What if calling someone stupid was a crime?

Mania. By Lionel Shriver. Harper; 288 pages; $30. Borough Press; £22

ARE YOU hateful enough to use the S-word? You know the one: stupid. It has been banned in schools, its use and synonyms (dumb, slow) considered “slurs” worthy of expulsion. Even its antonyms are grounds for book bans and boycotts: only a “cerebral supremacist” would have the gall to buy Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend”. Instead, those wanting to be politically correct display copies of “The Calumny of IQ: Why Discrimination Against ‘D— People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight” on their coffee tables.

Welcome to the America of Lionel Shriver’s “Mania”. The novel opens with the narrator’s son, Darwin, being sent home from school because he called a classmate’s t-shirt “stupid”. “I don’t understand the rules anymore!” he complains to his mother. “Can anything be stupid, or is everything intelligent now?”

Transformed by ideological extremism (everyone is smart and anyone who feels differently is a bigot), America is both the novel’s setting and subject. The New York Times has dropped the crossword puzzle, because its clues made people feel bad when they could not guess the word. Universities have open admissions; spelling bees and IQ tests are banned. Most students care less about learning than studying their instructors’ behaviour for slip-ups. Professors must treat all students as equal and deem all answers correct.

Pearson Converse, the narrator, is a literature professor in Pennsylvania and is hauled before the “dean of cognitive equality” for teaching Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot”. It was a cheeky act of resistance—and a futile one. She ends up having to apologise to keep her job.

As in George Orwell’s “1984”, spies are everywhere, but in “Mania” there are no telescreens. Instead children report their parents for forcing extra tutoring or pushing them to be ambitious. Every school has a “mental-parity champion”, who can call in child-protective services at the slightest hint of intellectual “abuse”. Pearson discovers this after her daughter, Lucy, who is wilfully resistant to learning to read but smart enough to game the system, turns her in. Orwell’s Winston Smith was tortured into compliance by the Ministry of Love; Pearson has to complete a Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity course to avoid losing Lucy to foster care.

As a writer, Ms Shriver is merciless and funny; as a thinker she is contrarian. She has been described as a “pro-Brexit, anti-woke, #MeToo-sceptical Democrat” and does not shy away from fraught subjects. Her best-known novel, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003), is told from the perspective of a mother whose son has gone on a mass-shooting rampage at his school.

Some may feel they have heard too much about “cancel culture” to seek out a work of fiction that tackles it so squarely. But the novel’s themes—of society’s quick pivots when it comes to socially acceptable beliefs, and how close friendships can be poisoned by the culture wars—feel like a welcome distraction, given their slightly (but not unbelievably) absurd elements. As Pearson observes, “I suppose none of this was funny, really; still, I couldn’t help but laugh.” ■

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter