Mandel's Multiverse

 Being late on my third book review is not a good look, but I can explain. 

For this week’s review, I read Hilary St. John Mandel’s new novel, Sea of Tranquility. Having read Mandel’s novel Station Eleven (2014) earlier this year, I was excited–nay, electrified!–to read her latest work. Station Eleven was not just one of the best books I have read in 2022, it is one of the best books I have ever read, and I am still processing the fact that it was robbed of a well-deserved National Book Award. (More on that below.) Plus, Sea of Tranquility has scenes set on the Moon. Triple word score! 

Yet, as I was reading Sea of Tranquility, there was a nagging thought in the back of my mind. A part of the narrative seemed familiar; I felt that I knew something of some of the characters. Had I not already heard of a woman named Vincent falling off a ship? To explain this sense of literary deja vu, I did some research on Mandel’s other works, where I found that Tranquility was, not so much a sequel, as an extension of the narrative of The Glass Hotel (2020). I felt I had no choice but to catch up by reading Hotel, as well. (“Oh no, please don’t make me read another book,” he groaned, sarcastically, as he jumped on Amazon to buy the book.) 

That is why I am late. Oh, and reading a third work by Mandel further confirmed feelings I already had: she is a genius who must be protected at all cost. As in, “in the event of the apocalypse, make sure Mandel is on one of the escape craft heading to Mars” protection. I would gladly give her my own seat, assuming I had one. 

The multiverse refers not just to a major plotline in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it also refers to the theory of parallel universes, alternate realities in which, for instance, Robert Frost did not take the road less traveled, but instead went with the well-worn track. This post is entitled “Mandel’s Multiverse” because this is what she is creating in her works. You see, that is why I will not call Sea of Tranquility a sequel to The Glass Hotel. Rather, it is an exploration of what happened to some of the earlier novel’s characters in a similar, but inherently different, version of reality. Furthermore, I discovered that Hotel referred back to Station Eleven. It was at this point that my head exploded, and I needed to take a moment. 

So, let us begin with the earliest of the three novels. In Station Eleven, a super-flu originating in Georgia (the country, not the state) spreads rapidly across the planet, killing over 90% of the human population. As horrible as Covid-19 was for us all, it was nothing compared to this super-flu; we are talking about the collapse of civilization here. The novel moves back and forth–gracefully, naturally, brilliantly–between the quicksilver collapse of society and the “present,” post-apocalyptic Great Lakes area, where a group of traveling actors perform a Shakespearean repertoire for scattered communities– survivors and their children–living in the detritus of a fallen world. Their quest to entertain comes under threat as a new “Messiah” appears in the region, with a scripture whose origin will truly shock the reader. (No spoilers here!) 

The Glass Hotel is a totally different kind of story. Part true crime, part ghost story, part exploration of what it truly means to be alive in the world, Hotel is the life story of Vincent. From the mysterious disappearance of her mother in rural British Columbia to her own disappearance at sea (Not a spoiler!), Vincent’s life serves as the link, the living sense of “it’s a small world,” that unites all the other characters and their stories. It is, in a sense, a novel of disparate parts, covering just as much ground as its characters do. (Cities across the world make the geographical equivalent of cameos.) While I consider this novel to be the weakest of the three, it might just be the most important. It is here that Mandel’s multiverse begins to manifest. (No alliteration consciously intended.) 

There is a term Mandel uses throughout The Glass Hotel: counterlife. A counterlife refers to the alternate lives each character experiences in parallel universes. It is an imaginary answer to the age-old question of “what if?” The power of these daydreams is driven home when Vincent imagines a world “where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed” (p. 67). By writing of a character imagining the plot of her previous novel, Mandel has exceeded the novelist’s goal of world creation. She has created an entirely new reality with its own parallel interpretations of that reality. One of the flu’s most tragic victims in Station Eleven reappears in Hotel, where she is given the happy ending her alternate self was denied. It is a brilliant trick of literary genesis that puts Mandel’s genius on full display. 

But, she does not stop there. 

The Glass Hotel appeared on bookshelves in early 2020. What usually follows a book’s publication? If you guessed “a book tour,” you win this week’s prize. You can probably do the arithmetic in your mind: Mandel’s book tour would have to end prematurely because of the outbreak of Covid-19. Oh, and I should tell you that HBO’s ten-episode series based on Station Eleven was in development, premiering in December of 2021. As such, interest in Hotel waned as Mandel began to field questions about her earlier, seemingly prescient novel about a life-altering plague. 

Why does that matter? Because Mandel, like all of us, was traumatized by the Covid-19 pandemic. And she went meta with it. 

Sea of Tranquility (2022) is, in a sense, three novellas intertwined into a single novel. In Tranquility, the reader is transported from the same British Columbian island from The Glass Hotel (this time in the early 20th century) to modern-day New York City and into two distant futures: the first featuring the author of a novel about a pandemic cutting short her book tour in the face of a spreading virus; and the second, where a time traveler decides to break every rule in the book by saving that author from her impending death. (Like I said, meta; and not a little difficult to describe!) Tranquility is without a doubt a work of literary self-therapy on Mandel’s part. As the fictional author travels for her book tour, nibbling at the edges of her consciousness is the news of new cases, more death, and a sense of impending doom. It is what Mandel must have felt in early 2020, and what billions of human beings felt in Station Eleven and in our own, yours, the readers’, reality. What is more, with some of the same characters–but with different life outcomes–from The Glass Hotel, Tranquility represents yet another parallel reality, another counterlife, in Mandel’s multiverse. As I said, it cannot be considered a sequel. 

Let me quickly say, before continuing, that Mandel has written three other novels, all of them predating 2015’s Station Eleven. I have not (yet) read them, but let me offer up my own work of continuation: I will get them read, and if they, too, exist in Mandel’s multiverse, I will let you know. 

I knew before starting this review that I might not do a good job. On the one hand, Mandel’s two most recent works are extremely complex narratives, complicating the review process. More to the point, I was concerned that my gushing description of Mandel’s multiverse would be so blatant as to be off-putting. (I hope I managed to mostly contain my unadulterated adoration.) What I would ask you to keep in mind as I “fanboy” over this author is that I have read a lot of award-winning literature, and Mandel is a contender for any and all of those awards. She lost the 2014 National Book Award to Phil Klay’s Redeployment, an enjoyable enough collection of short stories about military life, but (I believe) largely inferior to Mandel’s work. I have also read something by every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, from Rene-Francois Prudhomme in 1901 to last year’s winner, Abdulrazak Gurnah. I do not say that to brag, I say that because I am assured of some noticeable weight to my opinion when I say, Mandel has, at the very least, begun to earn her place in the Noble pantheon; “at the very least” because I think she is already there. 

Read Emily St. John Mandel, and I suspect you will not only understand my argument, you will agree with it. 

And I hope you will forgive me for the tardiness of this post.

A Return to Tudor England, with Alison Weir

 This week’s review is of Alison Weir’s latest work of historical fiction, The Last White Rose, a novel about the life of Elizabeth of York. Princess Elizabeth was born in 1466, the eldest child of King Edward IV, knowing from an early age that she was meant for greatness. Her father is popular, his reign is mostly stable, and her parents’ union is extremely fruitful: she would eventually have eight younger siblings–including two brothers, “an heir and a spare”--thus securing the succession and the continuation of the royal line. Elizabeth, herself, is betrothed to the future king of France before her twelfth birthday, promising her the queenship of “the greatest kingdom in Christendom.” As the medieval period approaches its end and the Renaissance lies just beyond the horizon, life seems pretty good for Elizabeth. 

“For want of a nail [...] the kingdom was lost….” King Edward IV should never have gone fishing in the middle of winter. 

The unexpected death of her father is the first domino to come crashing down for Elizabeth. Her brother Edward, heir to the throne, is too young to become king. A regency is established to help him rule until he reaches his majority, but her uncle Clarence, Duke of Gloucester, has other plans. As the future King Richard III (Yep, that Richard III.) works to seize the throne, he arrests those nobles who are loyal to his late brother’s wife and children. Elizabeth’s mother rushes her children into the holy sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, ensuring her children’s safety, but sidelining herself from the battle for the throne. Lies, violence, and assorted machinations secure Richard III’s claim to the throne as Elizabeth and her siblings are declared illegitimate by Parliament, thus denying all of them any claim to the English throne. Worse still–worst of all–Elizabeth’s mother is tricked into allowing her younger son to visit his brother at the royal court. 

She would never see either of her sons again. Indeed, no one would, as they become the infamous “Princes in the Tower.” Their disappearance remains a historical mystery to this day. (As well as a novelist, Weir is a historian, and in her 1992 work of historical investigation The Princes in the Tower, Weir concludes they were killed by Richard III as long believed, and their bodies buried within the confines of the Tower of London.) 

There was, ultimately, a happy ending for Elizabeth. A long-exiled claimant to the English throne, Henry, Earl of Richmond, returned to England where he led an uprising against Richard III, eventually defeating him at the Battle of Bosworth and becoming King Henry VII. His marriage to Elizabeth made her Queen of England, ended the years-long tension between the Houses of York and Lancaster, and would eventually result in the birth of Prince Henry, the future King Henry VIII. 

Having covered so much of the book’s content, I wonder now if I should have provided a “spoiler warning.” Yet, what purpose would that serve for a work of historical fiction, where the briefest of visits to Wikipedia could spoil the entire plot?

Despite giving away several key plot points, I hope that you will still take the time to read Weir’s latest endeavor. Or any of her works, in fact. She is a masterful storyteller, and her works are an important attempt to write women back into a historical narrative that has long downplayed their experiences and contributions. Weir began her writing career with works of history, not historical fiction, and her first major work was The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1991). Since then, among some works on more general British royal history, she has mostly focused on the history of royal women, from Eleanor of Aquitaine (12th to 13th century) to Mary, Queen of Scots (16th century). 

In moving to historical fiction, Weir broadened the canvas on which she could explore and celebrate the lives of the women she sought to discover with her works of history. Her first fictional work was 2006’s Innocent Traitor, the story of the life of England’s “Nine Days’ Queen,” Jane Grey (the great-niece of Henry VIII). From there, she has written works of fiction on just about every woman in the Tudor dynasty. In fact, The Last White Rose is Weir’s first work since her series on the six wives of Henry VIII. Weir is the only author to have ever written a novel on each of Henry’s brides, starting with Katherine of Aragon, The True Queen in 2016 and finishing with Katherine Parr, The Sixth Wife in 2021. Having written on all of Henry’s wives, and one of his daughters, it was a natural enough progression to move “backwards” and narrate the life of Henry’s mother. (It is unexplained, I would even say somewhat suspicious/confusing, that Weir has largely ignored the tragic Queen Mary I, who has yet to receive her own work.) 

While works of history allow for little in the way of poetic license, Weir’s works of fiction are under no such constraint. She is delightfully unafraid of extrapolating from rumors and ongoing historical mysteries, as best illustrated in The Lady Elizabeth (2008, and, yes, that Elizabeth) and in Anna of Kleve, The Princess in the Portrait (2019), the fourth book in her Wives of Henry VIII series (and the best of Weir’s novels, in my opinion). Her works of history are illuminating, and her works of fiction are great entertainment. However, I believe Weir faces one possible problem: she has largely limited herself to writing about the same 100 year long period. As such, the same historical characters appear over and over again. While it is one thing to “be done with” Henry VIII’s nonsense by the time you get to Katherine Parr, you are also kind of sick of Parr, herself. If, like me, you have read most of Weir’s works, then by the time her own book came out, you have seen Parr in Innocent Traitor and The Lady Elizabeth, in which she plays an extremely pivotal role. Weir’s 2012 novel A Dangerous Inheritance continues the story of Katherine Grey, who you can read a lot about in Innocent Traitor. On the one hand, it is nice that everyone gets their spotlight, but after a while, you kind of want a different cast of characters. 

So, what is my ultimate decision on The Last White Rose? I say read it. It is a good book. Indeed, I would recommend all of Weir’s works of fiction (Well, you can give The Captive Queen a miss….), but I believe she has put herself in an awkward situation where only her diehard fans can be trusted to stick around for much longer. Read The Last White Rose, or Innocent Traitor, or Jane Seymour, The Haunted Queen, but do not read all of them unless 1) you are a fan of “anything Tudor,” or 2) you like Weir as much as I do. Yet, for all that I like her, I have found my excitement waning with time. I mentioned Weir’s canvas earlier, and I would heartily suggest that she attempt to broaden it with her future works. You can only repaint over older paintings for so long before folks yearn for a new portrait.

The Newest Literary Award: The Gotham Book Prize

 “There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy.” 

–Walt Whitman, on New York City 

There is a newcomer in the world of literary awards: the Gotham Book Prize. It was founded in 2020, and first awarded in December of that year, by venture capitalist Bradley Tusk, and Howard Wolfson, a former adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Tusk and Wolfson established the Gotham Book Prize (GBP) as the city it is meant to celebrate burned in the fire of the Covid-19 outbreak. The GBP was their attempt to celebrate, to appreciate, ultimately, to uplift New York City in one of the darkest chapters of its story. Qualification for this award is simple: produce an outstanding work about or occurring in New York City. 

Covid-19 has gone from epidemic to endemic, something to be guarded against as best we can with vaccines, booster shots, and the continued wearing of masks in crowded areas. Gone, thankfully, are the days of extended social isolation, hospitals bursting at the seams, and the constant wail and echo of ambulance sirens in the steel canyons of “the city that never sleeps.” A piece of what remains is the brainchild of Tusk and Wilson, a new literary prize for “award enthusiasts” like myself to follow. It is fitting to begin this new blog with a discussion of this new award, and the two works which have thus far garnered the honor. 

The inaugural winner of the GBP was Deacon King Kong, the most recent work by writer and musician James McBride. If you recognize that name, it is likely because McBride won the 2013 National Book Award with his novel The Good Lord Bird, a powerful narrative of abolitionist John Brown and the events leading up to his famous raid on Harpers Ferry. (You may also have seen the miniseries of the same name. While my personal mantra is always “the book was better,” there is no denying the sheer excellence of the miniseries. I highly recommend both it and the novel from which it was adapted.) 

Deacon King Kong takes place in late 1969, in the Causeway Housing Projects of South Brooklyn. It is here that a church deacon, former Little League coach, and perpetually-inebriated man known as “Sportcoat” disturbs the fragile balance of the local social ecosystem when he shoots the resident drug dealer. (Who was once Sportcoat’s star pitcher, no less.) Residents of the Causeway fear for Sportcoat’s safety, though he has no recollection of the events and goes about his usual business. His would-be victim survives this attempt on his life, and seems inclined to forgiveness, but someone still seeks to end Sportcoat’s life. What follows in this 370-page narrative is an incredible, at times almost fantastical chain of events which leaves few members of the community unaffected. 

The denizens of the Causeway are as beautiful and eclectic a collection of characters to have ever graced the pages of any novel. A mix of Black and Lantinx, immigrants and long-established families, they offer up an imperfect sense of solidarity against the outside world, including the machinations of a lonely one-man mob family and a love-sick police officer only months away from retirement. As the Causeway and the rest of New York City move ever closer to the hell of the heroin epidemic and the myriad troubles of the 1970s and 80s (Think of the 1975 Daily News and its famous headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”), the residents of the Causeway focus on the search for their missing Christmas Club money, while an ancient, longer-sought treasure rests in an unexpected spot. Magical almost to the level of a fairy tale–for, in some ways, that is what the novel is, a modern-day American fairy tale–Deacon King Kong illustrates the highs and lows of the human experience, and describes the hopes, dreams, and belief systems that anchor and uplift the human being. It is, in its own fashion, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s seminal One Hundred Years of Solitude, if with a more constricted timeline. 

The second, 2021 recipient of the GBP is Andrea Elliott’s nonfiction work–expanded from an earlier collection of essays for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction–Invisible Child. This 515-page exploration of the life of Dasani Coates (“She is the embodiment of New York City–charming, fearless, tactical, brash.”) and her family as they struggle through poverty and homelessness is that rare work of nonfiction written with the eloquence and compassion of a novel. Dasani, her sister Avianna, and her mother Chanel all bear names drawn from higher-end, unattainable products, representing the most recent expression of generations’ worth of aspirations for a better life. Yet, that better life never seems to arrive, and all hopes prove ephemeral and just beyond reach. Elliott’s work is a profound exercise of the sociological imagination, linking the life of the individual, the young Dasani, with the broader social, political, educational, familial, and economic social structures which dominate her existence, even as they fail her at nearly every turn. 

However, as with Deacon King Kong, the inhabitants of Invisible Child defy two-dimensionality: no one in either work can be categorized with Disney-reminiscent judgements of “good” and/or “evil.” (Well, we will allow for one exception in McBride’s novel, but you will find no spoilers here.) What we see in both books are strivers, human beings–American citizens–from whom the American Dream has been denied. In these works, we see drug dealers, brawlers, shoplifters, Mafiosos, and black marketeers at their best and their worse, but there is not and there cannot be any castigations of these people and their choices. What we see in these works is survival, plain and simple. 

For a prize centered around Whitman’s exultant city, the first two recipients of the GBP are interesting choices, as neither pulls its punches in their chastisements of a metropolis in which great wealth and desperate poverty exist side-by-side. The Causeway Housing Projects stand only a few hundred yards from the industrial decay of extinct New York City manufacturing, even as the Projects’ location in South Brooklyn affords its residents a spectacular view of the Statue of Liberty. In real life, Dasani and her mother struggle with homelessness as the areas of NYC in which their grandparents–only one or two generations removed from the Great Migration, the journey of millions of Southern Blacks in search of better lives out of the Jim Crow South–once owned homes and businesses. Seemingly overnight, expensive new stores have replaced the established stores and bodegas in which Chanel can find affordable food for her children. Deindustrialization in Deacon King Kong, gentrification in Invisible Child: both have proven to disproportionately affect People of Color like Dasani and the residents of the Causeway. Both works hold nothing back, putting the spotlight on these exercises in economic disenfranchisement. 

It is no wonder, then, that both works are also demonstrations of the individual’s yearning to control some element of their lives. Most of the Black residents of the Causeway Projects spend the novel searching for their lost Christmas Club savings, skillfully hidden by Sportcoat’s deceased wife, who, despite returning in ghost form to berate him for his drinking, does not see fit to share the secret location with him. Finding this money takes on elements of the quest for the Holy Grail, and why should it not? As Sister Gee so eloquently explains to a bemused outsider, “That Christmas Club money is all we can control. We can’t stop these drug dealers from selling poison in front our houses. Or make the city stop sending our kids to lousy schools. We can’t stop folks from blaming us for everything gone wrong in New York, or stop the army from calling our sons to Vietnam after them Vietcong done cut the white soldiers’ toenails too short to walk. But the little nickels and dimes we saved up so we can get our kids ten minutes of love at Christmastime, that’s ours to control. What’s wrong with that?”

For Dasani and Chanel, their sense of self-worth manifests as an ironclad demand for respect from those around them. Their sheer uncompromising refusal to be judged by the world around them often leads to physical fights, which both are always prepared for. In fact, away from Dasani’s teachers and from the family’s caseworkers, Chanel encourages her daughter to engage in physical confrontations whenever necessary. With these fights, and the concomitant demand for respect, Dasani and her mother seek to control the image of themselves in a world that leaves them little else to possess. These fights, though they never improve Dasani’s situation at school and sometimes lead to criminal charges for Chanel, create for the Coates family a hierarchy of respect and value, and they will stop at nothing to be at the top of that ladder. It is, after all, the only ladder that our society has left for them to climb. 

I have been reminded (or lectured to) on several occasions about how literary awards are–and you can pick your own term from this grab-bag of disparagement–useless, elitist, silly, ethnocentric, etc. It surprises the people sharing these opinions when I invariably agree. The Nobel Prize in Literature is far too Eurocentric for an award that is supposed to represent worldwide literature. The Booker Prize has been criticized as an expression of British cultural imperialism; though an overreaching criticism, I do not deny some merit in the accusation. In my opinion, the National Book Award for Fiction has a history of poor decision-making that continues to this day. (Larry Heinemann’s Vietnam War novel Paco’s Story should never have beaten Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In fact, I would like to know why war novels seem disproportionately represented in the list of winners.) 

Alas, the criticisms of literary awards are all-too-often legitimate, and yet(!), a faithful tradition of following these awards has one incontrovertible benefit: when you promise to read a winning work, regardless of whether you would have personally chosen to do so, you have opened yourself up to new books, new authors, and new interpretations of this weird little construct we call “reality.” Despite my enjoyment of The Good Lord Bird, McBride’s latest work may well have fallen off my radar, displaced from my “To Be Read Pile” by other works and other authors. Thanks to the GBP, I have discovered in Deacon King Kong a narrative that will not soon leave my thoughts. I readily admit that, given my penchant for fictional narratives, I would likely never have read Invisible Child if not for the GBP. Now, Dasani and her family’s struggles live in and with me, guaranteeing at least one more set of eyes staring unforgivingly at the economic inequality that New York City, and our country at large, needs to fix. What we will ultimately make of the GBP remains to be seen, as two works are insufficient to illustrate a typology. Already, however, it stands out as an award willing to envelop both fiction and nonfiction, without separate categories, in its quest to accomplish its mandate: placing the spotlight on New York City and the lives of those who call it home. McBride and Elliott are both supremely worthy winners of this new award. 

And we will see what is to come. The third winner of the Gotham Book Prize will be announced in December of this year.

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