Since I’m (somehow) about to be a senior, I’ve been trying to explore more opportunities around Ann Arbor and on campus before I graduate. This week I had the opportunity to attend an event hosted by one of my favorite Ann Arbor businesses, Literati Bookstore, at Rackham Auditorium with author Emily St. John Mandel in conversation with April Baer, the host of Stateside on Michigan Radio. Mandel has written numerous novels including Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, both of which were highly praised. I was recently introduced to Mandel’s work through a class I took this past fall semester which ended up becoming one of my all-time favorites: it was a class about contemporary novels with author and professor Peter Ho Davies. The first novel we read in the class was Station Eleven, and I was immediately hooked. When the TV adaptation came out on HBO Max over winter break, I immediately watched it in its entirety before moving on to The Glass Hotel, which gave Station Eleven a run for its money. I was eager to learn more about the author behind two of my new favorite novels–-and of course to get my signed copy of Sea of Tranquility, which I will likely read while procrastinating on my finals.
This event was the second in-person event Literati has hosted since the pandemic, which was very exciting to be a part of. April Baer was a great host, and a microphone was set up so that audience members could pose their questions to Mandel as well. The turnout was great, and Rackham Auditorium was full of people, most of whom had read Mandel’s previous novels and were anxiously awaiting her newest one.
One reason that so many people are so invested in Mandel’s work is that most if not all of her novels are connected in some way. Characters from Station Eleven reappear in The Glass Hotel, characters from The Glass Hotel reappear in Sea of Tranquility, and so on. Mandel explained that the reason that she writes in this way, creating a multiverse, is because she writes the kinds of novels that she herself would enjoy reading. Part of her inspiration behind this is from one of her–-and my–-favorite books, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, which follows a similar structure although not quite to the extent of Mandel’s growing multiverse. The author was asked many questions about her writing and thought processes, but she says most of it is intuitive for her; she brings back characters because she likes them or is interested in their story, and often writes her novels by jumping around to random chapters and assembling them in a coherent structure later.
Mandel’s work is inextricably linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, partly because she has become known as the “pandemic author.” Station Eleven, which features a flu-like virus that wipes out over 90% of the world’s population, was published in 2014, years before the real-life pandemic, but became popular again during the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel is interested in what stays important when certain major aspects of our culture, such as technology and infrastructure, are destroyed. Obviously, this had never seemed more relevant than at the height of the pandemic, although Mandel said that she does not recommend reading the novel during a real pandemic (as someone who did, I second that advice). Mandel says she wasn’t actually that interested in pandemics when she wrote Station Eleven, but a highly contagious and deadly flu just seemed like the most efficient way to create a post-technological society to write about. Now, of course, this decision has become a major aspect of her authorial persona.
In December 2021, HBO Max released a Station Eleven TV adaptation of the same name, and Mandel announced to us that adaptations of both The Glass Castle and Sea of Tranquility were in the works. Although she ceded all control with the Station Eleven adaptation (she was burnt out from touring and in the midst of writing her next novel) she said that she will be much more involved in the coming adaptations. Her newfound interest in collaborative work is partly due to the intense isolation that the pandemic has caused; Mandel says that now she would much rather discuss ideas with a group of writers than sit holed up in her apartment writing. Fans may be excited to hear that Mandel will play a bigger role in the TV adaptations, as a few key changes in the Station Eleven show conjured storms of angry readers. Mandel herself says though that she absolutely loves the TV adaptation, which gives me hope that we are entering a new era of quality, author-approved book-to-TV adaptations.
Mandel’s new novel, Sea of Tranquility, is similar to her previous novels in that it is set in multiple times and places–-from a moon colony in 2400 to the Canadian Rockies in 1912-–and from the perspective of multiple characters. Some of the more fantastical elements of the novel–-the portals, the Queen of the Enchanted Forest–-are a product of the pandemic; inspired by a make-believe game that Mandel played with her then-4-year-old daughter. The novel is part-autofiction, which means that although it is fiction it draws from the author’s real-life: the main character in the historical period within the novel is based on Mandel’s great-grandfather, and the Moon-inhabiting author who goes on a book tour on Earth is based on Mandel herself. Based on Mandel’s impressive talent for worldbuilding, I have no doubt that Sea of Tranquility will become another one of my favorite novels.
If you haven’t checked out Emily St. John Mandel’s work you definitely should, as well as the Station Eleven adaptation which is—like almost all TV or movies—not quite as good as the book. And if you need a fun class to take at Michigan, I would definitely recommend English 364 with Peter Ho Davies.