Author: James Livingston

Lionel Shriver is a bad writer who makes Ayn Rand sound like a good liberal.  Like her ideological antecedent–I can’t dignify this lineage with the word “intellectual”–Shriver writes lousy novels that attract critical attention and Hollywood options because they make no sense.  The more inexplicable the better, I suppose, because this lack of sense gives everybody all the more discretion in analyzing, producing, and consuming the available fictions.  Until now, when the future intrudes on our thinking like the stupid burglar who cased the wrong place, as Donald Trump has done in hijacking the USA. But there is no present like the one lived in dystopian science fiction, where the past stands in for the future precisely because what is to become of us can’t be known until it happens–until it’s written and remembered avant la lettre, before the fact, ahead of its time, as non-fiction or novels. Shriver notes this chronological perversity in The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2042, her last readable novel (2016).  The speaker is Lowell Mandible, a complacent Keynesian economist who has been furloughed from Georgetown as the US slides into chaos because the federal government has repudiated the national debt.  Lowell is eventually rescued from his intellectual and political lethargy by his nephew, Willing, who plays the part of the old Randian mole, burrowing beneath our silly beliefs in anything but self-reliance, and who, accordingly,...