I’ve read three of Emily St. John Mandel’s novels now, seen the masterful HBO Max adaptation of Station Eleven, and am midway through her latest effort, Exit Party. It’s been an unusual but rewarding trip so far, largely because of how unexpected, yet how plausible, even familiar, her characters are. Her focus on them, and on their strangely syncopated encounters in the spacetime that ebbs and flows around them, pulling them apart and rejoining them again, could easily seem cheap and contrived in the hands of a less sensitive and less capable writer, but in hers they become as persuasive a signature as any riff of Bach’s or Mozart’s.
This is her real distinction as a writer, I think, and the main reason why I find her stories so attractive. She doesn’t conspire against her characters, she investigates them, peels them apart layer by layer like an onion, as though they, and the pathos that they’re embedded in are to be accepted as being just as real as the author is, as we, her readers, are. It’s a commitment on her part that I find impossible not to respect, and it leads me finally to accept that her premise, that these characters are as real as any of our own performances of character in the real world are, is entirely reasonable. Like Jane Austen, she’s what I would call a forensic humanist, one fit as few are, to apply her talents to her own twenty-first century, and to us, its all too human denizens.