Shriver's 12th novel is set in a near-future American dystopia where many of the concerns currently expressed by conservatives finally have been realized. After an immigration amnesty, the country is flooded with Lats who elect a Mexican-born president who presides over a devastating economic collapse, in part created by runaway entitlements. Shriver observes President Alvarado's baby-faced softness only emphasized by the palatalized consonants of a Mexican accent, a stereotypical image of a pudgy, lisping Mexican that links his perfidy to his ethnicity as would an elliptically described hooked nose on a loathsome Jewish character.
The two black characters are similarly ill-treated. One, a social worker, is the novel's only character who speaks sub-standard English. After Alvarado renounces the national debt, she says, I don't see why the gubment ever pay anything back. Pass a law say, We don't got to.' It was once common in newspapers, fiction and nonfiction to report the speech of ordinary people in standard English, while voicing minorities in dialect or vernacular, as they might sound to white ears; this still happens from time to time, unfortunately. By recording only the speech of minority characters in sub-standard English, you stigmatize the entire ethnic group as something other than normal. No one speaks perfectly. Respect for your characters suggests that if you record one's solecisms, dropped consonants, drawl or brogue, you will faithfully record everybody else's, too.
The most problematic of Shriver's minority characters is an African American woman who has married into the white family at the heart of the novel. She suffers from early-onset dementia and is a danger to herself and to others. As the economy collapses, the family loses its home and treks across Brooklyn with the woman at the end of a leash. A plot development that features an uncontrollable black person who has to be kept under restraint like a dog seems guaranteed to hurt and provoke outrage. I wrote, If The Mandibles' is ever made into a film, my suggestion is that this image not be employed for the movie poster. I was thinking of ads in bus shelters and, honestly, I imagined they'd be wrecked.
