![]() ![]() “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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