The characters are straight from the author’s stock persona warehouse: middle class, successful, wealthy, and ever-so-slightly cleverer than everyone else on the planet the kind of people you’d want this to happen to, just to see how they deal with it. Well, some are those that never had anything are now predators, preying on the once-wealthy who find the loss of everything beyond their ability to cope with. Over the space of a decade, the United States is reduced to a third-world country populated by people who are simply not prepared for life in a third-world country. Right now the middle classes are scared that the ongoing financial crisis will render them destitute by the time they hit retirement age, and right on cue the Shriver literary machine pops out a book about a moderately wealthy family that finds itself increasingly less wealthy as the US economy crashes and the encumbent government decides (unwisely) to default on its international debts. Worried that your financial resources will be depleted by a bout of cancer? She’s got a novel for that too. Afraid your kid is going to go postal? Shriver’s got a book for that. She taps into the single fear that is uppermost in the nation’s mind and crafts a story that drags that fear into an extreme reality. I think I’m on to Lionel Shriver’s secret: timing, research – and sharp story-telling doesn’t hurt either.
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