But The Mandibles isn’t a humorous romp. Shriver has obviously been reading autopsies of the financial crash, and we also get the conventions of future fiction: some gizmo action, fold-up computers, driverless cars, and some new slang.

However, being bewitched by your research is one of the dangers of novel-writing. Willing chips in to the conversation: “We could easily get along with a small, steady predictable rate of deflation. Inflation is a tax. Money for the government. A tax that people don’t see as tax.”

His comment works here, because it tells us something about Willing, he’s not your typical 14-year-old kid. Yet a lot of the economic debate in the pages of The Mandibles does feel like what it is: economic debate. As with most novels what works best is human nature, and Shriver does a good job with the family relationships in the Mandible clan.

As in many dystopian works, there is the “other place” to escape to, in this case a breakaway state, centred around Las Vegas, that the far-sighted Willing and his favourite aunt, Nollie, reach. The refugees from the failed United States are informed immediately on arrival that it is not a “utopia” but a place where there has been a return to the pioneering, independent spirit of the founders.

Fortunately for Willing his aunt, a once-successful novelist, has a secret stash of gold to help get them started. It may be the future, but even there, writers suffer. As Nollie is at pains to point out:

This is not manna from the sky. I earned it by staying up late at a keyboard when my friends were carousing in bars. By reading the same manuscript so many times — in multiple edits, copyedits, first, second and third passes, and galleys — that I came to hate the sight of my own sentences. By appearing in public events and saying the same thing over and over until I was senseless with self-hatred.

For someone who has spent much of her life outside the US, Shriver seems to have a fondness for the hardcore American values of self-reliance, industry and dislike of government. Daniel Defoe would have approved.