HOW TO BE AN OPTIMIST IN DYSTOPIA

Emily St. John Mandel and Jia Tolentino see hope in the weirdness of our pandemnic moment.

- ADRIENNE GAFFNEY

“WHEN HAVE WE EVER believed that the world wasn’t ending?” asks a character in Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility. “There’s always something.” At a time when that fear is so acutely alive, the question is revelatory.

Depending on how you look at it, Emily St. John Mandel is either a remarkably prescient writer or simply a student of history who recognized that pandemics are an inevitable part of life. Her award-winning 2014 novel Station Eleven, set in a world in which 99 percent of humanity has perished, debuted as a television series just as America was nearing the end of a second full year of coexisting with COVID. Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, which centers on a Ponzi scheme, had an unfortunate release date of March 24, 2020. Rather than traveling to promote it, she spent much of lockdown writing her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility (out April 5). The expansive book features a time-shifting plot that explores pandemics, moon colonization, time travel, and, perhaps most brilliantly, the idea that the basic rhythms of daily life carry us along even as our circumstances shift into unrecognizable forms. While Mandel focuses on many of the things that terrify us, she also illustrates how hope and humanity are flames that can never be fully extinguished. Recently, she sat down with Jia Tolentino, author of the acclaimed essay collection Trick Mirror, for a wide-ranging conversation on isolation, the future, and finding beauty in the mundane.