Emily St. John Mandel on Station Eleven: 'I had to end the world somehow'
On Tuesday, September 15, Emily St. John Mandel publishes Exit Party, her first novel in four years. It opens in Los Angeles in 2031, the first spring after the collapse of the United States. The curfew has lifted, the jacaranda trees are in bloom, and Ari Waker walks across Silverlake to a party where an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and the host, Kareem, vanishes into thin air. From there the book travels to a weapons dealers' resort on the cliffs of Greece, a domed Paris and a colony on the moon. Kirkus, in a starred review, calls it "a glittering puzzle box of a novel" and Mandel's "best novel since Station Eleven."
The catch for a newcomer is that Mandel's novels, as Michelle Cyca put it in the Globe and Mail last week, "form a kind of multiverse, as familiar figures from one book crop up in another, though they are never quite the same." Characters, a village, a flu and a painting all travel between the books. So where do you walk in?
The reflex answer is Station Eleven, the 2014 novel about a troupe of actors and musicians touring the Great Lakes twenty years after the Georgia Flu pandemic. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, it was a National Book Award finalist, and it is the one everybody has heard of. It is also the wrong door, and the best witness for that is Mandel herself.
The pandemic book that isn't
That is Mandel talking to Laura Wheatman Hill in an interview Defector published last Thursday, September 10. She added that she "certainly did not set out to become 'the pandemic novelist.'"
Take her at her word and the trouble with starting there is plain. Since 2020, as NPR's Maureen Corrigan notes in her review of Exit Party, critics and readers have remarked on how the book anticipated the pandemic. Read it first now and you read it as prophecy, and the flu becomes the subject. It is only the starting gun. When the book won the Clarke, the committee highlighted its focus on the survival of human culture after an apocalypse, rather than the survival of humanity. Its heart is a comic about Dr. Eleven, a man living on a space station, drawn by an actor's first wife, Miranda, and clung to by a young survivor, Kirsten. It is a novel about what art does after the end of the world, and it lands harder once you have seen how Mandel reruns her characters' lives. So read it second.
Start with the con man
Start with The Glass Hotel (2020), the book the others run through. Vincent works the bar at a hotel on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island and drifts into the orbit of Jonathan Alkaitis, the wealthy investor who owns the place, whose fortune turns out to be a Ponzi scheme. Mandel told Defector that "every character in that book is completely fictional, but of course, the starting point for the crime was the Madoff Ponzi scheme."
Now look at what passes through it. Two Station Eleven characters, the shipping consultants Miranda and Leon, turn up here, and so does the Georgia flu, except that in this version it never becomes a pandemic. That is Mandel's favourite idea in miniature: the counterlife, or as she described it to the Globe and Mail, "the life you didn't live." The wiring runs forward too. The hotel's village, Caiette, returns in Sea of Tranquility, and the painting in Exit Party, Swan Dive, which Corrigan describes as "a pair of feet disappearing into a dark ocean," is the work of a painter named Lucas Alkaitis, briefly mentioned in The Glass Hotel. Read this book first and every later door opens from a room you already know.
It is not the easy option. Ruth Franklin's review in The Atlantic called it "a jigsaw puzzle missing its box," and for its first stretch you will not know who matters. Stay with it. The pleasure of a Mandel novel is the moment the fragments lock together, and this one gives you that click with no apocalypse to lean on.
Then the time machine, then the party
Third comes Sea of Tranquility (2022), written during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the one that punishes you for skipping The Glass Hotel. It picks up Vincent's story through her friend Mirella and folds it into a mystery that reaches from 1912 to a colony on the moon. It is also where Mandel takes on her own reputation: one of its central characters, Olive Llewellyn, is a novelist from a moon colony on a book tour for her novel about an imaginary pandemic. Laird Hunt, reviewing it for the New York Times, called Olive "unquestionably a stand-in for Mandel herself."
Fourth, Exit Party, and the honest case for breaking the order also comes from Mandel. Ari, its protagonist, was the villain of The Singer's Gun (2010), "really unambiguously the villain," as she put it to Defector. Now Ari is out after 18 years in prison, and Mandel found that useful for exactly the reason a newcomer will: "she's kind of learning the rules of the world at the same time as I'm presenting them for the readers." She also told Bookselling This Week that Exit Party "is in no way a sequel" to the earlier book. So if you want the new one this week, start there and you lose surprisingly little. You and Ari arrive in 2031 equally lost.
What you lose is the echo. A reader who knows The Glass Hotel sees the surname Alkaitis and feels the floor shift. A newcomer just sees a painting. And if a collapsed America sounds grim, Mandel disagrees: "I actually do sincerely believe that it's a hopeful book with a lot of joy and humor in it," she told Defector.
Save The Singer's Gun for after. It is the story of Anton Waker, a man trying to live a more honourable life until his cousin blackmails him into one last job, and the cousin is Ari. "I wanted to see her next life," Mandel told Bookselling This Week. Read the old book after the new one and you meet the woman Ari used to be, a counterlife run in reverse. Completists can go back further, to Last Night in Montreal (2009), her debut, about a young woman who cannot settle in one city and the private detective on her trail, and The Lola Quartet (2012), a literary noir set in Florida.
Where the show fits
The Station Eleven miniseries, ten episodes that premiered on HBO Max in December 2021, is worth your time, but after the book, because it is a counterlife of the novel. Creator Patrick Somerville moved the action from Toronto to Chicago and built a far more significant relationship between Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel). Then reality did something Mandel could have written: filming began in Chicago in January 2020, the pandemic moved production to Mississauga, and the show ended up shooting next door to Toronto, where much of the novel's collapse-year story is set. Same story, a few choices different, a different life.
Here is the order. Argue with number one if you like. Just don't start with the flu.
