![]() ![]() It urges us to “begin at the end,” where we find our first-person narrator, Vincent, plummeting into the sea. The Glass Hotel, Mandel’s follow-up, addresses a different, more fractured kind of disaster. Although Mandel’s fictional virus-a particularly nasty strain of swine flu-far outstrips the human toll of the coronavirus, it offers potent parallels to our time, and how we respond to the consequences of disaster. The attention was, and still is, earned the prose is clean and understated, and the book moves ably across time and points of view. The synopsis was a perfect fit for the moment: A theatre troupe reckons with the fallout from a deadly pandemic. John Mandel’s acclaimed fourth novel, Station Eleven, was a fixture in these pieces. ![]() The articles reflected this idea they were cheeky little pieces, often in the form of search-optimized lists, with winking references to bunkers and claustrophobia. In those hazy early days, we lived under the delusion that the virus would not be with us for long. Back in early 2020, when the novel coronavirus still felt, well, novel, the internet was inundated with articles about how to pass the time in quarantine. ![]()
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