But they are equally welcome at home during anxious days of following the news cycle or insomniac nights of worrying about the future. Mandel’s deeply imagined, philosophically profound reckonings with life in an age of disaster would indeed be appropriate companions alongside a plastic cup of wine and a tray of reheated food (if we’re lucky). But her entire body of work-her new novel, The Glass Hotel, is her fifth-can be read as a response to Pye’s demand. John Mandel used these lines as an epigraph to her second novel, The Singer’s Gun (2010), a book haunted by 9/11. “We stand in need of something stronger now: the travel book you can read while making your way through this new, alarming world.” With tanks now standing guard at London’s Heathrow Airport, what was once an ordinary plane trip had acquired “an element of thoroughly unwanted suspense.” The usual reading material, Pye argued, would no longer do. Writing in The New York Times in June 2003, less than two years after the events of September 11 shattered the complacency with which many Americans conducted their lives, the British critic Michael Pye lamented an unlikely casualty of the new era: the ability to occupy ourselves with a superficial novel while sitting in an airport lounge or drifting at 30,000 feet. Illustration: Paul Spella Sal Alas / Westend61 / Getty
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