'Station Eleven' and Entertainment in a Time of Crisis

The surprise literary phenomenon of the fall is a post-apocalyptic novel whose most radical feature is gentleness. Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven — newly shortlisted for the National Book Award — kills 99% of humanity with a flu in its opening chapters, then spends its heart on what the survivors choose to keep: a traveling company performing Shakespeare through the Great Lakes ruins under a motto borrowed from Star Trek, 'survival is insufficient.'

Mandel's structure loops around a single night — an actor dying on stage during King Lear as the pandemic lands — and radiates outward across decades, following a comic book, a paperweight and the people they pass through. The genre furniture is familiar; the thesis isn't. Where the field defaults to shotguns and cannibals, Mandel bets on orchestras.

The book has become a word-of-mouth engine in bookstores precisely because it consoles without lying — civilization, it argues, is a repertoire, and repertoires can be rebuilt.

Update: the novel's strange afterlife proved the thesis twice over — read in enormous numbers during an actual pandemic, then adapted into HBO Max's acclaimed 2021 miniseries, television's best argument to date that art is a survival supply. The catalog pairs book and series.