Of all the literary genres, satire is the most vexatious. Like Lionel Shriver herself, it is deliberately provocative. Likewise, it is adept at making enemies: Those with sensitive hides seem to resent having them flayed. In an age of media chaos, satire is easily confused with realism, and the satirist finds his best caricatures preempted by events. But satire nonetheless remains a substantial art form with a rich past reaching back to antiquity. A critic worth his salt will establish the grounds for judging such a work.
Shriver’s new novel, Mania, is a fierce satire of the progressive establishment. It follows that the New York Times’s official response merits close attention. The Times’s review is a ritual beatdown, as performed by Laura Miller, a co-founder of Salon, who finds Mania to be “tiresome,” “patently absurd,” and “ham-fisted.” If these terms emerged from the work of literary analysis, they would be intellectually serious. But Laura Miller shows little interest in the elements of satire. Her judgments are personal and political, in the combustible sense that occurs when these two words are used as synonyms. As a critic, Miller relies extensively on plot summary: “Mania is the story of Pearson Converse, an untenured academic who lives with her tree-surgeon partner and three children in a Pennsylvania college town. Most of the novel takes place during an alternate version of the 2010s, when a social-justice fad has been ignited by a best-selling book titled The Calumny of I.Q.: Why Discrimination Against “Dumb People” Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight.” The reviewer proceeds to rehearse the entire plot, snark-bombing the page as she goes.
A true literary critic might focus less on plot and more on the challenges of satire. One might ask: Should the satirist of “psychic epidemics” (Jung) include an exemplum virtutis, a non-satirical moral standard? An example would be Clarissa’s speech to the hysterical aristocracy in Canto V of The Rape of the Lock, a poem impossible to teach to the type of freshmen whom Shriver accurately describes, “touchy and on the lookout.” If postmodern fiction sacrifices nature to art, then Shriver is not postmodern. At the end of Mania, Pearson Converse resists the intellectualist backlash against the “Mental Parity movement” that upended the country in the first place. Despite having been punished for her rebellion against the “craze of intellectual egalitarianism,” Shriver’s narrator-protagonist makes her case against the rising “cognitive elite.” She writes, “Many qualities distinguish us besides mental endowment. Generosity, kindness, and common sense. …” This affirmation of virtue is sufficiently earned to carry weight. If The Big Lebowski may stand for the tendencies of postmodern satire, the moral contrast is clear.
None of this affects Times reviewer Miller, who is shrewd enough to control the game of premises: “Satire demands precision, and Shriver applies an ax to a job calling for a scalpel.” One would like to know more: How does Miller relate satiric precision to its complement, satiric hyperbole or exaggeration, even absurdity? I seem to recall that Apuleius’s Lucius turns into an ass. Chaucer’s Miller, drunk as a skunk, delivers Europe’s supreme fabliau—on horseback. Rabelais’s Gargantua is born through his mother’s left ear. Swift’s Laputa floats through the clouds. Monkeys pursue their human lovers in Voltaire’s Candide. Hans Christian Andersen is famous for a curious tale about a monarch who marches proudly through the obsequious streets without wearing a stitch but convinced of his sartorial glory. In Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” talented ballerinas must wear “bags of birdshot,” and smart folks must endure brain-buzzing, all in the name of equality. Patently absurd? Depends on how you look at it.
No doubt a good satirist understands the uses of precision, whether it be in capturing a precise emotional attitude, or in word choice, or in metaphors and extended comparisons. I must give Shriver high marks in all these respects. The dealer in axes and scalpels might benefit from close study of passages such as the following—the “institution” in question is Voltaire University, the alt-reality U Penn, where Pearson Converse teaches low-level writing classes:
The texture of the institution had become not so much fraudulent as ridiculous. Think Vienna, where I spent a week of summer vacation in the late 1990s. Although Austria is a small, dare I say has-been country whose only negligible power is heavily diluted through the European Union, its capital city is incongruously grandiose. Topiary gardens! Fountains! Gaudy marble statuary astride chariots! Golden eagles on the wing! Vast looming white edifices with wedding-cake ornamentation towering above all the little people! But with no empire to back it up, the city looks absurd. I had a gut sense this same atmosphere of blind vanity, unfounded pretension, and transparent self-delusion was also beginning to plague the stately campuses of Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard. Pretty soon, the entire educational superstructure of the United States would feel like Vienna.
This is highly accomplished, not easy to do, an extended comparison that soars on eagles’ wings before swooping down to its craterous anticlimax. Its poise and verve remind me of a passage from Matthew Arnold’s great essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” where Arnold extols the opinions of his literary hero:
Wordsworth holds the critical power very low, infinitely lower than the inventive; and he said to-day that if the quantity of time consumed in writing critiques on the works of others were given to original composition, of whatever kind it might be, it would be much better employed; it would make a man find out sooner his own level, and it would do infinitely less mischief. A false or malicious criticism may do much injury to the minds of others; a stupid invention, either in prose or verse, is quite harmless.
To return to the uses of satirical exaggeration, which is not the opposite but the counterpart of precision, it will be helpful to quote a few instances where Shriver extends her satirical prerogative. Let me suggest that Pearson is not, in Laura Miller’s dismissive phrase, “basically an avatar” of the author. Pearson, like Lemuel Gulliver, is an authorial persona and a vehicle of satire. Like Gulliver, she reports what she sees. She comments on the alt-reality version of the COVID freakout: “The morons in control of the country had panicked and shut down the entire economy for an initial pause of three weeks that went grindingly into two years.” She observes that we are breaking with “the scientific method through which all advanced economies have achieved their prosperity—a method whose previous practitioners were willing to brave the discovery of the ideologically inconvenient.” When her husband needs a good surgeon, she drinks in the spectacle of the hospital that politics built: “I watched numerous doctors and nurses rushing down the halls, and while they all looked plausibly like doctors and nurses, some of them were fake doctors and nurses, mere simulacrums, who threaded undetectably among the real ones like Stepford wives.” She comments that the West has “fallen hypnotically in love with its own virtue,” to the point that it is “committing civilizational suicide.” She remarks that “nothing works. Nobody does their jobs anymore, because nobody gets in trouble when they shirk.” She refers dismissively to her “fellow academics, cowards to a man and woman.” These statements are all exaggerations, but there is more than a grain of truth in them. The satirist is doing her job.
Although our judgment may be more or less informed by a knowledge of literature, Mania is not for all tastes. At its best, it has what T.S. Eliot called “the unpleasantness of great art.” If we can adjust our ears to her acerbic tone, Shriver proves to be intensely witty and effortlessly fluent, but her tone remains a challenge. For some, she will seem too topical, too “on the nose.” My conscience would not permit me to skip the passages on Obama, Biden, and Trump, but I did not enjoy them. And yet, her finest perceptions add to the stock of human wisdom. Pearson reflects on her tree-surgeon husband: “Some people inhabit their bodies more profoundly than others, and Wade was one.” She tells her son Darwin to his face, “Dependence on texting is one reason your generation is so ham-fisted at conducting relationships.” She refers to her phone: “The device was an instrument of torture.” Her lifelong argument with her best friend and foil, Emory Ruth, is the ironic backbone of the book: the chronicle of a friendship whose reality is always at odds with its appearance.
Another factor in the book’s reception is that Shriver is often droll but never boisterously funny. One never laughs aloud at the page. She has no minimalist register, such as we find in Wodehouse and Beckett, who use white spaces and silences to great comic effect. The body never upstages the mind.
One explanation for this paucity of hard laughter is that Pearson Converse, having grown up among Jehovah’s Witnesses, lacks an innately healthy sense of reality. If we approach comedy as a defensive reaction against conditions that are less than ideal, we imply the existence of ideal conditions. There’s a lot of play in that idea, to be sure, but my point is that Pearson, having suffered through a religious dystopia, has no grasp of a well-ordered happy life. It is not even the case that she is dull to the psychological wisdom of the Christian teaching on forgiveness. It is that her world is aboriginally Hobbesian. She lacks a certain imaginative capacity that the God-idea activates.
For instance, she mentions in passing two satirists, Evelyn Waugh and John Kennedy Toole. I would note that Waugh and Toole are out of favor in elect circles, their reputations bobbing haplessly amid the rest of the civilizational debris, tossed overboard since the ship of state hoisted its shiny new flags, all signaling virtue. It is (as Shriver knows) countercultural to mention them. My main point is that the God-idea in Waugh and Toole licenses a good deal of play, connecting them, in their literary descent, to Cervantes and Shakespeare. Quixote and Bottom are the common ancestors of Guy Crouchback and Ignatius Reilly. Pearson does not really belong in their comical and physically exuberant company. She is too intellectually severe, too much the acolyte of her admired Dostoevsky. She is always on point.
Shriver is a humanist who prefers the art of persuasion to the exercise of raw power. Her novel is a work of persuasion that appeals to readers on the difficult basis of their checkered humanity. Pearson Converse is not the world’s most lovable character by a long shot. Her anger at the world is exhausting for everyone around her, including, at times, the reader. But she won me over by outgrowing that anger in the end.
