But there’s no real difference between monetizing the debt and defaulting on it-it just takes longer,” she said. “There’s reference in the media all the time now to ‘monetizing the debt,’ as if that’s the most normal thing in the world. The coronavirus, she believes, will ultimately prove less destructive than the international fiscal contraction that it has provoked. Reviewing the book for the Times, in 2016, Ruth Franklin called Shriver, who is originally from North Carolina, the “Cassandra of American letters,” and reminded readers that “the curse of Cassandra, after all, was that she told the truth.” Shriver has often been convinced that we are freaking out about the wrong things-focussing on climate change, for instance, instead of contemplating the population explosion that fuels it. She was afraid that she would prove oracular about more than toilet paper, and that we are hurtling toward global financial cataclysm-what she described in “The Mandibles” as “an ongoing, borderless nightmare ended only by death.” “Truth is, I’ve never been this shaken,” she told me. It is a modest, comfortable place, decorated with thrift-store finds and small ceramic sculptures-smooth, faceless figures-that Shriver made, along with memorabilia that Williams has gathered in his decades as a jazz drummer. Since the lockdown went into effect, she has been sequestered with her husband, Jeff Williams, at their row house in Bermondsey. “I found that really gratifying,” Shriver said, as she considered her prescience, one recent afternoon in London. This is made particularly troublesome by another post-apocalyptic issue: there’s not enough toilet paper. (Their new patrons are foreigners America, like other failed states, has become a magnet for tourists who can afford luxuries that the natives can only dream of.) Everyone is grimy, because water shortages have rendered showers brief and infrequent. Former hedge-fund managers compete for jobs as waiters.
Savings accumulated over a lifetime evaporate in an hour. Suddenly, a cabbage costs thirty-eight dollars. In Lionel Shriver’s novel “The Mandibles,” it’s 2029, the United States has defaulted on its loans, and the country is plunging into an economic abyss.
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