19 April 2024

Mania by Lionel Shriver

“Lionel Shriver has two hats,” says John Self in The Sunday Telegraph. She is both a prize-winning author of 16 novels, and a right-wing columnist “who likes to court controversy on culture-war issues”. With her new novel, Mania, “the gap between novelist and provocateur is narrow”: written as the secret memoir of a university tutor, it’s a satire about an alternative America in which it has become taboo to distinguish between intelligent and stupid people. This is backed up with “pages of comic examples”: now that doctors don’t need to be clever to qualify, patients choose local rather than general anaesthetic for an operation because “you had to keep your wits about you”. When the protagonist assigns Dostoevsky’s The Idiot to her students, she’s threatened with the sack. Mania “stretches its points” at times, but Shriver still “delivers a few surprises in the last quarter of the book”.

As one of the “woke” types she loves to skewer, I’d love to ignore Shriver, says Maureen Corrigan in The Washington Post. But I can’t, because she’s “such a superb satirical novelist” – and Mania is one of her best works. In this universe, “the fool” has been edited out of Shakespeare, and the brainy Barack Obama is ditched by the Democrats after one term as president, to be replaced by the “impressively unimpressive” Joe Biden. Words such as “intelligent” and “sharp” are forbidden, “thus making problematic the question of how to refer to books like My Brilliant Friend and everyday devices such as smartphones”. Mania exaggerates modern trends, like “the death of the expert”, but also chimes with the current of anti-intellectualism that runs right through American history. It is “very funny, occasionally offensive and, yes, smart”.

Mania is available to buy here.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Knife, Salman Rushdie’s memoir about being nearly murdered on stage in 2022, was released this week. But before the author became the subject of a fatwa for Satanic Verses, his reputation rested on his second novel, Midnight’s Children. Published in 1981, it has a “weighty reputation”, says Sam Jordison in The Guardian – so I was surprised by how much “simple pleasure” the writing delivers. Roughly speaking, it’s the biography of Saleem Sinai, a psychic child born at the moment India became independent in 1947. But it also takes in spices, “eccentric aunts, indulgent uncles”, werewolves and much more. For all its “serious points about nationhood”, Midnight’s Children remains “real, vivid and alive”.

Midnight’s Children is available to buy here.

Elsewhere in The Knowledge Premium:

🚂 Patricia Highsmith’s “exceptionally accomplished” debut
🇮🇷 How dangerous is Iran?
🛶 Mill houses