Mania : A Novel

"A fantasy that hews uncomfortably close to todays reality, where facts and the truth are selectively recognized at increasingly subjective whims . . . . The specifics ofManiaare the stuff of bleeding satire, but the novels guiding concept cuts close to the bone with no anesthesia. Shriver isnt one to tip-toe around her subjects. She still knows how to poke the bear. In this case, the bear is us.Boston Globe

Set in a parallel yet all too familiar near past, a brilliant subversive novel about a lifelong friendship threatened by culture wars, from theNew York Timesbestselling author.

In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence.Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is "the last great civil rights fight." Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word (stupid) and encouraged to report parents who use it at home.

A college English instructor, the constitutionally rebellious Pearson Converse rejected her restrictive Jehovahs Witness upbringing as a teenager, and so has an aversion to dogma of any kind.Made impotent in the university classroom, shes also enraged by the crushing of her exceptionally bright childrens spirits in primary school.Fortunately, she enjoys the confidence of a best friend, a media commentator with whom she can speak frankly about her socially unacceptable contempt for the MP movement.Or at least she thinks she can . . . until one day the political chasm between the two women becomes uncrossable, and a lifelong relationship implodes.

With echoes of Philip Roths The Human Stain, told in Lionel Shrivers inimitable and iconoclastic voice, Mania is a sharp, acerbic, and ruthlessly funny book about the road to a delusional, self-destructive egalitarianism that our society is already on.