The dystopian stupidity of woke

Amid the conformism of contemporary literary culture, a new book by Lionel Shriver is always going to be an exciting event. At the very least, ‘the Cassandra of American letters’, as the New York Times once christened her, always has something challenging to say.

Mania is no exception. It’s a doomy, dystopian fiction tackling the censorious zealotry of woke culture. Set in a parallel recent past, this alternative US has been withering under the grip of something called the Mental Parity Movement, which insists that ‘there’s no such thing as stupidity’. To distinguish between people upon the grounds of intelligence is akin to racism and other discriminatory evils.

Shriver bills the ‘progressive’ struggle against the tyranny of the intelligent as ‘the last great civil-rights struggle’. In this world, it is a grave slur to call anyone ‘stupid’. The mantra of this new regime is ‘everyone is equally clever’. Anyone with an IQ in excess of 115 is badgered out of their jobs, and the great institutions of society are run by people who are unqualified and simply incompetent.

The narrator / protagonist Pearson Converse is a lecturer in English literature at the deliciously named ‘Voltaire University’. She utterly rejects the tenets of the new orthodoxy, yet has to survive in an academic environment where they run riot. Something she fails to do when she makes Dostoevsky’s outlawed title, The Idiot, required reading and is then caught on camera ranting about ‘retards’. She is duly cancelled.

Mania is more than just a cutting satire of ‘progressive’ intolerance. It is also an exploration of Pearson’s relationship with her best friend from childhood, Emory Ruth – a relationship that becomes increasingly fractious as Emory slowly embraces the Mental Parity Movement to further her career.

Shriver delivers all this with her customary verve, wit and, when required, venom. As a novel of ideas, the book stands in the grand tradition of Brave New World and especially Fahrenheit 451. ‘There was such a glut of used books on the market’, writes Shriver in a nod to Fahrenheit 451, ‘that they were being pulped and compressed into logs for wood stoves…’.

Shriver’s use of incisive phrases and pinpoint detail ensures that the pace never flags. Pearson’s nemesis in the English Literature class she teaches is described as ‘tall, smarmily good looking’, while her feelings at her own rejection by her own family are described as ‘knifing resentment’.

The climax of the book is a wonderfully splenetic rant by Pearson, as she finally unleashes on her befuddled students all of her long-repressed thoughts about the Mental Parity Movement. It’s reminiscent of the scene in Tár, where the Cate Blanchett character berates a hapless, hyper-politically correct music student who doesn’t want to study the great music of Western tradition because it is written by dead white males.

Mania certainly takes great pleasure in mocking the censorious zeal of the woke. Some of the funniest passages concern the cancellation of TV shows, books and films considered to contain ‘offensive representations of cognitive inferiority’. Forrest Gump proves a tough one for the censors. A ‘small but vocal campaign maintains that [Tom Hanks’] portrayal of Forrest Gump was politically redemptive… if Forrest wasn’t very smart, he was very wise: another differentiation too subtle by half for the times’.

Writing in the New Republic of one of Shriver’s previous novels, So Much for That, reviewer Ruth Franklin commended Shriver for keeping alive the idea that a novel could be ‘a vehicle for exploring political, religious or social questions’ – in other words, the novel of ideas as a literary form. But what impressed Franklin about So Much for That was that it was not so much about the politics of health reform as it was about ‘fury only barely contained’. Mania is not about barely contained fury, but it is furious – drawing as it does on Shriver’s own traumatic experiences of ostracisation.

Its portrait of Pearson and Emory’s splintering relationship captures a personal pain. After Shriver said that Boris Johnson likening women wearing burqas to letterboxes was not insulting on Question Time in 2019, a close friend and fellow novelist emailed her to tell her that their friendship was now over. Shriver went on to publish an open letter to this friend, whose identity she did not reveal, in the Spectator. The hurt in that letter is palpable and it’s difficult not to see it again in Mania.

A novel of ideas can seem artificial. In an article for the Paris Review in 2020, Sianne Ngai wrote of the form’s tendency to incorporate ‘direct speech by characters in the forms of dramatic dialogues or monologues’ and ‘overt narrators prone to didactic, ironic or metafictional commentary’. Mania does occasionally suffer from these problems.

Yet in the main, Shriver’s barely contained pain and fury cuts through the formal artifice. It certainly worked for Jonathan Swift, and it does for Shriver, too. Not that Mania is simply polemic. The satire here is many-sided, raising as many questions about the character of Pearson as it does about that of Emory.

As Shriver once wrote of an old journalist friend with whom she later fell out:

‘Once you pick your team, a neatly polarised moral universe throws up Truths on a weekly basis, so it’s a doddle to be wise. More, too much sanctimony makes for an excessively rich intellectual diet. Indignation clogs the arteries and makes your mind slow and fat.’

It’s lesson Mania delivers with remarkable success.

Neil McCarthy is a teacher and writer based in Dublin.