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    The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047
    The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047
    The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047

    Written by Lionel Shriver

    Narrated by George Newbern

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    With dry wit and psychological acuity, this near-future novel explores the aftershocks of an economically devastating U.S. sovereign debt default on four generations of a once-prosperous American family. Down-to-earth and perfectly realistic in scale, this is not an over-the-top Blade Runner tale. It is not science fiction.

    In 2029, the United States is engaged in a bloodless world war that will wipe out the savings of millions of American families. Overnight, on the international currency exchange, the “almighty dollar” plummets in value, to be replaced by a new global currency, the “bancor.” In retaliation, the president declares that America will default on its loans. “Deadbeat Nation” being unable to borrow, the government prints money to cover its bills. What little remains to savers is rapidly eaten away by runaway inflation.

    The Mandibles have been counting on a sizable fortune filtering down when their ninety-seven-year-old patriarch dies. Once the inheritance turns to ash, each family member must contend with disappointment, but also—as the U.S. economy spirals into dysfunction—the challenge of sheer survival.

    Recently affluent, Avery is petulant that she can’t buy olive oil, while her sister, Florence, absorbs strays into her cramped household. An expat author, their aunt, Nollie, returns from abroad at seventy-three to a country that’s unrecognizable. Her brother, Carter, fumes at caring for their demented stepmother, now that an assisted living facility isn’t affordable. Only Florence’s oddball teenage son, Willing, an economics autodidact, will save this formerly august American family from the streets.

    The Mandibles is about money. Thus it is necessarily about bitterness, rivalry, and selfishness—but also about surreal generosity, sacrifice, and transformative adaptation to changing circumstances.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 21, 2016
    ISBN9780062472649
    Author

    Lionel Shriver

    Although Lionel Shriver has published many novels, a collection of essays, and a column in the Spectator since 2017, and her journalism has been featured in publications including the Guardian, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, she in no way wishes for the inclusion of this information to imply that she is more “intelligent” or “accomplished” than anyone else. The outdated meritocracy of intellectual achievement has made her a bestselling author multiple times and accorded her awards, including the Orange Prize, but she accepts that all of these accidental accolades are basically meaningless. She lives in Portugal and Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for The Mandibles

    3.5/5

    204 ratings21 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I listened to this book in 2023, 7 years after it was published. Given our current economic condition, federal debt, and the intention of the current administration to join the World Economic Forum's "you'll own nothing and be happy" philosophy, the book seems far too much like a history book than a novel.
    • 5/5
      An excellent imagining of a not-too-impossible reality, this book will make you want to go buy some Bitcoin, even if that wasn’t its original intent. As each character in the book manages to capture the broad socioeconomic and philosophical spectrum of modern America’s views on money, we see what the implosion of a house of cards could look like. The only reason this book, written in 2016, can’t stand as prescient and bordering prophetic is because it assumed Bitcoin up and died, but I can’t fault the author for not being an early adopter to the worlds first digital hard currency. Replace gold with Bitcoin, and the story changes very little. But the book still serves as a cautionary tale of the possible outcome when the average person assumes that the “suits” with abstract power have it all under control.
    • 5/5
      Lionel Shriver is another favorite author of mine, and this book did not disappoint; it looks at what could happen if US currency loses its value worldwide, and some of its predictions hit a little close home in our current Covid world.
    • 2/5
      The Mandibles is both a story and a backstory of an economic dystopia. The story is that of the titular family, thrown into an economic crisis. As a novel, it's witty and engaging, though imperfect. There are too many characters, resulting in only a few complexly drawn ones and too many nonentities. The plot moves unevenly through the time span (more on this later). However, there is a good eye towards the mundane details: Food, water, toilet paper. When Shriver stops showing you how much effort she has put into research and lets her characters and story do the work a novel should do, it's a pleasure to read.

      The backstory is another problem. The underlying issue is that Shriver has founded the novel on a very abstract idea: the reality of money. In order to make it convincing, Shriver has to explain. And she does. In lengthy exposition, in too-knowledgeable characters, in info dumps.

      The scenario just manages to edge itself far away enough from realistic to be irritating. 2029 is only 13 years away, yet supposedly public school classes are now taught only in Spanish, kids don't read, street dialects are incomprehensible, robots have taken all the jobs, and teenagers are named Bing, Goog, and Fifa.

      Then we have the politics. In 2029, "Lats" have taken over, and now it's "press 2 for English" to make them feel more welcome and an inaugural address given solely in Spanish, followed by an Asian world takeover--the Americans begin referring to Asians as "flatfaces." It's the first Latino president who renounces debt, and successive Democratic governments who destroy what remains of the economy. I couldn't decide if it was straightforwardly racist, or an attempt to be edgy that flopped.

      The final phase of the novel shows us the "new" America: where people are taxed at 77% to pay for entitlements, chips are implanted in our heads to ensure taxes are paid, and cash has been abolished. The character who selflessly opened her home to her relatives is dead of an infection because antibiotics no longer work, while her son who dropped out of high school and owns a gun and her aunt who hoarded gold escape to a "not utopia" with the gold standard and flat tax. Of course, at the end of the novel, that tax rate goes from 10% to 11%. It's both well written and terrible; because the novel simply omits everything from 2032 to 2047, there is a large amount of catch up which violates the rule of "show, don't tell."

      In the end I don't know if this was a knowingly libertarian pipe dream, or a cynical con.
    • 4/5
      A bit pedantic at times, but her vision of the future and an economic collapse is not merely plausible, but chilling. It slows down a bit in the middle, but picks up again towards the end. It's very American in scope, which is a bit myopic at times, but parallels the political and economic dumpster fire down south, and I wish it had more about what might happen with Canada in it. Nonetheless, a good read.
    • 3/5
      The Mandibles chronicles the life of the extended Mandible family during and after the worst economic crisis the US has ever seen. With the dollar worthless, the middle classes are worst hit as overnight many white collar workers lose their jobs and the worth of their investments. First world staples such as water, heat and food quickly become luxuries, and the extended Mandible family find themselves thrown together in a bid for survival.I enjoy Lionel Shriver's novels as she's never scared of a contentious plot line, but her writing can be very uneven. This novel's only a few years old, yet it reads like a first novel in many ways. She spends the first 100 pages setting the scene of the economic problems in a way that feels very much tell rather than show, with dialogue that feels forced as she uses unnatural conversations between characters to over-explain the setting of the book. It particularly irked me that she kept throwing in clunky references to the technology of the future in a way that felt very amateurville (I'm walking down the street, so I'd better unfold my brand new xyz device in my pocket whilst simultaneously thinking about the demise of the old fashioned smart phones).That being said, the middle section of the book flowed much better once she'd got all her scene-setting of the future and economic explanations out of the way. Given our current COVID-19 situation, what was scariest of all about this novel was that it no longer feels like dystopian nonsense that could never happen. Empty shelves in the shops? Panic buying? Tick - already done that. Mass unemployment - will we be ticking that box sometime in the very near future? Economic wipeout - how are so many countries going to pay back the billions that have been borrowed to tackle Coronavirus? How financially secure are we really - is it possible to lose everything you've worked for if the economy doesn't recover quickly?It's all quite a sobering thought, although Shriver includes plenty of comedic streaks to somehow still keep things light(ish).3 stars - an interesting read, but falls very much short of her best writing.
    • 5/5
      I have yet to work out why the two sentences, "I'd build a gigantic greenhouse. I'd grow lemons", caused me to burst into tears.

      A riveting, thought-provoking read; it's fiction, but it might not be.
    • 1/5
      Read 70 pp too many.
    • 5/5
      This had a lot in common with my fave apocalypse novels – you could say this is an economic apocalypse novel, though it’s not a worldwide apocalypse, its effects being focused on one country (the USA), and like the best of them it doesn’t flinch from hard realities and harrowing events.To get to the drama you have to wade through the first part of the novel. Starting about ten years in the future, the social, political, economic and environmental circumstances need to be established, which means a lot of conversations in which characters debate the state of things, and children lecture their parents on economics, in ways that are not always believable but are nevertheless necessary if we are to put the events in context. It’s dense stuff, but there are gems to be unearthed (the passing reference to “Ed Balls’ government” raised a chuckle…. I was searching to see whether in this increasingly believable future, Brexit had actually happened, though if the answer was there I didn’t spot it).Maximum respect to Lionel Shriver, she has imagined a three-dimensional reality, complete with slang phrases, popular culture, technology, economics, the lot. It even comes with its own recent history (still the future for us). At one point the characters end up remarking how setting novels in the not-too-distant future means you don’t have to wait too long to find out if the vision was correct or not. Ironic and surely deliberate.Once the economic apocalypse hits – triggered by a decision by the USA to default on its increasingly unmanageable debt – the depiction of a society in gradual meltdown is compelling and frankly unputdownable. It’s one of those situations where just when you think things can’t possibly get any tougher, they do. There are people out there as I write “prepping” for the end of the world, or more immediately for Brexit, stockpiling coffee and baked beans and stuff like that. Having read this novel I’m thinking…. Man, if you really think there’s going to be a need for stockpiled goods, you don’t just need the goods you need a gun.There is an abrupt jump-shift towards the end of the novel, just when you least expect it, and though I felt a mite disappointed, things quickly ramped up again – Ms Shriver was not content with her apocalypse, she has also imagined what might come next, and ensure drama right up to the very last page. Good as her novels are, I feared she might never top “Kevin” but she just might have done here.
    • 5/5
      I was absolutely mad about this modern-day, black-humored GRAPES OF WRATH. It's 10 or so years in the future, and the dollar implodes, leading to a nationwide economic collapse. We follow one family's step-by-step decline into utter destitution, in the wider setting of New York City's descent into lawlessness. But trust me, it was no dystopian downer; it was funny and riveting. My five-star feelings only began to quaver after the portion set in the 2030's ended, when we fast-forward into what I initially thought was, and then thought SHOULD have been, a brief coda, set another decade or so into the future. The action only sagged here, in basically one scene, where the characters who were the teenagers during the collapse are now disaffected young adults unable to hold my interest. As this portion of the book went on, I was grossly disappointed - ending with the 2030's section was EXACTLY where it should have ended, I felt. BUT -- she did pull off a good enough ending to make the too-long coda worthwhile. So I stick with 5 stars.
    • 1/5
      Too technical for me
    • 4/5
      After reading past reviews I agree that there is not much "new" in terms of ideas here, and yes, there is too much debate/discussion about economics, but I think reading this now, in 2018, feels scarier then it did pre-2016 election. It is pretty disturbing how much it feels like something like this plot could happen very soon, and it led to pointless discussions about what is valuable now, what could be valuable in a crisis (seriously - toilet paper!) and how one could possibly protect oneself form being wiped-out in a similar financial/social crisis!
    • 5/5
      I was reading this book in Sonoma, Ca while the worst fires in California history were raging. This dystopian novel about the descent into hell for the well to do was mirroring the realty of many people here that have lost everything in the fire. Fortunately, I am ok and was able to finish this terrific book. This is my first Shriver book though I am familiar with her work. Many of the reviewers have trouble with what they see as baby boomer and old people bashing along with attacks on the government. This is important to the novel. Basically in the year 2029 things have been tough in the US. Water shortage, a loss of the internet for 3 weeks in 2024 and myriad other problems plague us. Shriver takes most of the existing trends in our 2017 culture and extends them out in 2029: robots, driver less cars, increasing minority population. She does it in a creative satirical way that is both funny but also plausible. It is the plausibility of this book that makes it so interesting. In 2029 the non-american world gangs up on the dollar by creating a new currency call the bancor meant to displace the dollar. This group is led by Putin. Rather than work with the rest of the world our Mexican born president(Latins are the majority now) renounces all of our debts. This begins the descent. The story of the Mandibles is about an extended family that has been waiting for their inheritance from their 97 year old patriarch Douglas. The crisis renders this worthless and the rest of the book deals with how this mult-generational family copes and survives. An understanding of economics helps but is not necessary to enjoy this book. It is well written with wonderful prose and lots of humor. It really gets you thinking how you would survive in a world where the veneer of civilization has worn away and it is dog eat dog. Having seen the positive side of humanity during the our North Bay fires, I would hope that it would not end up like this novel. Again, this is a must read!!!!
    • 3/5
      Part One was interesting, but difficult to get through. I could have done with more of Part Two. Overall, satisfyingly good.
    • 3/5
      This is one of the scariest apocalyptic books I've ever read--because it's so real. It begins in 2029, which is pretty much like today, only worse, and grittier, and with a wider income gap. For the most part, the four generations of Mandibles are doing ok. Florence works at a homeless shelter and owns a house in an area of Brooklyn she hopes will soon gentrify. She lives with her boyfriend Esteban and her teenage son Will. Her sister Avery lives in DC, and is a psychotherapist married to Lowell, a prominent economics professor at Georgetown. They have three teenagers, who attend private schools are very entitled. They live a comfortable, even luxurious life. Florence and Avery's brother Jared owns an organic farm in upstate New York.The family patriarch, their grandfather Douglas, also known as "Grand Man", is extremely wealthy, and lives in a luxurious retirement community with his second, younger, trophy wife, who ironically suffers from dementia, in contrast to Douglas's robust health. Avery and Florence, as well as their parents (their father is Douglas's son) sometimes overtly, but mostly just in the back of their minds look forward to a time when they will inherit some of Douglas's fortune. Douglas also has a daughter in Paris. Aunt Nolly wrote one wildly successful book, and has apparently lived well off the proceeds ever since.Then, everyone's world turns on a dime. A consortium of nations has introduced a new currency, the bancor, and has replaced the dollar as the standard currency measure with the bancor. They announce that they will no longer accept payments in dollars. The President of the U.S. then declare all U.S. debts null and void, and also outlaws the bancor. The value of the dollar is immediately wiped out, and everyone loses whatever they have saved, large or small. In addition, all privately-held gold is confiscated by the U.S. government. Inflation runs rampant, with food prices being raised hourly.Shriver paints a real and extremely frightening picture of how our society would fall apart in such a financial cataclysm. The first part of the book covering this transition was totally spell-binding. The second part of the book, a number of years later, after the economy has become more stable, is less engaging, and becomes somewhat of a polemic. Evil big government has taken over--everyone must be "chipped" which allows the IRS to take its due from every cent anyone earns. Not surprisingly, some of our characters want to live free, and take off for Nevada, which has seceded from the union. I didn't care that much for the second part, although it still made for some interesting reading. But I can recommend this book for the first part alone.3 stars
    • 4/5
      I'm a standard American liberal, so it was probably good for me to read something like "The Mandibles," which might be described as a dystopian novel written from a libertarian point of view. It's the sort of book that asks what would happen if many things that people on the left take for granted about America went wrong at the same time, from a failure of cultural integration to monetary policy to basic social order. But somehow, it's not always depressing. This one is, when one comes down to it, a satire, and at times it can be genuinely funny and not a little disquieting. You don't have to dislike left-leaning college professors and yoga-addled suburban moms to appreciate how well the author skewers them here. There are also some nice literary touches: Shriver anticipates not just how technology will change but how language will mutate over the next thirty years or so. "The Mandibles" includes future malaprops and slang. The book has something of a "voice" problem -- most of its characters speak in the same tart, excessively clever dialect that may or may not reflect the author's own speech patterns, but then, satires only have to be so realistic. The novel's central question really revolves around value, and not in the "what's really important" sense of the word. When a currency debases itself and everything, from food to shelter to water to basic safety becomes impossibly scarce, it moves a lot of the book's characters -- and perhaps the reader, too -- to ask themselves what really holds value and what doesn't. Shriver's very good at using the societal chaos described in this book to show what each of her characters takes for granted and how closely that ties into their financial condition. "The Mandibles" also asks what character traits, and, by extension, what characters, are best suited to survival when times get really tough. We see coddled characters find a toughness they never knew that they had, others make hard choices, and others fall apart completely. I especially enjoyed Willing Mandable, who's barely a teen when the trouble starts, and it's not that he's without kindness, but he has clear-eyed take on what it takes to survive and what's worth risking yourself for. He's an uncomfortable reminder that in some extreme situations it's the people who are willing to be most ruthless who are most likely to survive. The book sort of falls apart in its last few chapters, though. It's one thing to describe how people might deal with the collapse of a society more-or-less like ours -- an exercise which provides lots of opportunity for sharp satire -- and quite another to posit a mythical libertarian paradise. It's around here that the book finally starts feeling a bit like a sermon, and the fact that the author uses a really unfortunate metaphor to describe government surveillance doesn't really help matters. Even Willing Mandible becomes something of a vehicle for the author's version of one of those "I am an individual!" jags that Rand fans will probably appreciate. But even then, the books ends with the point that inequality is a part of the human condition and acceptance of inequality -- and the inevitable scarcity of resources -- is a necessary part of a truly stable society. I'll probably never agree with Ms. Shriver on a lot of political matters, but "The Mandibles" certainly gave me something to think about.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating dystopian novel following an American family in the near future. Financial meltdown, baby-boomers ageing, the withdrawal of cash, vividly described and scarily believable. Another intelligent, thought-provoking novel by Shriver.
    • 3/5
      For the first time I can ever remember, this is the second book (from one library visit) that I failed to finish. In this novel I reached the half-way point before putting it down. It is well written, amusing (as a fall on a banana peel is funny), and unremittingly bleak. It posits an economic and political future in which the U.S. loses it's leadership role and enters an economic war with Russia and China. The results are a total loss of the social contract. Everyone (including the 1%) becomes poverty stricken over night. Inflation approaches Weimar levels. Crime skyrockets and becomes the norm; anyone retaining a home suddenly finds it swarming with homeless relatives. The use of water is too expensive for most people, as is electric power. So there's a two-century regression back to the early 19th century while the setting is Brooklyn in the middle of the 21st century in terms of technology, knowledge, etc. Eventually, I began to dread picking the book up to discover the next atrocity awaiting the family at the center of the tale. Shriver has created a never-ending joke. You get the set-up, and await the punchline, and it never comes. I recommend it, but only to strong, stoic readers who can put up with a work that is like a black hole.
    • 1/5
      Ugh! About the worst fiction I've read this year. Horribly written and unbelievable dialog. Thinly drawn characters. Awful. Stay away.
    • 4/5
      This novel is about the economic collapse of the US. The tone is very different from We Need To Talk About Kevin, less personally disastrous and more disaster in general. On the bright side, the son has been redeemed from the sociopathic Kevin to the practical, economic wiz Willing. Having a deeper understanding of economics would probably make it more meaningful, but it is eye-opening and engrossing. No political or economic system goes unscathed because Shriver has never shown herself to be partial to one specific guide to living. In this book, she leaves the reader just as angry as she did in Kevin but for different reasons. The US economy does collapse and one of the large causes is the amount of the economy that goes toward supporting old people. Lots of Boomer talk. Being a boomer, it's like getting slapped in the face over and over. Shriver is not a cuddle up by the fire kind of read.
    • 3/5
      This book tells the tale of the economic collapse in the US in 2029. Cabbage is $20 a head. The robots were once called “bots” but they’ve taken over so many jobs, they’re now called “robs”. Showers are taken once a week to save water. There’s a new global currency, the “bancor”. The US President announces that the government is defaulting on all loans. Banks shut down and accounts are frozen. Inflation is out of control leading to chaos. The government demands that citizens turn over all gold to them. Unfortunately, this whole story is far too believable.Great Grand Man is 97 years old. The Mandible family (and there are a lot of family members) is waiting for him to die so they can inherit his sizeable fortune. But now not only has that fortune vanished, but they must struggle to survive. A new world is born and the author does a fabulous job of describing the changes. There is a truly chilling scene of the army coming into a home with metal detectors searching for hidden gold, with the threat of prison and a $250,000 fine should they find any. The book takes the family through to 2047 where what’s left of the family ends up in the United States of Nevada.This is written as a satire and with a dry wit. It’s a very clever book. I chose this book because I thought “We Need to Talk About Kevin” was such a powerful book so I was anxious to read her newest effort. This is a very different type of book. Although I’ve read reviews saying that the book is slow to start, I enjoyed the first quarter of the story very much but by the time I was half way through, I began to lose interest. I thought the book went on far too long and had made its point early on and the rest was just repetitive. The author does such an excellent job in detailing human reaction to these disturbing events that I wish she could have curbed some of the social commentary and long financial lessons that just seemed to bog the book down.This book was given to me by the publisher through Edelweiss in return for an honest review.