If Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s summer blockbuster The Nest made you mildly relieved not to suffer the infantilizing burden of an inheritance, Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles will make you feel nervous about having money at all. Because, though it also features a bevy of children panting for their payout, the family doesn’t suffer alone. Before they even get a chance, the world economy rejects the American dollar for an invention called the bancor, and the cash that would have saved them is recognized as legal tender only within U.S. borders.
The Mandibles is set in the near future of 2029, where East Flatbush is still gentrifying and a tenured econ professor in D.C. can support a family of four in style. The economy has already been rocked by an earlier recession known, in slang, as “The Stonage” and has recovered: barely. Overqualified offspring Florence works at a homeless shelter because, she determines, there will always be a market for it.
Along for the ride are her son, Willing, and boyfriend, Estaban (a “Lat,” for “Latino,” in the slang of the day); her brother, Jarred, who’s retreated, Luddite-like, into a self-sustaining farm; their parents, Carter and Jayne, a frustrated journalist and bookstore owner, respectively; Nollie, Carter’s rich expatriate, cantankerous novelist sister; and lifestyle coach Avery, whose husband, Lowell’s, expertise on the economy proves less and less accurate. Presiding over them all is The Grand Man, the holder of the family fortune, a former literary agent whose money was earned generations earlier from an ancestor who wisely invested in diesel engines. Though grandpa didn’t earn the money himself, he nonetheless holds it tightly: their inheritance, Carter acidly observes, is “stuck further up the system, like a wad of disposable diapers you’re told never to flush.”
One of the funnier, and more ironic, aspects of The Mandibles is novelist Shriver’s indictment of a literary career in the face of a concrete crisis. In the new economy, books are low, rice is high. The world has devolved: the government demands all personal holdings of gold to prevent a black market from forming, and house-jacking is common. (The entire family winds up crammed into Florence’s house, until they are thrown out by gun-wielding neighbors.)
Only Willing, Florence’s son, is prescient enough to give his dog to a neighbor departing overseas, because he knows the family won’t be able to feed it. Meanwhile, Lowell is scribbling unpublishable treatises on his computer while the family scrounges for meat. Nollie, a onetime literary wonder, hauls around her “papers” even to the tent encampment to which the family is relegated. That she plans to donate them to a university is a source of amusement and consternation. (Spoiler alert: they turn out to be worth something.)
Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers does not need to leap into a far future to create a family where meat is unaffordable. Right before our own recent Stonage, Leni and Jende Jonga and their son, Liomi, have emigrated from Cameroon’s coastal town Limbe, and a lucky break — Jende lands a well-paying job as a chauffeur to a wealthy family — puts citizenship within reach.
Though they all share a bed in a teeny, roach-filled apartment in Harlem, if Leni can make it through school to become a pharmacist while Jende’s lawyer inches him toward permanent residency, Liomi will have schools and opportunities Limbe can never provide. As Jende puts it as he and Leni watch traffic in Columbus Circle, marveling at their new circumstances: “Columbus Circle is the center of Manhattan. Manhattan is the center of New York. New York is the center of America, and America is the center of the world. So we are sitting in the center of the world, right?”
Jende’s boss, Clark Edwards, works at Lehman Brothers and is, as Jende overhears, a particularly earnest form of investment banker, attempting to convince his colleagues that their house of cards is about to crash the economy. His wife is cossetted but unhappy: ” ‘Vince won’t be coming to Aspen,’ Jende overhears her say . . . slowly and sadly, almost in shock, as if reading aloud the headline of a bizarrely tragic news story from the paper.” When Clark asks if Jenge left his job in Limbe because it wasn’t a good job, Jenge laughs. “There is no good bad job in my country . . . any job is a good job in Cameroon, Mr. Edwards.”
It’s telling that, in these two literary excoriations of the power of the dollar, the gritty details of each crash are always overheard, placed in large blocks of text in other characters’ mouths that a reader is happy to skim. In The Mandibles, the info comes from newscasters and family arguments, while in Behold the Dreamers we learn through Clark’s one-sided patter to his colleagues how bankers crashed the market.
But perhaps this is less a function of a writer’s uneven skill than the actual difficulty of writing about the fall of the dollar (future or not). After all, crashes really happen in boardrooms and backrooms and trickle down — or flood — into our daily lives in horrifically vivid form. We only understand after the fact, and we understand very little. In both books, terse comments are far more illustrative. When Willing looks calmly at a world with $40 cabbages, we shiver when he declares, “This is nothing.”
And it’s particularly striking in a world where the dollar is so pinned to race and class that novels tackling its decline find their weakest point at its jointure. Though Shriver writes broadly about a U.S. in which Mexico’s economy booms and keeps U.S. citizens out in droves (Estaban, though he holds only a U.S. passport, takes a perverse pride in the reversal), all the people of color in her novel are still helpmeets and partners, one suffering the indignities of dementia and the need for frequent diaper changes, at that. Behold the Dreamers has the opposite problem: while the Jonga family exists in vivid detail and emotional depth, and Mbue’s writing is fierce and affecting, the Edwards family is taken straight from White Rich Folks Central Casting. (Though it’s somewhat of a relief to find a book in which white, not black, characters are one-dimensional.) If you could mix the Mandibles and the Jongas in one book, you might wind up with the marvelous portrait of America that each is missing.
But both novels deliver a verdict in strikingly similar terms. In each, a family is shaken to its core, and in each, the characters must salvage a life that is bountiful, if different from the one they planned. In both, the dollar is central. But both families, in this new world, have to leave America to live the American Dream.
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Sig Nordal 