-leaning American lady novelist"; and "Lionel Shriver on 'the Human Tide'" (Feb 2019).
Peak Stupidity (blogging since late 2016) first devotes an entry to Lionel Shriver in early February 2020, back in the pleasant days before the Big Mistake. Lionel Shriver was on the right side, being against the Big Mistake (i.e., the mistake of a "mandated" embrace of a social-hysteria for a few years). In the Feb 2020 entry at this website, Peak Stupidity claimed that John Derbyshire had been blasting his trumpet proclaiming her greatness, inspiring the Peak Stupidity Book Procurement Division to track down her latest novel, The Mandibles.
It's interesting to me that many of Lionel's biggest jumps in popularity appear to align with when she inserted her voice into the Immigration debate, and that certainly includes the 2019 jump evident in Ngram (see also Steve Sailer's two entries devoted to her, 2018 and 2019). It's an interesting teaser, here in 2024 from Peak Stupidity, that "I'm starting to think that Mrs. Shriver wouldn't get caught dead reading Steve Sailer."
Lionel Shriver has been, now for about twenty years, a regular in the prestige press with columns and essays calling for immigration restriction of Nonwhite migrants and, quote, "asylum seekers," unquote, into Europe (not sure if she ever specifically called for White policy for the USA, which she has not resided in permanently since 1987). I wonder if she supports the UK policy of paying off Rwanda to host the "asylum seekers," recently passed into law. It's hard for me to judge what to make of the "Rwanda Plan," but if we go by press reports the deportation-to-Rwanda flights may begin soon. (The UK press is running interviews with outraged asylum-seekers who say they are disgusted at not being able to stay in the UK and angry.)
At some time in the 2000s, Lionel Shriver began to partly market herself as a liberal critic of uncontrolled anti-Whiteness and anti-White immigration policies (of course she would never use those phrasings, and a lot was dog-whistled or delivered i a shifted-register palatable to the newspapers and magazines publishing her). We can only assume these are her genuine positions on things, though maybe a certain kind of smug or cynical member of the Woke Left would claim she was demagoguing for higher visibility. I don't think there is good reason to believe that, because her immigration-restrictionist writings have the potential to really hurt her. She is like a small-scale, literary-world Gorbachev, someone using a kind-of inherited position of prestige within a system to try to do good, a kind of in-system dissident. This in part makes her so attractive to outside-of-the-system dissidents like Mr. John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer, and Peak Stupidity.
Moderator
Monday - April 22nd 2024 7:49PM MST
PS: I saw your picture - that was cool stuff back in the day. Well, whenever you get around to it ...
Moderator
Monday - April 22nd 2024 7:47PM MST
PS: "o you think she's one of those people who intentionally avoids the lowly audience that she connects with/panders to...until it's time to sell her latest book?" It's not that, J1234, as far as I know.
It's that from this book I think she doesn't want to touch the race issue with a 10 ft. pole... Steve Sailer doesn't go too far, but he writes honestly in what he does write on race. This book surprised me. Also, it sounds like Mrs. Shriver is a fan of Obama and hates Trump, from this book. Mr. Sailer wrote a whole book about Obama, and not in praise of the man - it was more of a warning about him. Well, I'll get on that criticism tomorrow or the next day.
Thanks for the comment and for reading.
It's that from this book I think she doesn't want to touch the race issue with a 10 ft. pole... Steve Sailer doesn't go too far, but he writes honestly in what he does write on race. This book surprised me. Also, it sounds like Mrs. Shriver is a fan of Obama and hates Trump, from this book. Mr. Sailer wrote a whole book about Obama, and not in praise of the man - it was more of a warning about him. Well, I'll get on that criticism tomorrow or the next day.
Thanks for the comment and for reading.
J1234
Monday - April 22nd 2024 3:46PM MST
PS-
Thanks for the review (first installment.) I look forward to the follow ups.
"For the record again, Mrs. Shriver's first name Lionel does not indicate that she has transitioned, unless one means a transition from Brooklyn, NY lefty to Brooklyn, NY lefty who at least sees the light in some places.
...as I'll get into, I'm starting to think that Mrs. Shriver wouldn't get caught dead reading Steve Sailer."
Do you think she's one of those people who intentionally avoids the lowly audience that she connects with/panders to...until it's time to sell her latest book? (Kind of like Leonard Nimoy and the Trekkies.)
"....she decided she wanted to be named Lionel. I don't know if this had anything to do with n-gauge train sets or not."
Hey, you put me on the path of a gender transition name that I'd use, should it ever come to that: AURORA
https://d3h6k4kfl8m9p0.cloudfront.net/stories/eE-XtToPTCAfAtAr1WM4ag.jpeg
Thanks for the review (first installment.) I look forward to the follow ups.
"For the record again, Mrs. Shriver's first name Lionel does not indicate that she has transitioned, unless one means a transition from Brooklyn, NY lefty to Brooklyn, NY lefty who at least sees the light in some places.
...as I'll get into, I'm starting to think that Mrs. Shriver wouldn't get caught dead reading Steve Sailer."
Do you think she's one of those people who intentionally avoids the lowly audience that she connects with/panders to...until it's time to sell her latest book? (Kind of like Leonard Nimoy and the Trekkies.)
"....she decided she wanted to be named Lionel. I don't know if this had anything to do with n-gauge train sets or not."
Hey, you put me on the path of a gender transition name that I'd use, should it ever come to that: AURORA
https://d3h6k4kfl8m9p0.cloudfront.net/stories/eE-XtToPTCAfAtAr1WM4ag.jpeg
.
___________
"Peak Stupidity (blogging since late 2016) first devotes an entry to Lionel Shriver in early February 2020, back in the pleasant days before the Big Mistake. Lionel Shriver was on the right side, being against the Big Mistake (i.e., the mistake of a "mandated" embrace of a social-hysteria for a few years). In the Feb 2020 entry at this website, Peak Stupidity claimed that John Derbyshire had been blasting his trumpet proclaiming her greatness, inspiring the Peak Stupidity Book Procurement Division to track down her latest novel, The Mandibles."
__________
.
CORRECTION: PS Entry No. 1309 is dated January 15th, 2020, a good deal before the Panic really begins to sweep across the land. Actually just before even PRC-China's Wuhan region lockdown gambit (Jan. 20, 2020).
It seems John Derbyshire read the book in either October of November 2019, and posted a short, positive review in his "Monthly Diary, November 2019."
"Some of the social observation is almost at a Tom Wolfe level of painful accuracy," said Mr. Derb at the time.
(Some of the good observations didn't need to wait for the 2030s or 2040s, for they were instituted during the Corona-Panic of 2020 already.)