Continuing my posts about Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047…
One of the family members is living in France when the U.S. begins to truly fall apart:
“Maybe you should stay in France.” “I can’t. For an American, anywhere in Europe is physically dangerous. We’re being assaulted. And not only with crème fraîche.” “Stay in nights, then. It’s sure to blow over.” “Besides, this country’s hardly one big wine-swilling soirée. At any given time, half the population is on strike, and what good is a great train system that never runs? They’re apoplectic that they can’t all retire at fifty-two. They all expect their child benefit, their gold-plated pensions, their token-pittance healthcare charges, their truncated workweek, and two solid years of unemployment at a salary most lawyers don’t earn—all of which is a human right. Along with so many holidays and vacations that the fuckers put their feet up for a third of the year. Oh, and everyone wants to work for the government; most of them do. Your basic all-cart, no-horse. So the whole country plops into the hay wagon and wonders why it doesn’t move.”
“It’s got to be better than here,” Carter said. “Furthermore, the whole Muslim thing is out of control,” Nollie bullied on obliviously. “If I walk down the Champs-Élysées, I’ll get thumped for being a deadbeat. If I walk anywhere less central, I’ll get thumped because I’m not wearing a trash bag. Even in France, they’ve given up on the assimilation shtick, and gone for slavish appeasement instead. Whole tracts of the country are effectively no-go areas for actual French people. It’s the same all over Europe now, so there’s nowhere to go.”
More: Read The Mandibles.
Acc. to the most recent interview, the character Nollie—anagram of Lionel—Mandible was meant to be a “sour, mean” avatar of the author Shriver herself (who seems to nourish that public image), only turned out to be more hilarious than intended. She, too, is an expat, if only in the UK, with a pied-a-terre in Brooklyn.
As for her remember: novelistic future claims that “in France, they’ve given up on the assimilation shtick, and gone for slavish appeasement instead. Whole tracts of the country are effectively no-go areas for actual French people” that seem to amplify your deepest fears, let me put your mind at rest: the French, along with other Europeans, are far behind America in that regard, existence of white-no-go areas, or drive-by such without stopping for anything. Potential sources of Arab unrest banlieus in France are also placed in such a way, that a platoon-strength police force each side of any can effectively cut it off from the rest of the country for ages. Not for nothing has Baron Haussmann remodeled the street grid of Paris in the 1880s with explicit intention to keep clear lines of sight to the next major intersection, and the avenues wide enough, so that troops could be dispatched there quickly to still any people’s riots and prevent them from escalating to the level of next Paris Commune. The Parisians appreciate their roomy thoroughfares, if not exactly for their once-intended reasons (that still could come in handy).
See my long comment about the author Lionel Shriver and “The Mandibles” in earlier thread.
[this same pointer will appear in other Phil’s posts about the book.]