C10| Saturday/Sunday, March 21 - 22, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
BYANNAMUNDOW
S
IX YEARSago, Emily
St. John Mandel’s
dystopian novel
“Station Eleven”
opened with the
Georgia Flu pandemic decimating
our species and ended—two de-
cades after the collapse of civili-
zation—with one of the survivors
daring to imagine a future. “Clark
looks up at the evening activity
on the tarmac, at the planes that
have been grounded for twenty
years, the reflection of his candle
flickering in the glass. He has no
expectation of seeing an airplane
rise again in his lifetime, but is it
possible that somewhere there
are ships setting out? If there are
again towns with streetlights
... then what else might this
awakening world contain?” That
consoling vision was accompa-
nied, however, by an overwhelm-
ing sense of loss for many read-
ers, and no wonder. In “Station
Eleven,” Ms. Mandel had created
a dreamlike reality so tangible
and complete that emerging from
it felt like banishment. (The audio
book, by the way, only enhances
that sensation.) And ever since
then, this writer’s exiled devotees
have wondered where she would
take them next.
The answer, perhaps sur-
prisingly, is to the world of
money, which materializes in
Ms. Mandel’s new novel, “The
Glass Hotel,” as both familiar and
profoundly strange. The catas-
trophe this time is financial, not
biological. A swindler, not a
pandemic, is to blame (in events
that mirror the 2008 collapse of
Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme),
and contagion is limited to a pop-
ulation of eager investors, one of
whom learns the truth from his
accountant this way:
“Your money’s gone,” she said
softly.
“All of it?”
“Leon, it wasn’t real...”The question of what is real—
be it love, money, place or mem-
ory—has always been at the
heart of Ms. Mandel’s fiction.
From the betrayals running
through “Last Night in Montreal”
(2009) to the identity fraud in
“The Singer’s Gun” (2010) and
the switchback crimes of “The
Lola Quartet” (2012), her narra-
tives snake their way across
treacherous, shifting terrain. Cer-
tainties are blurred, truth be-
comes malleable and in “The
Glass Hotel” the con man thrives.
“He had that trick,” Leon ob-
serves, referring to the Ponzi
scheme’s perpetrator, “of appear-
ing utterly indifferent to what
anyone thought of him, and in so
doing provoking the opposite
anxiety in other people:What
does Alkaitis think of me?”The
head of a fraudulent investment
company, Jonathan Alkaitis owns,
among other palaces, an island
hotel in British Columbia where,
on a brief visit, he reels in Leon
Prevant, a gullible shipping ex-
ecutive. Alkaitis also charms
Vincent Smith, the hotel’s young,
but far from gullible, female bar-
tender. “In the way he spoke to
her, his obvious wealth and his
obvious interest, she saw an
opening into a vastly easier life or
at least adifferentlife,” Vincent
admits, ignoring, while she can,
the price she might pay.
A fascinatingly elusive char-
acter, Vincent quickly becomes
Alkaitis’s second wife (though he
never formally marries her) and
glides between Manhattan and
Connecticut, Europe and Dubai,
until the Ponzi scheme implodes,
the “kingdom of money” vanishes
and Alkaitis is imprisoned for
life. Bewildered at first, he “pre-EYEEM/GETTY IMAGES‘Beyond
the Sea,’
a
dialogue
between
will
and fate,
plays out
like a
Beckett
drama
bobbing
in the
open
water.tends he’s on an alien planet” and
then, as decades of incarceration
pass, retreats into an imaginary
existence. “When he isn’t in the
counterlife,” as Alkaitis thinks of
that realm, “he likes to dwell in agreen field in his hometown, in
the twilight following a family
picnic.”
The victims of Alkaitis’s
crimes are also plunged into an
altered reality, one in which
money simply evaporates and the
certainties of everyday life dis-
integrate. Financially destitute
Leon Prevant and his wife, for ex-
ample, enter the “shadow coun-
try” of the poor, migrating across
the country from one menial job
to the next. “You stare at the
road and the road stares back,”
Leon muses at a truck stop where
desperate girls hitch rides at
night: “They’d all been cut loose,
they’d slipped beneath the sur-
face of the United States, they‘I’m happiest when I’m
away from other people,’
reflects one character,
who becomes caretaker
of a shuttered hotel.The Glass Hotel
By Emily St. John Mandel
Knopf, 301 pages, $26.95
were adrift.” Vincent, for her
part, goes to sea, becoming a
ship’s cook to sail the world,
recalling her long-disappeared
mother’s stories of “northern
lights shifting over a winter sky,
the silent towers of icebergs in
a dark gray sea.”
Such lyrical, hypnotic im-
ages—of a shoreline at dusk, for
example, or a city street at
dawn—suspend us in a kind of
hallucinatory present where
every detail is sharply defined
yet queasily unreliable. A sense
of unease thickens as the novel’s
interlinked narratives orbit the
main drama of Alkaitis’s down-
fall. Characters such as Walter,
the island hotel’s manager; Olivia,
an aging painter duped by Alkai-
tis; and Paul, Vincent’s aimless
half-brother, each wonderfully
drawn, disappear and reappear,
tilting the novel’s perspective
and tightening the suspense as
the narrative meanders back and
forth in time. Chronology, as
always in Ms. Mandel’s fiction,
becomes fluid. “The Glass Hotel”
opens and ends with a drowning
in 2018, and in between follows
an elliptical course whose start-
ing point is 1994. Toward the
end, there is a leap forward to- The dead begin to visit the
living. Characters from previous
novels surface—Leon and his for-
mer assistant Miranda are here
from “Station Eleven,” Alkaitis
from “The Lola Quartet”—and
Vincent idly imagines what the
Georgia Flu might have wrought
had it not been swiftly contained.
All of which is clever and,
perhaps intentionally, alienating.
For in this hall-of-mirrors novel,
Ms. Mandel invites us to observe
her characters from a distance
even as we enter their lives, a
feat she achieves with remark-
able skill. And if the result is a
sense not only of detachment but
also of desolation, then maybe
that’s the point. “I’m happiest
when I’m away from other peo-
ple,” Walter confesses when he
becomes caretaker of the shut-
tered hotel. “Without furniture,
the lobby was like a shadowy
ballroom,” he later observes, con-
tentedly, “a vast empty space
with a panorama of wilderness
beyond the glass: inland waters,
green shorelines, a pier with no
boats.” The scene, in its tran-
quility, recalls Clark’s final vision
in “Station Eleven,” but the
wounded survivors of this catas-
trophe crave connection in vain.
They settle instead for isolation.
Ms. Mundow is a writer living
in central Massachusetts.Craving Connection
BOOKS
‘Hell is the absence of the people you long for.’—EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL
ALL SURVIVAL STORIEShave
to balance two seemingly
contradictory truths. The first
regards the fragility of life, and
the ease and abruptness with
which it can be extinguished.
But the second is about the
body’s extraordinary capacity
to endure in impossible
conditions. Paul Lynch’s novel
“Beyond the Sea” (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 181 pages,
$25), about two men stranded
on a fishing boat in the Pacific
Ocean, is based on real events,
but the stark, mesmerizing book
reads like an existential argu-
ment between those irrecon-
cilable truths, a Beckett play
bobbing in the open water.
The unlucky actors here are
Bolivar, a veteran fisherman in
an unnamed Central American
village who needs a big catch
to pay off his debts, and Hector,
a young man persuaded to join
the boating trip at the last
minute. When a storm destroys
the motor and radio, the two
are cast adrift on the ocean
currents, clearly doomed to
perish and yet wondrously
sustained by nature’s infinite
resources. With flotsam they
pull from the sea they fashion
fishing nets and containers to
hold rainwater. They eat passing
sea turtles, the barnacles they
scrape from the hull and the
curious sea birds that land on
the gunwale. “What need is
there of much else?” Bolivar
thinks in the euphoria of
deprivation months into their
abandonment. “You eat and yousleep and you do simple tasks.
Now we are truly alive.”
Bolivar is a calloused,
belligerently physical being
determined to defeat the
elements (he establishes an
exercise routine, running in
circles around the boat).
Hector is a lovelorn introvert
who quickly sinks into stages
of guilt, mysticism and religious
resignation. The paradox of
survival is more than he can
process and he comes to feel
trapped in the torment of an
unwaking nightmare, “neither
alive nor dead.”
If the two characters seem
schematically opposed—will
versus fate—Mr. Lynch takes
pains to confuse their relation-
ship, changing it from mood
to mood into something bitter,
paternal, generous or adver-
sarial. The novel’s foundations
are like the ocean, too unfixed
and unfathomable to allow the
philosophical disputes to
advance in a linear fashion.
Both men appear courageous
or cowardly, insane or transcen-
dently wise, depending on the
angle of the sunlight—as if the
immensity of the setting
renders even the firmest
distinctions indistinct. “In
places it seems as though the
sea with infinite patience has
grafted one thing onto another,”
Bolivar thinks, “the sea slowly
working until all things become
single matter.”
Mr. Lynch’s prose style is
suitably rationed and sun-cured
in ways that make comparisonsto Hemingway’s “The Old Man
and the Sea” unavoidable,
though I wonder if he was more
inspired by Peter Matthiessen’s
brilliant, Zen-influenced ship-
wreck novel “Far Tortuga.”
Though bare and isolated, this
fine book contains multitudes
of experience.
What’s eating Percy, the
narrator of Jessi JezewskaStevens’s quirky and enigmatic
novel“The Exhibition of
Persephone Q” (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 212 pages, $26)?
Pregnant but unwilling to share
the news with her husband,
she has taken to wandering
New York at night and then
drowsing during the day.
Her sense of dissociation
deepens when she discovers
that a former fiancé has used a
nude photograph of her as the
centerpiece of his art show, yet
when confronted he claims that
the picture is of somebody else.
Is it a case of vindictive gas-
lighting? Is it, as the exhibition
catalog contends, “a profound
exploration of privacy, memory,and the instability of truth”?
Or is it all a somewhat random
muddle from a debut writer
prone to mistaking weirdness
for profundity?
I lean toward the latter.
Though Ms. Stevens conjures
a tantalizing vision of the city
at night—a murky, unreal space,
like Persephone’s underworld—
her story is too slight to make
the setting meaningful. We
follow Percy as she wanders
around, buys kitchen appli-
ances, chats with neighbors or
drafts emails to her perfidious
fiancé. There’s a narcoleptic
quality to her commentary as
she describes all this—white
space between paragraphs
usually signifies gaps in time,
but Ms. Stevens uses it to break
up continuous action, as though
Percy is constantly dozing off
for a second or two as she
moves through the world.
The novel resembles one of
those dreams in which you are
trying to run but your legs feel
stuck in quicksand. However
curious and intriguingly
symbolic the dream may be,
it’s a relief to wake up.
Marina Kemp’s novel
“Marguerite” (Viking,
358 pages, $26)takesusto
a sleepy French town in
Languedoc where there isn’t
much more to do than milk the
cows and trade gossip, and the
most interesting item of conver-
sation concerns a mysteriously
withdrawn Parisian woman who
has been hired to nurse Jérôme
Lanvier, the ailing widower inthe village’s grandest estate.
Marguerite Demers tries to
give the busybodies nothing to
discuss, devoting all her time
to her foul-mouthed, bedridden
employer, but hesitant friend-
ships with Suki, a lonely Iranian
woman, and a married farmer
named Henri initiate a slow-
burning series of betrayals and
dramatic personal disclosures.
Closely observed, profusely
detailed and probably overlong,
“Marguerite” is what a friend of
mine calls, with some annoyance,
a Lives of Quiet Desperation
book. Marguerite is fleeing a
trauma from her youth. Henri
harbors a scandalous secret that
you can guess as soon as he is
introduced. Their relationship is
filled with balky gestures and
thwarted longings that speak to
“the crushing feeling that oppor-
tunities had been missed and
something else had been lost.”
Yet there is also, happily, a
great deal of engaging writing.
Ms. Kemp has an uncommon
ability to keep her scenes
ticking along, and she’s terrific
with dialogue, injecting the
interactions with a brusque,
colorful candor at odds with the
theme of repression. Ironically,
Jérôme is the life of the novel,
and the sparring friendship
he forges with Marguerite by
way of complaints and insults
provide its best moments.
There’s nothing like an old man
raging against the dying of the
light to rouse you from stupor,
and with him Marguerite gives
as good as she gets.The Contradictions of Survival
THIS WEEK
Beyond the Sea
ByPaulLynchThe Exhibition
of Persephone Q
ByJessiJezewskaStevensMarguerite
ByMarinaKempFICTION
SAMSACKSTWO NOVELSof isolation: one
classifiable as fantasy, one as
horror. What’s the difference?
T.J. Klune’s“The House in the
Cerulean Sea” (Tor, 398 pages,
$26.99)is the fantasy. Its hero,
Linus, works for the Department
in Charge of Magical Youth as a
kind of school inspector. Any
reader of “Harry Potter” will know that ministries
of magic are dangerous bureaucracies, and Linus’s
is an extreme example. He works at a desk in a
room full of desks, constantly threatened by a
supervisor who issues demerits for anything from
stains on the tie to mismanaging his time.
Then Linus gets called upstairs by Extremely
Upper Management, and sent to inspect an island
orphanage called Marsyas. In Greek myth Marsyas
was flayed alive for challenging Apollo, so that’s
ominous. On the island, Linus finds six children
of strange species—sprite, gnome, shifter—with
strange powers. He has been warned against
befriending them, for they may be a threat.
Lucy, for instance, is short
for Lucifer. Can he bring
about the end of the world?
Extremely Upper Management
thinks so but in true mana-
gerial style gives Linus no
information. The orphanage’s
housemaster is an enigma too.
It’s a challenge for Mr. Little
Guy Linus, but he rises to it.
In fantasy, the challenge is
working out the rules in an
unfamiliar world. In horror,
the familiar turns strange, bit
by bit, and leaves victims questioning themselves.
Sarah Perry is known for her folktale-oriented
novels “Melmoth” and “The Essex Serpent.”
Her 2014 debut,“After Me Comes the Flood”
(Custom House, 229 pages, $16.99)—appearing
for the first time in the U.S.—begins almost like
a joke: John, driving from London on a lonely
road through the marshes, breaks down and goes
to a house for help. But he’s greeted familiarly
and shown to a room. Tired and sun-dazzled,
he goes along with the error.
Soon things don’t look so good: dead flowers,
meat hooks dangling from the kitchen ceiling.
Another visitor turns up, a woman with a face so
soft it seems boneless. The hostess’s smile begins
to look like a smirk. Another inhabitant is con-
vinced that a dam will break and drown them all.
The last words of the novel are “trying to make
it out,” and Ms. Perry says she’s pleased when
people come away with totally different ideas
about what she intended. Is the novel an allegory
of climate change? Or maybe one of those stories,
like William Golding’s “Pincher Martin,” where
the central character dies at the start and is
undergoing a kind of penance or purgatory?
Horror is introspective. Sprites, gnomes,
dragons—we can cope with them. Fears in the
head aren’t so easy. “After Me Comes the Flood”
is a notable experiment in inner Gothic:
atmospheric, haunting, disturbing.THIS WEEK
The House in
the Cerulean
Sea
By T.J. KluneAfter Me
Comes the
Flood
By Sarah PerryDangers
From Without—
And Within
SCIENCE FICTION
TOMSHIPPEY