2020-03-01_The_Atlantic

MARCH 2020 79

BOOKS

The Art of

Second Chances

In Emily St. John Mandel’s

disaster-steeped fiction, a derailed

life can take multiple forms.

By Ruth Franklin

Writing in The New York Times in June 2003, less

than two years after the events of September 11 shat-

tered the complacency with which many Americans

conducted their lives, the British critic Michael Pye

lamented an unlikely casualty of the new era: the abil-

ity to occupy ourselves with a superficial novel while

sitting in an airport lounge or drifting at 30,000 feet.

With tanks now standing guard at London’s Heath-

row Airport, what was once an ordinary plane trip

had acquired “an element of thoroughly unwanted

suspense.” The usual reading material, Pye argued,

would no longer do. “We stand in need of something

stronger now: the travel book you can read while mak-

ing your way through this new, alarming world.”

The Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel used

these lines as an epigraph to her second novel, The

Singer’s Gun (2010), a book haunted by 9/11. But

her entire body of work—her new novel, The Glass

Hotel, is her fifth—can be read as a response to Pye’s

demand. Mandel’s deeply imagined, philosophically

profound reckonings with life in an age of disaster

would indeed be appropriate companions alongside

a plastic cup of wine and a tray of reheated food (if

we’re lucky). But they are equally welcome at home

during anxious days of following the news cycle or

insomniac nights of worrying about the future. “You

can make an argument that the world’s become more

bleak, but I feel like we always think we’re living at the

end of the world,” Mandel said in a recent interview

at the University of Central Florida. “When have we

ever felt like it wasn’t going to be catastrophic?”

That sense of cataclysm most dramatically per-

vades Station Eleven, Mandel’s breakout 2014 novel

about a vicious pandemic known as the Georgia Flu

that sweeps the globe with astonishing speed (most of

those infected are dead within a day or two), killing

more than 99 percent of the Earth’s population. With

so few people left to keep systems running, civilization

collapses. Mandel offers an “incomplete list” of mod-

ern essentials that quickly cease to exist: electricity,

countries with borders, the internet, fire departments.

“No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit

green from below. No more ball games played out

under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths

fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running

under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the

electric third rail. No more cities.” The novel proceeds

with its own impeccable, funereal logic. A nearsighted

man who loses his glasses is unable to replace them;

after the world’s gasoline supply goes stale, pickup

trucks, retrofitted with wheels of metal and wood, are

pulled by horses. The immersion in Mandel’s fictional

world is so complete that more than once while read-

ing Station Eleven, I found myself looking around to

make sure life as I knew it still continued.

Although the details of the pandemic are sketched

in a few heartbreaking scenes, Mandel is less inter-

ested in the unfolding of the catastrophe itself than

in its impact on the survivors and their descendants,

who are still trying to make sense of it 20 years later.

Dystopic discontinuity, though, turns out not to be

her theme at all. Twenty-eight-year-old Kirsten, one

of the book’s multiple protagonists—their nonlinear

narratives appear in shards that the reader pieces

together—is an actor with the Traveling Symphony,

a troupe that makes its way between towns with names

like New Phoenix, performing Shakespeare’s plays

and classical music, because “people want what was

best about the world.” An older businessman named

Clark, who gets stranded in an airport during the crisis

and builds an encampment there with a group of fel-

low passengers, transforms an airline lounge into the

“Museum of Civilization,” filled with artifacts of the

old world that no longer have use: a driver’s license,

a credit card, a pair of high-heeled shoes. Everyone

in the post-disaster world is tormented by the ever

present reminders of luxuries and conveniences they

no longer enjoy, even people who are too young to

remember them. (Kirsten, whose memories of her

childhood are hazy, at one point wonders whether

refrigerators had light bulbs inside.) But the book ulti-

mately makes a beautiful argument for the endurance

of art—music, theater, literature—in drastic times.

“Because survival is insufficient,” the quote painted

on the Traveling Symphony’s caravan proclaims. (Yes,

it’s from Star Trek.)