Emily St. John MandelsStation Elevenis speaking to our pandemic-frenzied moment.
Her new book is even bleaker.
The Glass Hotelis out March 24.
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Sales ofStation Elevenare suddenly up.
Cell lines jam, and phones stop working within two days.
In under a week, television stations have gone to static as entire production crews die out.
But there can besomething reassuringabout taking in a fictional disaster in the midst of a real one.
you might flirt with the experience of collapse.
it’s possible for you to long for the world you live in right now.
I sound reassuring, right?, she asks, explaining that she thoroughly researched similar pathogens while writing.
She also has a mischievous streak.
Her face turns stoic.
Its frightening, and we need to keep an eye on it.
Then she waggles her eyebrows: Famous last words before the whole nation collapses!
Published after a mid-aughts deluge ofpostapocalyptic novels, it doesnt fit the standard mold.
Mandel isnt interested in the flus aftermath, with the accompanying pillaging and clan-building.
She imagines how society might have remade itself 20 years later.
Readers loved that it bypassed the cliches of civilians turning against one another and instead made sense of chaos.
But unlikeStation Eleven,this is a disaster in which Mandel can point a finger at a perpetrator.
Its a story less interested in hope.
Its bleaker than the end of the world.
But here she was selecting seating assignments for someone else.
Mandel is vague about what this means.
Nobody with money thinks theyre wealthy, she offers, but its enough to remodel my house.
People who say that problems cant be solved with money, I dont know … Show me the problem!
The money, it seems, is more than just enough to remodel.
Shes 41, and shes crossed over into another life.
Its a place with two stoplights, beautiful and claustrophobic.
She could feel the tenuousness of humanitys hold over nature.
By 21, her passion for dance had waned.
She bounced around Toronto, Montreal, and New York.
There were mornings when it was minus-20 Celsius, Mandel recalls.
The story of how Mandel began writing is almost odd in its lack of velocity.
The first thing she really dug into turned into her debut novel.
Her agent at the time, the late Emilie Jacobson of Curtis Brown, understood her work implicitly.
Theyre so distinct from Mandels current preoccupations that they seem to come from a different author.
But as a child of the forest, she wanted to see what her characters might do without technology.
Thats when the idea of a global calamity came to mind.
The five-city tour mushroomed into 17 cities, then spread around the globe.
Year-end lists rained down on us, Jackson said.
Thats when sales really spiked.
They reached 450,000 after a year.
Then it sold a million more copies.
The first sentence ofThe Glass Hotelthat Mandel put to paper is now in the middle of the novel.
Thewein question are party to The Arrangement the falsifications required to prop up a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
The details are similar to those newspapers relayed after Madoffs sandcastle washed away in 2008.
But Mandel is careful to note the Madoff character is not Madoff.
His family is not Madoffs.
But the crime is the same.
The crime is what fascinated me.
The author professes a good deal more anxiety about economic collapse than cough-splatter pandemics.
I soldThe Glass Hotelin a partial, she explains, which I normally would never do.
A close family member, whose identity she doesnt want to disclose, invested with Madoff.
They had simply trusted.
LikeStation Eleven, Mandel was drawn to a narrative of downhill momentum.
But the books differ in fundamental ways.
ReadingStation Elevenis a soothing experience.
There is a definitive before and after.
The world settles into something new.
you might fear a pandemic, but you cant rage at one.The Glass Hoteldoesnt offer the same reassurances.
With a Ponzi scheme, theres a clear villain, which is a narrative boon.
Theyre discussing the economys general downturn when she wryly says, Theres something almost tedious about disaster.
In a novel full of Easter eggs for devoted Mandel fans, its a sly note of camaraderie.
