Entry 01: Books for a Pandemic
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
One of the best openers of all time. And, post-apocalypse, it’s a wonder to behold a feisty rag-tag group of survivors who call themselves The Traveling Symphony, “this collection of petty jealousies, neuroses, undiagnosed PTSD cases, and simmering resentments [who] lived together, traveled together, rehearsed together, performed together 365 days of the year, permanent company, permanent tour. But what made it bearable were the friendships, of course…” and also “the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn’t matter who’d used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, although someone — probably Sayid — had written ‘Sartre: Hell is other people’ in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out “other people” and substituted ‘flutes.’ …The Symphony was insufferable, hell was other flutes or other people or whoever had used the last of the rosin or whoever missed the most rehearsals, but the truth was that the Symphony was their only home.”
Chapters later, St. John Mandel picks up this thread, concluding: “Hell is the absence of the people you long for,” a truth that hits like a sucker punch to the gut. The pandemic has made so many of us feel lonely. The series, now streaming on HBO Max, is a good adaptation.
2. On the Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
A darker vision, this post-apocalyptic novel follows a father and son over a ruined landscape post pandemic. The trees are falling, there are earthquakes and fires, and most people and animals are dead. The surviving people are starving, some resort to cannibalism. It’s very moving that the father has to protect the young boy. In a poignant twist, the boy still longs for other people and wants to help those they encounter; his moral center burns true. In this, he is a figure who might symbolize other famous sons who represent the forces of good in the world. This all-too-human father has a delicate balance to strike — he doesn’t want to scare the boy, but he knows people aren’t trustworthy. The relationship between father and son is all that prevents the two, but particularly the father, from falling into despair and giving up. We are human and we are wired to relate to one another. Of the three apocalyptic books I reread this year, this is the bleakest. Yet it’s written with restraint and beauty.
3. Harrow: A Novel by Joy Williams (2021)
Reminiscent of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, this absurdist novel interrogates the futility of life. The language is vivid, and the characters philosophize, often speaking past one another in colorful soliloquies, rather than engaging in actual conversations. Relationships between characters are ephemeral. Divided into sections, in the first, Khristen and her upbringing are described, then we follow as she enrolls in a school in a former sanitarium where the students begin to realize that everyone is “pretending things will be alright.” Images of “harrows” — an agricultural tool that removes old dead vegetation so that the soil will aerate and new seed can be planted — appear painted on doors and the wall of the railway station, as though someone or some group of people harken a retreat from the modern world to a simpler, more agricultural past. After a series of explosions, everyone scatters.
The meat of the book takes place after “for all intents and purposes the apocalypse had pretty much occurred.” In these sections, the narrator explains that “Things used to add up, not so much anymore,” and “nature had been deemed sociopathic….” Yet it dawns on the reader that this world, as presented, where the poor and elderly are impacted while the wealthy are inured, doesn’t veer so far from the world we inhabit now. Not so far at all. Apocalypse, the author states, occurs in the world whenever we find ourselves “dead to its astonishments.” A scrappy group of outcasts band together at a facility on a lake, an abandoned former resort known as the Institute, where they learn ‘the suicide arts” and plot terrorist actions, so that they feel their deaths will count for something. The characters rail against the despair of failing to “understand or justify human existence and behavior.” What does it mean to be human in this world, and to take up the art of living? These are important questions posed in this offbeat novel. The writing is spiky, insistent, and meandering; the plot resists linearity; the characters strike a pose, representing certain ideas; there is no resolution at the end — for, given the philosophy served up here, how could there be? Readers who embrace experimental work will find this captivating.
4. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (2020)
I reread this for my book club. It’s a fantastic premise: a family takes a rental house during their vacation, when the owners show up suddenly one night because something uncanny seems to be happening in the city, they wanted to get away for awhile. They’ll just stay in the basement, and will refund some of the money. So far so good, right? Only here’s the thing — the owners are Black and the vacationers are White. This is a clear set up for conflict, only …. in this telling, the initial interpersonal conflicts quickly fizzle out, because the uncanny events take precedence. The novel masterfully builds suspense and tension, describing that in-between stage when it’s unclear how bad an event is, or how bad it will get. Should you panic? Leave? Hang tight….? Unfortunately, I didn’t like the characters, finding them bland and annoying rather than well developed. Because of this, I could not root for them, and didn’t care what happened to them or not.