If Intelligence and Advanced IQ are Taboo

This novel kicks off with the protagonist, Pearson, being told to take her child home from school because he used unacceptable language, namely, he said his classmate’s T-shirt was stupid – the forbidden S-word. In a dinner party that night, where Pearson vents her frustration to her guest, childhood best friend Emory. The boyfriend Emory has brought becomes offended at Person’s non-MP (Mental Parity) language and leaves early, with Emory in tow. Pearson immediately confronts her friend the next day for betrayal and hypocrisy, and Emory explains that while it pains her to police her own speech all the time,

“I don’t plan on being crucified on social media and losing my job just from trying to protect the precious right to impugn someone else’s intelligence” (p26).

Seemingly, brain-vanity, intelligence, intellectual superiority are all taboo now (circa decade of alt 2010 onwards), as much so as sexism or racism or any other ism. (The novel is sectioned off by Alt-year chapters, signalling the alternative version of those years’ realities, this reader surmises.)  Pearson considers the intellectual egalitarianism of these Alt-years a form of social hysteria, which has an across-the-board dumbing down, including getting rid of Sherlock Holmes movies and crossword puzzles, to avoid fostering a

“bigoted self-congratulations in puzzle solvers and a gloomy, psychically deleterious sense of inadequacy in the stumped” (p74). (

NB: ‘Dumbing’ would not be a permitted word in this alternative reality.) It is a world where

“instructors could no longer gives tests or grades. The capacity to learn is intelligence. Therefore any variability in our students’ responses to lessons expressed a differential that couldn’t exist” (p100).

Needless to say, Pearson is the opposite of a Mental Parity Champion (which apparently her youngest daughter aspires to be, in retaliation for being deemed less clever than her 2 older siblings). Once a Jehovah Witness, forced into so being because of her parents (particularly her mum), Pearson is aware that in defying her childhood restrictions, she is at risk of defining herself more by what she is not, than what she is; tending to do what she is forbidden to do, than what she actually wants to do; the proverbial rebel without a pause. However, she holds out against the Mental Parity tide, and is consistently one of the more defiant of this new regime of dumbing down, and less willing to toe the line than her partner or her best friend are, whom she sees as sacrificing their true values by conforming. They, in turn, try to persuade Pearson to make the performance of toeing the line so that her job, income, lifestyle, and even parenting rights, are not damaged.

Pearson is very typical-of-Shriver protagonist, wonderfully contrary as always, consistently making vices out of virtues. When Pearson thinks back to her childhood with best friend Emory, she deemed Emory a conformist although she was a fashion leader.

“…she has always had an uncanny ability to keep up with changing fashions, and her look is reliably cutting-edge. She wears the hairstyle soon to become all the rage before most people realize the do is in vogue. She leaves the impression that she isn’t following trends but setting them […] She’s consistently conformist before everyone else” (p47).

Also like most other Shriver-protagonists, Pearson is very self-aware, though not in a self-flagellating way, but in a somewhat smug, told-you-so way:

“The darker emotions are both more powerful and more abiding than their sunnier cousins. If you could pour them in the tank of a car, disgust, fury, outrage, and antipathy would speed you to the far horizon, whereas a fuel distilled from mercy, empathy, appreciation and forgiveness would leave you rutted by the side of the road after a few hundred feet. Thus I’ve long trusted that the incendiary resentment I pooled in childhood would propel me all the way through to an acrimonious old age” (p65).

Shriver puts forward the arguments in this novel as to what ‘right thinking’ people should do when the world goes mad, in this case, over the top with Mental Parity as the new political correctness – should we conform, work from within to undermine it, gain the trust of establishment so that we can effect change, try to simply survive by giving establishment its pound of flesh, whatever our private beliefs? All these different stances are held by characters in the novel and played out. Mental Parity’s push is for ‘cognitive equality’ supposedly leading towards ‘cognitive justice’, but of course, far from rendering everyone equal or delivering justice, it is a punishing of those who are more cognitively gifted, not that they are permitted to self-identify as such, but selecting them for punishment, it would seem they are still thus identified, paradoxically. It is a good idea of Shriver’s to make her protagonist of average or middle-tier intelligence, demonstrating that resistance is not necessarily led by those who epitomise the issue.  

Mania develops the dystopian alternative reality of what happens when in America, no one is allowed to be intelligent anymore.

“Reverse discrimination was ensuring that droves of highly skilled employees were out on their ears. As folks who know what they were doing were replaced wholesale by folks who didn’t, social justice seemed to intermingle with an unfocused revenge – though what exactly the competent had ever done to the clueless was hard to pinpoint” (p164).

She writes of horrific scenarios where doctors and surgeons are not the most experienced and knowledgeable, but the least so, and put people’s lives at risk. All systems suffer the same, and America is grinding to a halt, the butt of the joke for the rest of the world. In this novel, those who refuse to conform, such as Emory’s younger sister and Pearson, are in the firing line (literally fired from jobs!). Those who conform quietly even if privately they do not agree, like Wade, Pearson’s partner, also suffer the consequences of working in such a disastrous system. There is a lot of Emperor’s New Clothes about this dystopia, where no one is allowed to name things as they are, particularly not the problems arising from Mental Parity.

There is talk about Shriver’s novel being about wokeness gone mad. But that’s not how I read it. It is a novel about the fear of those who are less intellectually competitive, being resentful and having the chance to even the odds up for themselves, albeit in ugly ways. Being woke is being aware of how we damage others, inadvertently or otherwise; Mental Parity has no care about causing damage, and does so, with full intent. It is not wokeness gone crazy, because it is not wokeness at all. To call this a novel about wokeness gone to extremes, would be to malign wokeness. The novel does make excellent points about ‘cancel culture’, which is an abuse of wokeness, not its desired outcome.

Shriver’s latest is a recognisably Shriver novel in so many ways, particularly in its cynicism (for e.g. that people mostly behave like sheep, that vice and virtue are trends which come and go, that many are opportunistic, etc.) and its exposure of hypocrisy. Pearson’s youngest daughter, Lily, has echoes of Shriver’s celebrated Kevin, making up for what she lacks in IQ with cunningness. In many ways, Mania was a strangely comfortable read, which I gather goes against the intention – which is to discomfit – but it is so recognisably Shriver in its rants and angsts that it is extremely enjoyable. Here’s looking forward to the next Shriver novel once again!