“And that was your perspective on your country as well: that it was not forever,” Eva, the narrator of “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” writes to her husband, Franklin.

It’s been on Shriver’s mind for some time. “What if the United States collapsed?” is a question that has been asked by any number of novelists, to say nothing of the rest of us Americans squinting toward November with mounting apprehension. “What if I had to care for my obese sibling?” yielded “Big Brother” (2012), a fictional playing-out of an autobiographical scenario which, painfully, never came to pass in actual life Shriver’s older brother died from complications related to obesity, in 2009. (A movie adaptation, starring Tilda Swinton, followed, in 2011.) “What if I kissed a man who wasn’t my husband?” led to “The Post-Birthday World” (2007), which traces the alternate lives that a children’s-book illustrator might lead depending on how she answers. Shriver was forty-eight at the time, and had spent years writing in obscurity. “What if my son became a school shooter?” is the prompt that gave rise to “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” her astounding seventh novel, which made her name when it was published, in 2003. Much of Shriver’s work operates in a speculative vein she likes to let her fiction sprout from the germ of “what if”-type thought experiments, unconfined by genre. This is the world according to “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,” Lionel Shriver’s new novel, her twelfth.

A meager cabbage costs thirty dollars one week, forty the next, and that’s when there’s still cabbage to buy.

In short order, a greenback is as worthless as a Weimar cigarette rolled with a fifty-billion-mark note. The Fed goes into overdrive, printing new money to cover its debts. Furious, President Alvarado, America’s first Mexican-born head of state, announces that the U.S. But those disasters are minor compared with the latest: an economic collapse set in motion by the introduction of the bancor, a new global reserve currency meant to replace the dollar on the international market and backed by a coalition of countries led by Russia’s ruler-for-life, Vladimir Putin. Americans are still reeling from the Stone Age of 2024, when the electric grid crashed, wreaking technological havoc: pileups on unlit roads, airplanes dropping from the skies, pacemakers pumping double-time, looting and riots from sea to shining sea. “Dryouts” are commonplace, though it’s not clear whether scarcity of water or the dilapidation of the infrastructure meant to distribute it is to blame. The good news is that the United States has hung on for another thirteen years. If you think times are tough now, just wait until 2029. In her latest novel, Lionel Shriver brings the country to the brink of economic apocalypse Photograph by David Azia / AP

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