Most of the book covers the subsequent slow slide into total American collapse. The President then forcibly confiscates all the gold in the country and hands it over to China to prevent China attacking us.
Global debtors demand repayment of dollar-denominated US debt in bancors the US, under the leadership of a race-baiting Latino president, responds by cancelling all government debt (that owed to US citizens as well) and cutting off the US from the world financial and trading system.
Final economic collapse occurs when the United States currency, a fiat currency untrusted by other countries due to America’s stagnancy, consuming ways and lack of production, is replaced as the world’s reserve currency by the “bancor,” a new global currency backed by gold and commodities. The book profiles an extended family-the wealthy elderly patriarch, his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all living in either the New York or Washington, D.C. Shriver satirically narrates the economic collapse of America, occurring in 2029, when her book starts (although apparently things have been going downhill since the “Stonage,” i.e., “Stone Age,” when the Internet was brought down for three weeks, probably by the Chinese, to the economic detriment of America). The nature of cautionary tales is that they are didactic, of course, but Shriver does an excellent job of avoiding the shrill tones of, say, Ayn Rand or once-praised sixth-rate writers like Barbara Kingsolver and Annie Proulx, whose books are merely tedious vehicles for their various odious ideologies. It is a fairy tale, like Hansel And Gretel, though here the witch is the economics of smoke and mirrors, especially involving money, and the gingerbread house is the belief that we can spend money we don’t have, endlessly receiving something for nothing. In the meantime, though, we can enjoy The Mandibles, Lionel Shriver’s excellent, and mostly pessimistic, book about the near future collapse of America. Now, I suspect it will happen slowly over piles of bodies, with the only question being how tall those piles will be. A few months ago, I thought that switch would be quick and smooth. Moreover, my strong belief is that, while it may not be evident yet, the era of apocalyptic fiction is ending, to be replaced by a new literature of optimism and pursuit of excellence. Of course, intellectually I realize that actual apocalypses are very, very bad for everyone involved, so my self-image is buried deep in my id, not a goal I have set for myself. Probably, similar to many doom-and-gloom conservatives, deep down I see myself as bestriding the Apocalypse like a colossus, Bible in my left hand and short-barreled AR-15 in my right.
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