Pearson Converse teaches literature at Verlaine University, Pennsylvania. She exists in an alternative universe to our own in which the Mental Parity Movement holds sway. There is intellectual levelling, and no ‘cognitive discrimination’. This is high satire, exaggerated, crude, inviting ridicule of the social system portrayed, close to the great satirists of the 18th century in tone if not in style.
Yet Lionel Shriver’s Mania is more than just a satire. It is a study of Pearson’s family life and her ‘unbalanced’ relationship with her best friend from childhood, Emory. Pearson has three children: an intellectually gifted girl and boy by a high-IQ sperm donor, and an averagely intelligent girl conceived with her tree-surgeon partner, Wade. He falls victim to Mental Parity because he is forced to employ an unqualified assistant. This ingenu lets a lopped branch fall on Wade which breaks his ankle. He is then operated on by an incompetent young surgeon (who is supposed to be as good as anyone else), and is left incapacitated for the rest of his life. His fate is an example of what is happening in the wider world. A Nasa employee, who is also ‘just as good as anyone else’, is put in charge of a mission to Mars. The rocket, ‘the result of costly, rigorous research’, crashes into a dustheap.
Pearson’s two clever children are hopelessly frustrated; her other daughter turns into a ‘neo-Stasi snitch’, who informs on her mother. While all this MP correctness is going on, Russia and China exploit the rest of the world, judging the US to be a population of imbeciles.
Emory begins by sympathising with Pearson’s critical, sceptical attitude, agreeing with her in private.
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