reviews by Marcianne Miller –
Station Eleven: A Novel
I was reading this post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, during the recent Ebola crisis, when some were wondering—what would happen if the virus went pandemic?
Such a thing happens in this dazzling, fantastical, scary, haunting tale by a young Canadian writer, Emily St. John Mandel.
The story travels seamlessly through time. A famous actor dies of a heart attack while performing King Lear onstage in Toronto. His entourage includes his wife and lover, his agent, other actors, and the paramedic in the audience who tries to save him. The virus that quickly wipes out 99.9% of the world’s population begins that same night. Fifteen years later, some members of the entourage are still alive, but they have survived in radically different ways.
Mandel has created a fascinating variety of the ways societies form. The Traveling Symphony is a cluster of actors and musicians who caravan in horse-drawn wagons among the far-flung villages between Toronto and Chicago, performing concerts and Shakespearean plays. (These people are remarkably like the contemporary British gypsies featured in Ian McKell’s gorgeous photography book, The New Gypsies.) The Symphony is usually greeted warmly by the culture-starved communities. But in the one they are visiting now, a new leader has transformed the village with his self-centered religion, terrorizing the inhabitants, and demanding that the travelers leave one of their women to become his new wife.
Miles away, the performers have heard, is a more compatible community and they sneak through the forest to find it. Over the years, a hundred or so survivors have found themselves in an abandoned airport, where they’ve set up a community that is so thriving, they will take in the occasional refugee. They gather food by hunting in the nearby woods and send out search parties to retrieve supplies from abandoned homes and stores.
The former theatrical agent, following the habits of his dead boyfriend who was a curator, has set up a mini-museum in the former boarding area. Here he displays artifacts from the pre-virus world, exotic treasures such as an iPhone, a driver’s license, a passport, and a laptop.
Some of those who were alive in the earlier world fondly remember these treasures, grateful for having once lived in a world with so many luxuries. Others think that the children born in the post-virus society, who never knew a car or plane or the internet, should not be taught about such things because they make no sense anymore. As a reader, it’s amazing how you can appreciate the ordinary things of life when you imagine that they’ve disappeared overnight.
There is always fear and the threat of lawlessness in this future world. There is a dearth of stability and a mountain of loneliness. But in Mandel’s magical story, there is also a fierce determination to hold on to life and remember what hope was like.
Station Eleven: A Novel, written by Emily St. John Mandel, Knopf (2014), 352 pages. Also in audio. Available at the library and local bookstores.
Losing Our Way
An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America
I rarely say to someone else “You must read this book!” Well, that’s changed.
I think every American who cares about where the country is going should read Losing Our Way. After 18 years as a columnist for the New York Times, Bob Herbert set off on a trip across the country to look at places and talk to people who have been affected by the recent Great Recession and what our politicians and our citizenry have—and have not—done to make a difference.
You don’t have to be a leftist to know potholes are everywhere in our aging roadways. Or a rightist to know that our bridges are falling apart. Your politics don’t matter to a war vet trying to walk again, to unemployed parents who are losing their homes, to children whose schools are closing. Herbert mixes U.S. history and his investigative skills with the heart-wrenching, unforgettable tales of real people who are putting one foot in front of the other and trying to stay on the American way.
No one person, or one political party, is the villain in this story. But Herbert is clear who the heroes must be—each and every one of us. We must vote to get politicians who will take seriously the role of improving the country’s economy and infrastructure. More than that, we must be citizen activists—actually getting out of our complacency and doing something to make things right.
Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America, written by Bob Herbert, Doubleday (2014), 340 pages. Also in audio. Available at the library and local bookstores.
So We Read On
How the Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures
I’ve just discovered my new favorite book on writing.
And no, you can’t borrow it, because I’ve highlighted it all over, written in the margins and typed up a long list of “things to remember” from So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures.
This lively, informative, inspirational book was written by Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. I’ve read Gatsby several times, but I’ve never particularly liked it. My reaction, according to Corrigan, is not rare, in fact, she has a whole chapter entitled “I Didn’t Get It the First Time.” So We Read On is an exciting combination of biography, history, literary criticism, even autobiography—Corrigan has read Gatsby 50 times, so it’s a love story, too.
Corrigan claims The Great Gatsby is the best American novel written in the 20th century. It was a hard-won struggle to attain that accolade—the book fizzled upon publication, and poor F. Scott Fitzgerald died penniless, convinced he was a failure. During WWII the book was chosen to be published in inexpensive paperback editions for American GIs and a great wave of appreciation began.
All the movie versions of the book, including the latest (2013) starring Leonardo DeCaprio (directed by flashy Aussie director Baz Luhrmann), increase the number of fans of the book. It doesn’t hurt that the novel is short, making it popular in high school English classes.
It’s the story of a self-made millionaire, Jay Gatsby, who lives alone in a mansion on one side of a bay off Long Island. He’s obsessed with dreams of his former lover, a high society southern belle who is now married and living on the other side of the bay where he can see the flashing green light on her dock every night.
A quick reading of Gatsby tells us that it’s about the materialism of America, the excessive hedonism of the 1920s. Well, yes, that it is. But closer examination, as Corrigan points out, Gatsby is a merciless depiction of something we don’t like to admit—that America was, and is, a class-stratified society. Believing the American dream, we are addicted to illusion, longing for love, for riches, for acceptance, for reinventing ourselves.
Corrigan also examines the book as a literary accomplishment, the way the beginning is mirrored in the end, its metaphors, such as the eyeglasses on the roadway billboard, its recurring images of water (rain, drowning, the bay) and how Gatsby pays homage to the pulp fiction crime novels that preceded it. Anyone planning to write a novel would do well to first read So We Read On.
I’m just about to read Gatbsy again, but this time I’ll read it out loud, a few pages at a time, in order to luxuriate in its exquisite poetry. I recommend the authorized text, with notes and preface by Fitzgerald scholar, Matthew J. Bruccoli.
So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures, by Maureen Corrigan; Little Brown & Co. (2014), 352 pages. Also in audio. Available at the library and local bookstores.