The US author’s novel about a cancelled lecturer in a parallel dystopia that prizes ignorance is missing her usual verve
Lionel Shriver’s new novel, a hymn to inclusivity and kindness – just kidding – takes place in a parallel recent past as western civilisation withers under the grip of the Mental Parity movement (“the last great civil rights fight”), which insists there’s no such thing as stupidity, preferring to speak of “alternative processing”. Effects run from the retrospective cancellation of Frasier (because the Crane brothers are “brain-vain”) to tens of millions of Covid vaccine deaths (because newfangled employment practices stopped Pfizer hiring qualified staff, resulting in the inadvertent creation of a toxic serum).
World-building as trolling, basically. The saga unfolds in Pennsylvania from the point of view of a contrarian lecturer, Pearson, cancelled amid the war on wisdom after she bravely makes Dostoevsky’s The Idiot required reading – the very title being outlawed, natch – before being caught on camera ranting about “retards”; footage that sweeps through the press, who are more concerned with “cognitive bigotry” than with Moscow and Beijing rampaging through their neighbours “because the western world was wholly caught up in this Mental Parity fiasco”.
