University economics departments are filled with socialists who will tell you that “morally, your money does belong to everybody.” The president who defaults on the national debt was born in Oaxaca, and he only speaks Spanish at press conferences - so really, you can hardly be surprised when he confiscates the personal property of good, hardworking middle-class (and, it’s implied, white) Americans. America’s national character has been diluted by the enormous political power of Latino immigrants who have, tellingly, changed the automated phone systems so that you have to dial one for Spanish and two for English. In the near future of The Mandibles, Keynesian economics is revealed to be nothing more than “dodgy hocus-pocus” that has massively devalued the dollar. And while I personally don’t agree with its politics, I might still consider The Mandibles to be a well-crafted book, if it didn’t seem to exist almost entirely to congratulate itself on its political views.
The book is a fairly straightforward conservative libertarian nightmare. The Mandibles are forced first to cram together into the modest Brooklyn home of elder sister Florence - the bleeding-heart liberal of the family - and then to escape New York City entirely and flee upstate to farmland. The book follows the respectable, upper-middle-class Mandible family as the economy collapses and the country devolves into chaos.
This is the world as described in Orange Prize–winning Lionel Shriver’s new dystopian novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047.
If only we had listened to the precocious libertarian children of the world and invested in gold, rather than trusting those elitist socialists who run the economy and the immigrants who run the government. It’s 2029, the dollar has collapsed, and America is on the brink of ruin.
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