Political satires, like politicians themselves, often have a hard time striking a balance. Tilt too much in one direction and you alienate your base, tilt too much in the other direction and you end up preaching to the choir. Many authors lose their balance and end up tilting at windmills.
Such is the tightrope that Lionel Shriver walks in her new political-satire novel, Mania. Don’t expect any subtlety here. Mania is set in an alternate-history 2010s, where a new movement called Mental Parity (MP) sweeps across the Western world, a movement that declares that there are no differences in intelligence between people. This mania took over the West shortly after the publication of a bestselling book titled The Calumny of I.Q.: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight, an obvious allusion to the “do-the-work-and-educate-yourself-you-bigot” books that were ubiquitous during our own manias of the last few years. (Another book is titled How to Be an Anti-Smartist, drawing direct parallel to the real-life book How to Be an Antiracist.)
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