The Counterlife - The Glass Hotel (2020) Part 2

The collapse is an apocalypse first in your mind, then when you learn that it's all over, a sheer, cosmic relief. At least now the lies can stop, and this ugly thing can end at last.

David, Pat and ‪@DarthdYT‬ close out their discussion of Emily St John Mandel's sleep hit and try to figure out what the book is doing.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D. C. McNeill: Now, I finished this book. There's two things I want to say before we get started.

The first is that I did a disservice on the last episode, Pat, where you asked a little bit about Emily St John Mandel's relationship with sex, and I was like, gosh, she's just not that interested in writing about it. I was wrong.

Someone on the Patreon DM'd me and went, look, and they asked to remain anonymous. Fair enough.

They were like, listen, it was a really eloquent point, but you need to read The Singer's Gun, because that is Emily St John Mandel's book, functionally about sex. I did that this week.

The Singer's Gun is a novel that basically follows a, I guess they're second-generation immigrant cousins, Anton and Arya. Their parents run a clothing store. It's like a tchotchke furniture thrift store, antique store blend in Manhattan.

And all of the furniture they sell is stolen. And the book kind of follows Anton's life. And growing up, he immediately falls in love with his cousin.

And that's kind of like the beginning of his sexual awakening. And then marries a woman that he definitely shouldn't marry, who they have a terrible relationship, and is having an affair with this woman, Eleanor, the whole time.

The book is sort of about, it's still written quite keenly from the female perspective in that it's about the connection and the absence of that connection as it relates to sex that like actually matters.

So like Eleanor, the character, while she's having this affair, she's in a relationship with his boyfriend, Gabriel, and he's been on these like depression pills that mean he has no sex drive.

That's kind of why she starts the affair in the first place. But the book really centers like, it's not lurid and it's not torrid, it's like really dealing with these things as like elemental facts of reality.

And so I think that to more thoroughly answer your question from last time, Pat, I think that Mandela is not necessarily interested in sex itself as like an act, but the things that it produces in us as people and the things that it produces in us in

its absence as well. And the way that some connection can be sustained without it and some connection can't be sustained without it.

But reading that book, it really felt like she'd sat down and went, let me think about this once, so I don't have to worry about it ever again. That type of exercise.

Patrick: Yeah. I mean, that makes sense to me. She's very interested in the complicated, messy relationships that come from such intimate acts, like in the before and after of that kind of thing.

But yeah, it sounds like from that description as well, that she also still doesn't go into the very, as you said, carnal aspects of sex and stuff.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah. Yeah. I think like a male author, and certainly I've noticed like the way that I write about sex insofar as I have, because obviously the Maynard Trigg series is like Young Adults, so it's not really in that series.

But I'm working on like a side novel set in the same universe just to figure out like what is sex in this universe like mean and look like.

It's like, yeah, I guess I'm interested in Sea of Tranquility because that ends up being a book about a lot of things.

But seminally, it becomes a book about like every, I think everything Mandel has written, which is like how do you not live the wrong life and then die, right? That line from Station Eleven.

And a big part of that to her seems to be, who do you choose to be vulnerable to over like large periods of time? I think that's like a like a foundational piece of her corpus.

Darth: I think it's worth pointing out that that the both Station Eleven and this ended up being much more about like relationships than about whatever the the quote-unquote mystery was, right?

And I think the same thing can be said about all of the sex scenes that we've not seen in this book, because each one is just indicative of a relationship either shifting or, you know, something like that, where the point of it is what is being

indicated. Does that make sense?