A Fierce Lion in the Streets

In Lionel Shriver’s MANIA, intelligence becomes hate speech. “Smart,” “brilliant,” even “wise” are banned for suggesting inequality. Colleges drop admissions requirements. Everyone graduates med school. The lion is loose.

But as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shriver warns us early: this lion isn’t real. Or is it?

In Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” several laborers—a carpenter, a joiner, a weaver, a bellowsmender, a tinker, and a tailor—produce a play for the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons.

These “mechanics” fear their lion might be too convincing—frightening the ladies and spoiling the celebration. So they settle on a rhetorical trick, to announce the lion is merely a man-in-lion’s costume, thus saving the play and the dignity of the ladies.

Snout Will not the ladies be afeard of a lion?

Starveling I fear it, I promise you.

Bottom Masters, you ought to consider with yourselves: to bring in,––God shield us!––a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing; for there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion living; and we ought to look to’t.

Snout Therefore another prologue must tell he is not a lion.

Lionel Shriver employs a similar device in her novel MANIA, a parallel America in the 2010s in which the Mental Parity (MP) movement sweeps aside the notion that some people are more intelligent than others. Smartist elites, we’re told, invented “intelligence” to justify power. The real offense isn’t inequality—it’s believing it exists. With astonishing speed the MP movement wins over academia, pop culture, the education system, and the government.

Shriver writes a blueprint for dystopian change.First: language is policed. Words like “dumb” and “idiot” are obvious casualties, but even “smart,” “brilliant,” and “wise” are banned for implying cognitive hierarchy. Second: culture censors itself. Credentials are downplayed; The Big Bang Theory is pulled; The New York Times cancels its crossword and issues an apology. Third: the legal system gets involved. Bureaucrats enforce compliance; nonconformity becomes prosecutable.

Ms. Shriver tells her story through the first person account of a mother, Pearson Converse. A natural contrarian, Pearson runs away from her Jehovah’s Witness community at age 16, eventually finding her footing as an English instructor at Pennsylvania’s Voltaire University. She sees the MP movement as “stupid”—a banned word, obviously—but censors herself until things come to a head.

Rumors circulate that Pearson uses smartist language at home; Child Protection Services pays a visit to investigate the “torture” she inflicts on her daughter with reading lessons. When asked for an alternative CPS informs her she should let the girl “read in her own way”. Things spiral further—her best friend embraces the MP movement, and her partner, an arborist, injures himself falling from a tree, an accident caused by an employee who is just-as-competent-as-everyone-else despite knowing nothing about trees—or power tools for that matter.

Shriver intersperses MANIA with real events between 2010 and 2025—the Arab Spring, the Aurora movie theater shooting, Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Obama’s presidency, Trump’s election in 2016, and, of course, the pandemic.

Which brings us back to Shakespeare.

Each of Shriver’s chapter-sections is headed by a year and the word “ALT-”, as in “alternate”. 2011 is therefore “ALT-2011”. 2014 is “ALT-2014”. Initially, I found this insulting and annoying as a reader—it felt overly obvious. As I read further reality and fiction began to blur, the more disconcerted I became, and then I clung to those ALT prefixes like a child clings to her security blanket. Like Snug’s prologue they reassured me, “Then know that I one Snug the Joiner am, / No lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam…”.

All satire veers into the realm of the absurd, and the idea that all people are equally intelligent is absurd…isn’t it? Shriver’s satire on intelligence works equally well as a stand-in for a dozen other themes that have fallen prey to cancel culture in the past decade—she shows what happens when mob mentality goes unchecked. So, Shriver’s book, like all good satire, brushes heavily against reality.

However, at times, MANIA flirts with the reactionary. Not every attempt to reshape language deserves scorn. Emory, Pearson’s colleague, makes a fair point: some words—“stupid,” “dumb”—aren’t brave truth-telling so much as lazy shorthand. But Shriver’s concern isn’t with individual choices; it’s with the coercive machinery that turns culture into code enforcement.

In the mechanics’ staged play the main characters, Pyramus and Thisbe, don’t know the lion isn’t real, leading to a double suicide. Like the lion, cancel culture may be a performance, but someone still ends up mauled.