Only the strong survive and IQ is decided by genetics: Lionel Shriver’s alternative America sounds familiar

Mania is a novel that laughs at ordinary people and exalts an intellectual elite. It doesn’t quite mean to do this, but it does

Conservative gadfly: Lionel Shriver. Photo: Mark Kohn

Kevin Power

The good news is that Lionel Shriver’s new novel advances a coherent vision of the contemporary world. The bad news is that this vision is incipiently fascist.

Up until recently, Shriver has tended to write as an amusing, if rather wearying, conservative gadfly. Now her sense of things has darkened and calcified. In the cosmos of Mania, there are only the strong and the weak, the brave and the cowardly, the bright and the stupid. The novel laughs at ordinary people and exalts a genetically determined intellectual elite. It doesn’t quite mean to do this, but it does.