The Disaster Artist

Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel reimagines a world thrown off its axis by financial collapse. But it’s her previous novel that’s speaking to our pandemic-frenzied moment.

- Hillary Kelly

Sales of Station Eleven are suddenly up. In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 blockbuster hit, the “Georgia flu” wipes out over 99 percent of humanity—it moves so quickly that within 24 hours of the virus reaching America, all air travel is shut down. Cell lines jam and phones stop working within two days. In under a week, television stations have gone to static as entire production crews die out. Spread via tiny aerosol particles, the Georgia flu is like our seasonal one and, yes, the coronavirus, on steroids—mercury-popping fevers, rattling coughs, respiratory distress, followed by death.

“I don’t know who in their right mind would want to read Station Eleven during a pandemic,” the perplexed author wrote on Twitter, to which her readers replied: We would. Inhaling a novel about a contagion that brings civilization to an end while news about covid-19 sends hand-sanitizer sales vaulting doesn’t sound logical. But there can be something reassuring about taking in a fictional disaster in the midst of a real one. You can flirt with the experience of collapse. You can long for the world you live in right now.

“The virus in Station Eleven would have burned out before it could kill off the entire population,” Mandel points out when I ask the question legions of fans are sending her way: Is she worried? The author is preternaturally composed—dressed in a checked toffee blazer and mahogany boots, she has an air of Betty Draper just returned from riding lessons. “I sound reassuring, right?,” she says. She also has a mischievous streak. Her face turns stoic. “It’s frightening, and we need to keep an eye on it.” Then she waggles her eyebrows: “Famous last words before the whole nation collapses!”