Ruth
Franklin has a great book review in the NYT (“Lionel Shriver Imagines Imminent
Economic Collapse, With Cabbage at $20 a Head”). In the novel, American
civilization has apparently collapsed under its own weight – ending la dolce
vita for the 1%. Here are the last 2 sentences from the review: “‘The line
between owners of swank Washington townhouses
and denizens of his sister-in-law’s Fort
Greene shelter was perhaps thinner than
he’d previously appreciated,’ Lowell
realizes late in the novel. The line separating us from our dystopian future
may be equally thin. The curse of Cassandra, after all, was that she told the
truth.” The trouble is – I tend to trust people who can write so well…