Bowdoin’s student newspaper decried the attendees’ lack of “basic empathy.” Administrators sent multiple emails to the “culprits” threatening an investigation into an “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Partygoers were placed on “social probation,” while the two hosts were ejected from their dorm and later impeached. All four generations of the family are forced to crowd into one small Brooklyn house – that belonging to Florence, one of Douglas’s two grand-daughters and the only one of the 13 (14 if you include their lodger) who’s got an actual job (in one of the city’s homeless shelters, currently operating at a 200% capacity and growing) – where regular washing and re-using of pieces of torn up cloth is the only toilet paper available.When photos of the party circulated on social media, campus-wide outrage ensued. What follows is a speedy descent from the luxuries of an upper middle-class existence into a life of daily drudgery, hardship, violence and fear.

The Mandibles have been luckier than most – “While crude survival from one day to the next might be every human’s animal goal, for generations the Mandible family had managed to dress up the project as considerably more exalted” – but this is brought to a swift, sharp end when the fortune the younger generations have been counting on inheriting when 97-year-old Douglas Mandible departs this world, is wiped out.

Sprinkled with just enough speculative inventions to hint towards something Atwoodian – a workforce displaced by robs voice-activated household management systems self-driving cars and increasingly Orwellian levels of state control and surveillance – this is also a world in which the once glorious United States is now teetering on the edge of complete financial meltdown, crippled by national debt and with the dollar in free-fall. Having, in previous works, explored the evils of the present – from high school shootings to the American health care system – Lionel Shriver’s ambitious but flawed new novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, takes an America of the near future as its subject.

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver