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.