Set in a parallel yet all too familiar near past a brilliant subversive novel about a lifelong friendship threatened by culture wars from the New York Times bestselling author. 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. Children are expelled for saying the S-word (stupid) and encouraged to report parents who use it at home. A college English instructor the constitutionally rebellious Pearson Converse rejected her restrictive Jehovahs Witness upbringing as a teenager and so has an aversion to dogma of any kind. Made impotent in the university classroom shes also enraged by the crushing of her exceptionally bright childrens spirits in primary school. Fortunately she enjoys the confidence of a best friend a media commentator with whom she can speak frankly about her socially unacceptable contempt for the MP movement. Or at least she thinks she can . . . until one day the political chasm between the two women becomes uncrossable and a lifelong relationship implodes. With echoes of Philip Roths The Human Stain told in Lionel Shrivers inimitable and iconoclastic voice Mania is a sharp acerbic and ruthlessly funny book about the road to a delusional self-destructive egalitarianism that our society is already on.
