Station Eleven

By Emily St. John Mandel, Vintage, 2014, 354 pages
Reviewed by Julie Bookman, June 16, 2020

I am not usually the sort who could or would ever read a novel focused on the aftermath of a mind-blowing present-day pandemic during the onset and unfolding of a real pandemic.

But alas, daughter Elly and her boyfriend, Dustin, had both just read it and were raving, so this was the one novel I carried with me to LA on March 6, then on to Hawaii on March 10. (It was eerie to be reading it at LAX at midnight on March 18, surrounded by weary travelers wearing face masks.)

The expert structuring, the beautiful writing/storytelling, a roster of intriguing characters, and the deft ways in which the author holds back key details and only very gradually parcels them out — all of this outweighed any and all “pandemic” queasiness or creepiness. I kid you not, I was never less than riveted and am left begging to know, “What happens next?”

I plan to read it again and am vastly looking forward to experiencing it with a higher grasp on things (because, for starters, I won’t be as fretful over who’s who, how they are connected to other characters, and the overall puzzle of the “collapse of civilization” itself.)

I put “Station Eleven” in the top five or 10 novels I’ve read in the last decade or two.

If you can think that you “maybe can” handle a pandemic theme, then I say you can. Honestly, do not miss “Station Eleven.”

[An aside: Naturally I got hold of St. John Mandel’s new novel, “The Glass Hotel” (2020), which involves a different collapse: the unraveling of a Bernie Madoff-type Ponzi scheme. I recently borrowed it from a friend who had also read “Station Eleven” but couldn’t get through this new one. I also tried, I did. I read 80 pages, and opted not to stick with it. Times are tough, too tough to settle on something not good enough when there’s plenty that is. I believe that “Station Eleven” will prove to be St. John Mandel’s masterpiece.]