Review by New York Times Review
THE MANDIBLES: A Family, 2029-2047, by Lionel Shriver. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Amid economic disaster, members of a once wealthy family gather in Brooklyn as they struggle to adapt in this shrewd dystopian novel. THE SUNLIGHT PILGRIMS, by Jenni Fagan. (Hogarth, $26.) In Fagan's lyrical novel of impending cataclysm, a trans girl, her mother and a friend band together during an unfathomable winter. A HOUSE FULL OF DAUGHTERS: A Memoir of Seven Generations, by Juliet Nicolson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A marvelously written family history by Vita Sackville-West's granddaughter. COLLECTED POEMS 1950-2012, by Adrienne Rich. (Norton, $50.) Work from seven decades displays Rich's evolution from careful neo-classicism to free verse, and her embrace of lesbian feminism and radical politics. CRITICS, MONSTERS, FANATICS, AND OTHER LITERARY ESSAYS, by Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25.) Ozick bemoans the decline of serious literary culture in the internet age. BEING A BEAST: Adventures Across the Species Divide, by Charles Foster. (Metropolitan/Holt, $28.) A British naturalist reports on his attempt to live as various animals do in this meditative romp. AGNOSTIC: A Spirited Manifesto, by Lesley Hazleton. (Riverhead, $26.) Hazelton offers a vital, mischievous defense of an outlook that embraces both science and mystery. THE WAY TO THE SPRING: Life and Death in Palestine, by Ben Ehrenreich. (Penguin Press, $28.) An anecdotal, nonpolemical look at the everyday. A BOOK ABOUT LOVE, by Jonah Lehrer. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Explaining (and deromanticizing) love by way of attachment theory. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 11, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In a post-post-apocalyptic America (the Chinese have hacked our Internet infrastructure), in the not-too-distant future, chaos reigns as the country's financial system goes into free fall. The dollar isn't worth the paper it's printed on, America has defaulted on all its loans, the top one percent are targets of scorn and derision, the gold standard is shot, and inflation is through the stratosphere. Each member of the multigenerational Mandible family feels the economic constraints in his or herown unique way, from the dearth of a good cabernet to the rationing of rain water. Though they try to adapt to increasingly stringent restrictions over the course of nearly two decades, clinging to the illusion that the senior Mandible's estate will one day see them through, the ultimate reality finds them homeless and, eventually, on the lam. From immigration reform to international monetary policy, there is not an aspect of contemporary culture that award-winning novelist and journalist Shriver (Big Brother, 2013) leaves on the cutting-room floor. This is a sharp, smart, snarky satire of every conspiracy theory and hot-button political issue ever spun; one that, at first glance, might induce an absurdist chuckle, until one realizes that it is based on an all-too-plausible reality.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Shriver's latest opens in 2029, five years after a large-scale cyberattack called "the Stonage" destabilized the American economy and shifted all its transactions off-line. Now President Alvarado addresses the nation to deliver the news that the U.S. is once again under attack by a coordinated international effort to sink the dollar and replace it with a new global currency called the bancor. America's response is to default on all its loans, including the T-bills held by American citizens. And just like that, the inheritance of the Mandible family, created by an industrialist forebear and stewarded by patriarch Douglas, disappears. With wit and insight, Shriver details the impact of this new era on the Mandible clan, who are forced to come together to weather the crisis. Soon Douglas and his wife, Luella, are kicked out of their retirement community and begin bunking with his "boomerpoop" son, Carter (a journalist back when there were still newspapers), and his emotionally fragile wife, Jayne, in their Brooklyn brownstone. Carter's sister Avery and her economics professor husband, Lowell, and their three children arrive on the doorstep of her do-good sister Florence, whose job working for the homeless is more stable than Lowell's academic career. What's remarkable about the Mandibles is how poorly they adapt to the new normal, perhaps with the exception of Florence's son, Willing, a teenager with prodigious knowledge of macroeconomics and a dismal worldview formed by the Stonage. Shriver's (Big Brother) vision has a few blind spots, and a time shift forces significant plot points to be recounted by characters later. Nevertheless, Shriver's imaginative novel works as a mishmash of literary fiction and dystopian satire. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Shriver, nobody's idea of an optimist about the present day, delivers a dire vision of near-future America. The collapse of the United States arrives in 2029, not via climate change or airborne viruses or zombie hordes, but international monetary policy: foreign governments establish their own currency, the bancor (a concept first proposed by economist John Maynard Keynes), and when the U.S. resists, it's effectively locked out of global trade. America speedily goes into free fall, with rampant shortages and inheritances vaporized by high costs, unemployment, and human longevity. The Mandible family is just barely hanging on: Florence, who has one of the few stable jobs left (working at a homeless shelter), is forced to open her Brooklyn home to desperate family members, including a humiliated economist brother-in-law, a sister whose career as a novelist tanked along with all print media, and her once-wealthy grandfather who has only a silver service left to his name and whose second wife suffers from violent dementia. Almost gleefully, Shriver (Big Brother, 2013, etc.) catalogs how this upper-middle-class clan gets knocked off its perch in ways both small (toilet-paper shortages, overcrowding) and large (rampant theft and violence, starvation, zero health care, general erosion of humanity). Politically, this may be the only novel Mother Jones and breitbart.com can both take an interest in, though it might tire them both, too: the closing chapters, set in a scorched-earth 2047, are overly didactic on themes of individual rights, taxation, and citizenship. "Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present," as Florence's brother-in-law puts it, and Shriver's biggest fear is that, between numbing technology and nanny-statedom, we've lost our capacity to live by our wits. This novel is a bracing vision of what happens when we're forced to, though the lecturing tone sometimes grates. An imperfect but savvy commingling of apocalyptic and polemic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
