![]() Characters weave in and out of each other’s lives like ghosts (and sometimes as ghosts), creating a web of intricate relationships and personal histories that, as in Station Eleven, coalesce into a singular vision. Structural and thematic fragmentation is again at the forefront of The Glass Hotel. This marriage between form and content, theme and structure, fragment and whole, is part of what makes Station Eleven such a hugely successful novel, and a major reason why Mandel’s new book, The Glass Hotel, has been so widely anticipated. ![]() ![]() The people in Station Eleven’s post-disaster world yearn for the conveniences of their past and deride the depravity of their present, the linearity of their lives jumbled into a jigsaw. Yet for Mandel, fragmentation is not simply a structural conceit, but an essential tension felt by her characters. ![]() The book’s mosaic structure is navigable and inventive and sneakily builds toward unification all along, the fragments were pieces of a whole. In Station Eleven, her breakout 2014 novel about a pandemic that kills more than ninety-nine percent of the global population, Mandel imaginatively flashes forward and backward in time, switches points of view, and uniquely disseminates backstory without eliding immediacy or propulsion. John Mandel has an uncanny knack for shape. ![]() For an author who writes in fragments, Emily St. ![]()
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