All of these mechanisms combined in January. I'd started reading Gliff, the new novel by Ali Smith, shortly after receiving it for Christmas. Her books tend to be on the literary side, but are generally light and uplifting (although my heart was in my throat the entire time when reading about the curlew in Companion Piece, but he turned out fine). This newest novel is a lot darker in tone, however, there are no little bright sparks as in the seasonal quartet books. Reading this during the darkest days of the year was quite depressing, and I read lots of non-fiction books on the side.
Then one of my library reservations came through; Mania, by Lionel Shriver. Now I'd only reserved this based on a Storygraph suggestion. Apart from the blurb I hadn't read any reviews or anything else about the book. I enjoyed some of her previous works, although again We need to talk about Kevin kept me on the edge of my seat, but from the blurb this felt like a comic escape. So I thought this book would be a nice distraction from the Gliff universe.
As it turns out, Mania lives in the same dark world as Gliff. They are both set in alternate versions of our times, where destructive politics have gotten the upper hand. In Smith's England, people and words are cancelled by drawing red lines around them, although I haven't read far enough to know why. In Shriver's US, it is no longer appropriate to call someone stupid, dumb, or any derivative. We are all born the same, we are all equally smart, we just process information at different speeds. The main character, with the puzzeling first name of Pearson, does not want to adhere to these rules, especially since she went some length with donors to make sure her children would be highly intelligent. So she rebels against an alternate universe in which Obama is not re-elected because he is too smartist. Exams and entry tests are discontinued and if you're not hired for a job, you can sue because you feel discriminated against. The results are predictable; society falls into disarray. In a not-alternative parallel, Donald Trump is elected because he can in no way be called smart.
Now this could have been a humorous book. It takes a satirical approach on several social movements that culminate in something pretty horrific (apart from the election result). However, the tone of the book is biting. The main character, although her motives are understandeable, is pretty unlikeable. She mistreats and endangers her children and her partner, solely because she cannot control herself. Her best friend, who may or may not turn out to be an enemy, is the voice of reason throughout but for that she is snubbed. And in the end, a deus ex machina appears to make everything alright again, although our main character still protests to much. She is a classic tragic hero, but without any tragic irony.
Added to that, the writing is laboured. We are supposedly reading Pearson's diary, composed during Covid times when most of the US population died from vaccines as pharmaseutical companies are now staffed by dummies who created a poison. But really, nobody writes like this. We get one day out of each year, with loads of exposition to fill in the gaps. These chaters contain never-ending sentences full of strained alliterations. The inside joke throughout the novel is that Pearson herself is not all that bright, so this is possibly alluding to her using posh synonyms, but as she is a teacher of English composition and creative writing at a university, one would expect her to be able to write properly. The bits that read nicely are the dialogues, but no one can remember conversations from a decade ago ad verbatim, so again we cannot trust our narrator.
So both in form and in content, it was a difficult read. The message saddened me, but not as much as how a nice concept, which may well partly turn out to be reality in the not-to-distant-future, was strangled to death by an annoying character, difficult language and unrealistic style. As Shriver is a somewhat controversial activist, I realise that some have simply disregarded her novel because of her political views. In my opinion, not taking into account the author or her possible intent still leaves you with a pretty poor product, plodding powerlessly onward and never nearing a neat narrative nexus (see what I did there?).
My escape from Gliff turned out to be a jump into the same boat. I finished Mania, but without any joy in reading. However, I still look forward to reading more of Smith's book, since her writing is always beautiful and her characters are more likeable. Not for now, though. For now I buried myself in a Bridgerton novel, another library book, to properly escape the darkness of winter.
