Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven 

The Glass Hotel

Sea of Tranquility is a hard book to describe. We follow multiple characters in various time periods and geographic locations. Edwin St. Andrew is the third son of a British noble who has been exiled to Canada in the early twentieth century, Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour on Earth in 2203, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is a detective in the far future who has been hired to solve a mystery. There are reappearances of characters from The Glass Hotel, so it was fun to think of this as part of the ESJM extended universe, like Taylor Jenkins Reid does. It is a standalone novel and you don't need to read The Glass Hotel to know what's going on, but they were fun Easter eggs. 

The writing in this book is divine. The pacing is spot on. There's a dog AND a cat. Her writing is effortless. The multiple storylines converge in a perfect way and it really rewards careful reading. 

I have a handful of quibbles with the book: the author substitute complaining about how hard her life on tour is a particular sort of whining that privileged people do that irritates me, the pandemic storyline was a little bit too on point, and time travel is not my favorite sci-fi trope, although I think she handled it really well here. But those quibbles do not overshadow my overall enjoyment of the book.

And, just like with all ESJM's books, I can't stop thinking about it days after I've finished it. There's something about the fact that we will all die and centuries from now, it won't matter how or when. I just keep looking around my house, a place I am so proud to call home, and wondering what will happen to all of it when I'm gone. 

4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. (page 5)

I think this one sentence describes me perfectly. I am Edwin.

Sometimes order can be relentless. (page 68)

Right? We had a friend in grad school whose house was immaculate. She had a big, dumb retriever named Thor and Thor got his paws washed and dried every time he came into the house. It was very stressful to be in her house, even though she was a lovely hostess and so very kind and obviously loved her dog very much.

"...I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world." (page 189)

One of the reasons that we never had children was because we really felt like it would be irresponsible to bring a child into a world where their future will never be as bright as ours were. Maybe it is narcissistic for us to feel this way, but we always thought we'd rather regret not having children instead of regretting having them.