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“Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present.” – Lionel Shriver in The Mandibles

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver

Reviewed by Nyssa

A Near-Future Family Saga – 4 stars

Title cover image

Welcome to the United States of America in 2029 where Spanish speakers are in the majority, big cities’ public water systems’ failing infrastructure is causing frequent "dryouts," the dollar’s value is in free fall as is the Wall Street, and a head of cabbage costs $20, if you’re lucky enough to find one in your neighborhood market.

Published in 2016 well before the pandemic and lockdowns began in the real world, some of the events in this fictional timeline foreshadow some similar events that we see happening today and describe some going even beyond our current woes: high inflation rates, near-empty store shelves (yes, including toilet paper), high crime rates, a growing homeless population that includes much of the middle class, and a threat to the supremacy of the US dollar as the bedrock of world trade. All of these figure in to the new living conditions that the multiple generations of Mandibles must face as the older generations struggle to understand the changes and the younger members struggle to survive.

The additional triggering events that send this fictional version of the USA spiraling into an even worse quagmire of misery are the government’s renunciation of US Treasury Bills and Bonds, thus canceling the debt held by US citizens and foreign powers, making the private ownership of gold illegal, and the confiscation of all gold held in the US by residents as well the gold stored for foreign nations in US banks and repositories. These drastic moves turn the United States into a pariah on the world economic stage while bankrupting most pension funds and investors at home.

At this point of the story, the US has pretty much pissed off everyone else in the world. Not content with that, the federal government begins implementing a list of new laws with limitations to citizens’ freedoms.

The country soon finds itself shunned and unable to participate in most world trade. Isolation ensues; domestic troubles increase along with higher runaway inflation, increased homelessness, hunger, and poverty.

The two characters who figure prominently in the book are Florence, a granddaughter of the family’s patriarch Douglas Mandible, and her son Willing who is 12 years old at the start of the story. Florence, despite an Ivy League education, is working at a low-paying, dead end job at a city-funded homeless shelter in Brooklyn to try to support herself and her son. Willing is a quiet and observant 12 year old who absorbs everything he sees, hears, and reads and has a knack for connecting dots and drawing conclusions that turn out to contain practical solutions in crises that help his family survive in the new reality.

The book is divided into two parts, the first starting in the year 2029, and the second picking up with the family again in 2047 to see how the characters and the country has fared.

Even the fictional collapse of the United States of America is a dark and disturbing subject, but the touches of humor worked into the narrative by the unique set of characters keep things from descending into page after page of seemingly unending gloom and doom.

It’s difficult to pin this book into any one specific category. There are elements of speculative fiction, satire, humor, and even a healthy scoop of an Economics 101 tutorial. It could be compared in some ways to the classic "1984" with its warning ideas of what we’ve got in store for us in the future, but with low key humor, some familiar names in and out of the future government, and a much wider cast of very distinctive, multi-generation characters to follow that make up the branches of the Mandible family.

The warnings of the events and conditions described in this book are well over-the-top and exaggerated at times, but the underlying problems in the economy, aging infrastructure, lack of manufacturing resources, and climbing national debt are all real. If only a fraction of the results begin to happen in our real world, it’s worth noting these warnings to try to change the country’s course or, in the worst case, prepare as best we can for the possible hard times ahead.

Recommended as both an easy to read primer on economics and a worst case what-if warning.

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