Dystopian Fiction: A Commentary

Our Missing Hearts     Celeste Ng     (2022)

The Handmaid’s Tale     Margaret Atwood     (1985)

I ordered the latest Celeste Ng novel from my library reluctantly, because dystopian novels set my teeth on edge. But I had reviewed Ng’s previous non-dystopian works (Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere) very positively, and I did not doubt her ability to deliver quality prose, so I steeled myself for a dystopian world of her creation. It was well worth all the cringing that I did.

The setting for Our Missing Hearts is an undefined time, not too long after the present day, in the Boston area and in New York City. Bird Gardner, age twelve, and his father scrape along in a grim student dormitory on a campus that closely resembles Harvard’s. Bird’s father had been a linguistics lecturer but now shelves books in the campus library.

The two keep their heads down and try not to attract attention in a society that has adopted a law called PACT, Preserving American Culture and Traditions. Under this law, Asian Americans suffer particular discrimination, and children deemed at risk of “anti-American” indoctrination can be forcibly removed from their parents. In Ng’s dystopian society, the PACT law is accepted by most of the public as a reasonable response to a previous period of civic unrest and economic crisis. Those who resist PACT are severely punished.

Bird’s mother, who left the family three years before the start of the story, was Asian American, and hence the lives of both mother and son are at risk. As Bird sets out on a journey to find his mother, the novel builds to a chilling climax.

Ng explains the basis of her plot in an Author’s Note at the end of the book: “There is a long history, in the US and elsewhere, of removing children as a means of political control.” She cites the compulsory separations of families in the years of slavery, the punitive boarding schools where Native American children were placed against the will of their parents, and the recent seizures of refugee children at the southern border of the US. These are well-documented cases, and Ng’s fictional world in Our Missing Hearts doesn’t exaggerate the dangers of such abuses of power.

As one character muses, “Is anyone listening out there? Are people simply rushing by? And how much of a difference can it really make, just one story, even all these stories taken together and funneled into the ear of the busy world. . . It is hard for anything to be heard and even if anyone hears it, how much of a difference could it really make, what change could it possibly bring . . . “ (299)

Our Missing Hearts joins the ranks of the classics of dystopian fiction that I read in high school and college: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (published in 1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). And, then, of course, there is The Handmaid’s Tale, which Margaret Atwood published in 1986. Until this week, I had never read Atwood’s bestseller. (Okay, okay. I really dislike dystopian novels. Even though I lived in Toronto in the 1970s, when Atwood was an up-and-coming Canadian writer and could often be spotted on downtown streets, I never got past her initial fiction offering, The Edible Woman.)

The video streaming adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale that started in 2017 has amplified Atwood’s message, bringing her warnings to a much wider public. But the original novel, which focuses on the subjugation of women in the realm of Gilead (a remade United States), is even more disturbing than Our Missing Hearts. I was struck by Atwood’s prescience, nearly four decades ago, in constructing a fictional world that predicted toxic destruction of the global environment; extreme fundamentalist censorship of written and visual materials; inequitable stratification of society; and, most shockingly, pregnancies forced on women.

Why do people write dystopian novels? Why do they create alternative histories? It’s often to send a message about totalitarian societies. The emphasis of the work can be political, economic, scientific, environmental, technological, religious, or a combination of these aspects. Dystopias are usually constructed by those with left-wing views, but they need not be—witness Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. I reviewed this 2016 novel which, despite the horrors of racism and poverty that Shriver depicts, is fascinating in its exaltation of a libertarian utopia that contrasts with the dystopia that she fashions.

I don’t plan to read a lot more dystopian fiction. It gives me nightmares. But I take the point that citizens in democratic societies need to be vigilant and activist if they want to protect their civil rights—indeed, their human rights. And authors like Atwood and Ng have chosen fiction as their medium of alarm, not articles in the New York Times. 

A Dystopian America

The Mandibles:  A Family, 2029-2047     Lionel Shriver     (2016)

Hang onto your hat. The year is 2029, and Russia and China now rule the world. The economy of the United States has crashed spectacularly, because of the national debt run up by the Latinos who control the federal government. All savings and investments are worthless, inflation is uncontrolled, jobs have disappeared, and ordinary citizens have become scavengers and thieves to stay alive. Guns, though forbidden, are essential. Despite the dire situation, elderly Americans continue to be cosseted, through programs such as Social Security and Medicare, because they are reliable voters. (Somehow, voting isn’t disrupted.)

Caught in this maelstrom are four generations of the Mandible family, New Yorkers who used to be upper middle class. Over the course of the eighteen years that this novel covers, most members of the Mandible clan survive and eventually escape to a locale (I won’t reveal where) that has created an isolationist libertarian paradise, basing its economy on the gold standard, with a flat tax and no social services. In other words, Lionel Shriver’s book is not just an echo of Ayn Rand but a loud, clanging reverberation.

A “mandible” is a jawbone, and in this novel the Mandibles exercise their jawbones frequently to expound on political and financial issues. I grew weary of the ultra-right-wing screeds against the Federal Reserve and against non-white people. There were even snide references to Chelsea Clinton and someone named (ha-ha-ha) Krugman. Almost all the characters whom Shriver presents as reasonable and civilized humans espouse views that are economically untenable and, to me, morally reprehensible.

Yet I kept reading through to page 402 in order to follow the threads of daily life in Shriver’s dystopian scenario. As housing becomes scarce in the years after 2029, more and more of the Mandibles crowd into one home, inevitably creating scenes of interpersonal conflict. What do you do when there is no more toilet paper and very limited water supply? How do you stretch a cup of rice to feed a crowd? These conundrums of human existence in a sadly debased America are sometimes solved in clever ways. And some of the future language that Shriver injects into the dialogue is amusing, if flippant. For example, since the very aged Baby Boomers are pariahs, the word that replaces “crap” is “boomerpoop.”

A couple of the characters in The Mandibles are intrepid in the face of disaster. The hero of the Mandible family turns out to be Willing, who is thirteen years old in 2029 and comes of age as he teaches himself advanced survival skills. He’s the one who leads the way to the promised land of libertarianism. Another Mandible, Avery, who is middle-aged at the start of the novel, blossoms: “Things seemed to matter again. It seemed to matter how she spent her time and what she told her children. Why, it was tempting to wonder whether, while the likes of the Stackhouses were musing idly over whether to cover the footstool in taupe or mauve, folks on the margins were living real lives, and making real decisions, and conducting real relationships, full of friction and shouting and moment—whether all this time the poor people had been having all the fun.” (188)

But mostly The Mandibles is a book about ugliness. Kindly people die. Hard-nosed scammers prosper. The only African American character has advanced dementia and is kept tied up.  As Carter Mandible, an unemployed economist, pronounces, “It’s the decent people who always get fucked.” (125)

The Mandibles did prod me to consider the place of the Unites States in history. Shriver puts these same considerations into the mind of my favorite character, Florence, early in the book: “She didn’t think about being American often, though that may have been typically American in itself. She didn’t regard being American as especially formative of her character, and that may have been typically American, too. . .  For years now it had ceased to be controversial to suppose that the era of the ‘American Empire’ was fading, and the notion that her country may already have had its day in the sun she didn’t find upsetting. Plenty of other countries had flourished and subsided, and were reputed to be pleasant places to live. She didn’t see why being a citizen of a nation in decline should diminish her own life or make her feel personally discouraged.” (74)