Really did not enjoy this book. A lot of the writing went right above my head.
Couldnt get to grips with Shriver's writing style - wanted it to get to the point more- it went around the houses too much and I got lost along the way!

IQ tests are banned, nobody is more intelligent than any one else and using words like 'dumb' or 'stupid' could have severe consequences, like your children being taken away. 'Mental Parity' is king so in the modern day America that Pearson Converse lives in, education essentially means nothing. Doctors might not actually be qualified, scientists have no scientific knowledge and the president? Well.

It's an interesting read; scarily too relevant at times, especially with Shriver's interweaving of genuine modern day events and points of culture which gives moments of truth nestled throughout a brilliantly created fictional world. The story is easy to follow and horribly believable, although at the same time I found myself incredulous that itnwpuod.be allowed to happen....and this identifying with Pearson!

I'd recommend this read; it's thought provoking, entertaining and engaging. Shriver's prose flows well, the ending feels exactly right and I've had many conversations about what this book brings up already!

I thought Shriver was one of my favourite writers until I read Mania. I did not like this AT ALL.

It's hard to pinpoint the author's political stance, because there is so much in the US right-left discourse that goes over my (European) head, but the more I read the more I smelt the stench of the right. The premise carries anti-woke sentiment to an extreme, but instead of focusing on a minority race or gender group, it's a world where where Mental Parity is being enforced, whereby one must accept that there are no differences in intelligence and all are intellectually equal. Noone is allowed to express opposition to this, or to use terminology that discriminates against people who are less intelligent. The punishment for transgressions becomes more severe over time.

From the start, I was really expecting this to be be cleverly twisted around, to say something complex about progressive vs anti-woke values. But no, that's pretty much the whole story, until suddenly, right at the end, it isn't. Just one long stream of anti-woke vitriol, really. [The fact that some clearly right-wing reviewers loved it says enough.]

The novel is so hyperbolic that it's difficult to break down what is the point that is actually being made. I read it as carrying 'things you should never say' to the extreme in order to demonstrate how this can lead to a fascistic suppression of free speech.

Which is pure nonsense. I can and will resent people using negative terminology about minorities, without expecting that it is the first step on a slippery ladder to fascism. Just as my parents' generation learned not to use racist language, we now have to train ourselves to not use discriminatory language in any context. It's not fascism, it's social progress and respect for others.

BTW, I really f**king hate how the right are managing to turn 'fascist' into an attack on the left. It's so twisted and evil. Not to mention schoolyard-level argumentation. ("You're nasty." "No, YOU'RE nasty!")

I could turn this review into an ad hominem attack related to political values. I won't (although it IS a political novel, so it's fair game, I believe.). But I do criticise this novel for being confusing and abstruse in what it is really trying to say, for really awful, unsympathetic characters, for rambling, repetitive monologues, for sheer failure to get me to suspend my disbelief, and for a rushed and unsatisfactory ending. But most of all for the dog whistling.

I loved The Mandibles though, although now I'm asking myself if I rather stupidly really got the wrong end of the stick when reading that.

My thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

Lionel Shriver did it again !

If you know anything about Shriver's novels is that you will go through ALL the feelings : laughing, gasping, shock and rage. Why ? Because he always finds a subject that hits so close to home that you hope it isn't reality, but it is. In this case, the "politically correct" antics are the new norms. For example, the new "s word" is not the four letter word you would think off, but rather the word "stupid". Because, yes, in this Shrivered society, everyone is intelligent in their own way, and no one can say anything different.

So many more experiences that the main protagonist, Pearson Converse, will have to go through and battle in order to bring back some sense into the world, even though it might cost him everything...

Loved it !

On its surface, it is the story of Pearson, a woman in her 40s, who has an issue with any form of authority, struggling to accept and acquiesce to cultural changes around her in an alternative USA, where, a movement for Mental Parity, is eschewing any reference to differences in ability between people. As we follow Pearson struggling to accept the new reality around her, we observe the absurdist chaos that society around her falls victim to, and how her own life falls apart piece by piece.

First, my feelings about the book. It made me furious - the distance between the absurd reality described in the book and the woke cancel culture so prevalent in the west, is so on the nose that it hurts. Choosing differences in ability, and the various repercussions of that on how society functions, sounds ludicrous at first read, but, so could gender politics to someone reading about them in the 80s. What made me particularly angry is the fear I felt when reading about it, and the inescapable reality it could entail, especially as the snowball effect such trends sometimes evoke in society. It terrified me. This is what the book is about, and for bringing it to the fore with a great writing style - I'm grateful. In this sense, I loved the characters and the realistic portrayals of how interpersonal relationships work when subject to socio-political change, and how some personality types react to it, regardless of their own beliefs.

That being said, I didn't really like it. My main peeve is with the repetition. The whole premise could have been dealt with more effectively in a quarter of the words, making it a nice punchy novella. Instead, we are faced with pages upon pages that say, essentially, the same thing. The analogy to Ayn Rand's hammering her point home with a sledgehammer in Atlas Shrugged comes to mind (more of this later). Pages upon pages of words saying the same exact thing were tiring to the extreme, and felt more like an opportunity for the author to vent her grievances with modern society vs something that really added intellectual value to the reader.

I also struggled with the ending, frankly. While it created a nice cathartic effect, it lacked the panache of something more fundamental. It highlighted perhaps the propensity of contemporary Western culture to follow fads, but it failed to bring home a message about the ramifications of this long term. In some ways, by ending the book the way the author chose to do, the strength of the main message got diluted, being cast as only a bump in an endless series of bumps. The reality, in my view, is that some bumps are more destructive than others.

Finally, I am not sure I liked (or understood the relevance of?) the relationship between Pearson and her friend Emory. While parts of it highlighted nicely how different parts of society digest and react to social change, the personal angle itself failed to capture me, and felt unrealistic. Maybe it's my not being American, but the relationship felt forced and something that can't really happen in reality.

Bottom line is that it was a nice premise that got lost in vitriol and verbosity. The book, in some ways, indeed reminded me in its structure of Atlas Shrugged (with many similar elements, though with far less sophistication of the underpinning philosophy). It also reminded me of Parable of the Sower and its sequel, but, while butler was nuanced in her critique and left it to the reader to experience the horrors firsthand (vs reading about characters' pontificating about them), and made the ending cathartic in a positive and engaging way, Shriver just failed to capture similar magic.

Not sure I'd recommend it to anyone but the most avid fan of the author, or political leftists who enjoy reading someone of their own ilk trashing woke-ism (no criticism intended either way).

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

The woman with the unlikely name of Pearson has problems. One of which is that Darwin "doesn't understand what the rules are anymore". And yet her son is supposed to be one of the smart ones. Or, rather, he isn't – in this alternative USA you're committing a sin for judging anyone and anything as smarter than anyone or anything else. Neurodivergency has been stamped out, through just being ignored, and so there is no lack of intelligence any more, nor any superior amounts of it. Not even a smartphone can be called that without people left, right and centre (well, left and centre, perhaps) being triggered by such a 'slur'. Darwin, then, is the older son in a family that is clearly far too based to want to kowtow to this brainless dumpster-fire of thought politics. And that's where Pearson's (and the whole family's) troubles lie.

Of course, this may not be Ms Shriver's survey of woke/based thinking – after all, in the world of these pages Benedict Cumberbatch was "deep-sixed" for his Sherlock character being too smart, not lauded as in our MSM for his ultra-leftie wiffle. But it certainly, undeniably, is about a world where everyone has been forced to level down due to stopping some people having hurty feelings. And when you see Darwin's mother talk about admissions at her university place of work you do see the positive discrimination that was the first example of wokeness many of us ever saw. Long, too, has been the history of people racialising the IQ test to pour scorn on it.

Now, in amongst the thousand of things to potentially say about this quite incredible read, is the strong claim that this has said all it has to say within the first five pages, which is kind of affirmed by a mahoosive switch into flashback and Pearson's early life with Jehovah's Witness parents. That said, this reinforces her as the main character here, juggling everything at work and at home, and produces the real antagonist of the book, who is completely removed from Darwin, however much he dotes on her.

Some of the many other things, then – first, this is not an attack on Trump, his politics, policies and voters – or at least not precisely when on these pages you'd expect. Another thing it is not is nearly as funny as made out – for the comedic drama of this age you really need the cancer culture as seen by John Boyne in "The Echo Chamber" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4051948780). But despite my early doubts as to the need for all this, it remains a thoroughly engaging read. The Newspeak aspects are there, and the family drama is worth keeping with (even with such stupid names as Pearson, Zanzibar and the like, which really go too far to alienate this family for a British reader, if nobody else).

Ultimately, this is a very powerful book. At times, yes, it can read as a portrayal of the Montessori system as written by someone with no knowledge of the Montessori system, at others it's spot-on. It shows a world dumping a meritocracy, and going the other way, so only the bad-at-dancing can dance, and woe betide anyone who cuts down trees for a living – "blessed are the bunglers, for they shall inherit the earth". Finally, when it shows Russia and China making geographical gains because of America's box-ticking (and of course Tiktoking) and avoidance of all logic, it's tomorrow's newspapers as fiction today.

I did merely like it a lot, due in part to all the countless issues and many other sticking points (and I've not even mentioned the corona-scepticism here). But this is proof that four-star must-reads exist. It isn't something I'd laud as perfect, or great for everybody to enjoy, but it is damnably strong at times, and far too accurate throughout.

Mania is a timely, clever, amusing but harrowing and frightening story of where this 'woke' society we now live in could lead to. I sometimes felt it to be comparable to how it felt to be Jewish in Nazi Germany, and I mean that with no disrespect whatsoever. Lionel Shriver at her best.
My thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for my copy.

I love Lionel Shriver and her writing is brilliant and funny but I couldn't read this.
Not because it's bad - quite the opposite, it is only too true.
I flipped between profound depression and rage as I read the opening chapters and the betrayal of her "friend", so I skipped to the end to see that Emory had flipped again and the Mania had switched through 180 degrees.
Everyone should read this and think about lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masking, climate change, lawfare and the rest of the woke nonsense that is destroying the world.

The author imagines a world where the mental parity movement has taken over and where you do not need professional qualifications and everyone is equal.

The concept was original and interesting and scarily rang true but the long winded speeches from her main characters did not.

The ending was satisfactory but the book needed serious editing and shortening in my opinion.

Mania is a bit of a dystopian parody on societal behaviour we continuously see happen, albeit in lesser scales, or based on different characteristics. I know first-hand what it is like to see people being destroyed by an over-correction of past actions. If only this book was mandatory reading for those trying to employ rules to balance out inclusion, equality and the future (and I am not saying that some form of change isn’t required).

I must admit, I battled with the fact the Pearson categorically stated that she wasn’t highly intelligent but then proceeded to lose me with her highfalutin grammar and constant use of vocabulary that I had to look up. Or perhaps I am just stupid? Or maybe that was the intention? I appreciate that Lionel Shriver’s writing is always like this, but to categorically state that someone is not as intelligent as the other characters in the story, but then use the exact same language for all of them seems like an oversight.

Thank You NetGalley and HarperCollins UK for a Review Copy

Mania by Lionel Shriver
Publication date: 11 April 2024
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4 stars
Thank you to Harper Collins UK and NetGalley for providing me with an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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.

I enjoyed this; it was well-written, thought-provoking, infuriating and the premise was *chef's kiss*
The characters are unlikeable, but written in a way that I appreciate: they are interesting and charismatic, even though they will make your blood pressure rise.
I loved the inclusion of real-life political and cultural events to see how they would play out in this alternate reality. I thought this was really clever (pun thoroughly intended, considering the topic of the book) but I wish the author had refrained from mentioning people's size and weight quite so many times, often presented as a embodiment of their intelligence, or lack thereof according to main character Pearson, who was odious, and I understand this was written from her POV, but it happened enough to feel jarring.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

A frighteningly realistic read, though some of the alternate reality scenarios made me laugh out loud.

Mania is a bleak but brilliant satirical speculative/dystopian fiction novel set in a recently altered version of the USA, where political correctness has overcome the last great source of societal discrimination - intellectual ability. Lionel Shriver is one of the most polarising writers out there - I’ve only read We need To Talk About Kevin, and her 2022 collection of essays, titled Abominations, but that’s enough to recognise how much of herself she has poured into her provocative protagonist.

Pearson Converse is an English lecturer at a small university at a time when the Mental Parity movement has overtaken America, with the seductive notion that all human brains are equal so no one can be smarter than anyone else. Tests are outlawed, the supposedly intelligent are shunned, whole swathes of fiction and media are disappeared due to problematically gifted main characters, and you can lose your job for using the wrong word. Pearson and her best friend Emory, a TV journalist, are happy to mock the system in private, until one goes too far and faces losing everything.

This book certainly won’t be for everyone - the humour is vicious and the subtle mockery of many aspects of modern culture relentless. The premise seems far-fetched, until you think about cancel culture and the hysteria unleashed on social media - and therefore the increasingly feeble news media, every time a celebrity “fat-shames” or “slut-shames” anyone. The “heroine” is not likeable - an intellectual snob, despite repeatedly protesting her own relatively low intelligence, she uses a lot of big words (yay for the search function on my Kindle that allows me to look up their meanings) and selected the father of her artificially inseminated children based solely on his IQ score and Japanese ethnicity.
I still thought this was very clever, as the predictably disastrous consequences of the movement play out on a National level, but I didn’t know how it would all end.

Thanks to NetGalley and the Harper Collins for the ARC. I am posting this honest review voluntarily.
Mania is published on April 11th.

Mania by Lionel Shriver is a work of genius. True, if a book has a glowing review from John Cleese, you know it will be awesome. Dystopic, speculative fiction, I am here for it. Add in humour and satire, just watch those scorch marks as I race to read it! Needless to say, not even remotely disappointed

Imagine a culture war (not too far from reality, but lets just imagine) and two friends are either side of that culture war. Imagine one friend (Pearson) who is traditionalist and believes that the only way forward is to remain in a bigoted, closed mindset, despite it beginning to affect her professional and private life. Then, on a completely opposite side, Emory starts to go further into the popular opinion, but way to the hard edge of it

Where does this division come from? A reality where calling someone stupid would be illegal, and due to the rule of the Mental Parity Movement, the entire education system is disbanded, qualifications becoming redundant and in a very Orwellian reference, children are to report their friends and parents if they hear anyone use the word "stupid"

It is a terrifing fact of just how close Lionel Shriver writes to reality with a powerful, contemporary reality that we can all relate to. It encourages to meet in the middle instead of going to extremes and this message could not be more poignant

A book that will be as essential to read as 1984 imo. Absolutely brilliant

Thank you to HarperCollins UK, HarperFiction | The Borough Press and the incredible author Lionel Shriver for this epic ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own

Mania is an interesting and challenging read from Shriver.

It's a satire set in an alternate world in which the Mental Parity movement takes off in 2011. This movement essentially states that everyone is equally intelligent (some people simply process things in an alternative way). It's not cool to discriminate and you certainly can't use words like stupid or dumb. It's cruel to have people pass or fail tests, or apply to university and not get in due to their intelligence. The outcome is that everyone can do everything, whether or not they're qualified to do it...

Main character Pearson is defiant and furious. Can't people see what's right in front of them? She takes some comfort in saying what she really thinks in the privacy of her own home, but then her best friend starts berating her. She needs to be more thoughtful and careful, or she could lose her job or worse. But Pearson can only bring herself to hide her true feelings for so long. It gets to her - is everyone lying to themselves or do they all honestly think that being smart is bad, that it's mean to differentiate based on intelligence?

It's an interesting take on cancel culture or what happens when groupthink is forced upon us. It's not an easy read though. Shriver's main character often acts in unlikeable ways (she is very affectionate to her two eldest children, conceived with the sperm of a high IQ donor, but thoughtless about her 'less intelligent' youngest daughter, conceived with her partner). She has a tendency to place herself first and to ignore the consequences of her actions. She is, herself, obsessed by intelligence.

The novel also occasionally falls into talking at the reader rather than telling a story. This could be tiresome, but I read this as an interesting 'what if' novel, examining what could happen in a particularly extreme situation.

An important thing to note, if you don't throw the book down mid-read, is that Shriver does give Pearson the gift of eventually being able to accept her mistakes and even change her mind. It's something so many people online never do. For me, this is what takes me from a 3 to a 4-star review. I see Mania as a thought-provoking satire - and it works very well like that.

3.5 ⭐️ rounded up

I'm really not sure how to feel about this one; I want to say I liked it but I think I liked the concept more than the outcome. That's not to say it was a bad book, just perhaps targeted to a different audience.
•
First of all, I'm still unsure if the main characters of Pearson and Emory were written to be unlikable or if I just didn't connect with them very much. That being said, I still found them genuinely interesting enough to read and I could see from Pearson's point of view, as well as mostly being on her side right till the end, even if she did go about things the wrong way more than once.
•
I've seen a couple reviews mention how they felt as if the reader is being talked at rather than to and though I can see where they're coming from, I personally enjoyed this style of writing. I liked how further on in the story, we were reading it as Pearson's memoir which felt a bit like breaking the fourth wall and for me enhanced the whole thing, making it all feel more real. When I started the book and for the first few chapters, I was unsure on the complex language used in the writing of this, however it became clear why such way of writing was used and actually by halfway I found it a clever add on to the plot and this kept me wanting to read on.
•
The main thing that I think could be controversial about this book and made me slightly uncomfortable was the use of the R slur that we had to read, a few too many times, in my opinion. I understand I could just be missing the point but I think the same story could have been written just fine without bringing that into it as much as Shriver did; it ended up feeling like this was written in as more shock factor instead of adding to the plot.
•
My favourite parts that I found the most interesting to read were the years from 2012 onwards, more so when it reached 2023 and into the future. I enjoyed that as much as this is set in a dystopia, we were also led into real life events such as the US presidency of Donald Trump and Covid-19; this all made it feel even more like I was reading an actual memoir and heightened the fear that 'Mental Parity' and the law of 'stupid' becoming an illegal term could easily become a real thing. Unfortunately, I didn't find the ending as satisfying as I'd hoped but after sitting on it for a bit, I think I can understand why it ended the way it did and I can accept it— again, this is probably a subjective thing and I can see how others would potentially enjoy the way it ends.
•
Overall, this was an okay book that I'm glad I got to read and I didn't completely dislike it. Surprisingly I've never read any of Shriver's work before, (even though I've watched and enjoyed the film adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin), but I know she's highly regarded as a writer so I'd be open to reading her other works someday and I'm sure this one will interest a lot of her fans. It might not have quite hit the mark for me as much as I'd wanted but I'd still recommend for those who like dystopian novels with a sense of realism and a very intriguing plot line.

Thank you to the publisher for my advanced copy

As usual Ms Shriver doesn't veer away from the controversial, and has written another thought provoking book about "hate speech" and the consequences of following through on, in this case, the need for mental parity. I did find the story itself quite slow going at times, and the author did labour her points somewhat, but overall an interesting read.
Coincidentally, I was reading this admist the controversy generated by the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act which came into force on 1st April 2024. It is envisioned it will provide greater protection for victims and minority communities but has led to many concerns about the effect on free speech, especially as any breaches will be investigated and dealt with by the police.
Thank you to netgalley and Harper Collins for an advance copy of this book.
3.5 rounded up to 4 stars

Sharp, scary and shocking, Lionel Shriver 's edgy new book reflects back current society trends and highlights the risks of dumbing down. By taking only one or two steps ahead of where we are as a human race, Shriver reveals the true stupidity of the ultimate equality, Her main character Pearson is an unlikeable and prickly woman, but by the end of the book you are rooting for her and her beliefs to get the upper hand.
A harsh and cruel exploration of current society, this book holds up a mirror to us all and finds every one of us sadly lacking. A cautionary and inspiring tale for our times.

Wavering between a 2 and a 3 but decided to round up. This is a provocative book and also feels as though it might be quite personal to the author. The story takes place in an alternative reality where it’s politically incorrect to discriminate on the basis of intelligence. The prevailing ideology is variously referred to as “mental parity”, “intellectual egalitarianism”, and “cognitive equality”, and there are some uncomfortable (for me) parallels drawn with diversity and inclusion measures designed to address discrimination on the basis of race and disability. Within this context, much of the story addresses the fracturing of a friendship along ideological lines, something that may have become all too familiar to many of us over the past eight years.

There is great characterisation with regard to the book’s spiky, ex-Jehovah’s Witness protagonist, who is frequently her own worst enemy and whose failings as a parent are vastly more evident to the reader than to herself. Lionel Shriver’s authorial voice remains reliably mordant, but sometimes she seems to be having more fun with the book’s conceit than the reader and belabours the point(s) being made. Possibly as a result of this, I struggled at times to stay engaged with the book and had to push myself to finish reading it. The final chapter was a nice reward, though.

Overall, it’s an interesting thought experiment on the effects of anti-intellectualism in society in general and universities in particular, but I’m not sure the concept is enough to sustain a whole book; it felt a little self-indulgent. For me, this may have worked better as a short story.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the Advance Reader Copy.

A story for this age of Trump and fake news. 'Mania' gives a satirical look at what happens to a woman and her family when the latest fashion is for 'Mental Parity'; discrimination on the grounds of being less intelligent is banned. In theory this sounds like an admirable idea, but the writer takes it to its extreme : no one can use words like 'dumb' or 'stupid' and a child can be taken from their family for breaches of the law. Ultimately, if there's mental parity, then everyone could be a doctor, or a tree surgeon even if they weren't capable, and no one would ever fail anything or ever be wrong. A pretty scary world!
I enjoyed 'Mania' and was intrigued to see how far Shriver would run with the idea. There's humour and supreme irony, but I often felt the premise got in the way of what is, on another level, a story about extremism and how different characters react to living under strict rules. Essentially the story is about power and control in a long-term friendship and how difficult it is to ever really 'know' someone, even if you think you do, even if it's your best friend. Food for thought.