The book promised, or threatened, that near-total transformation can be surprisingly easy. Scenes of stragglers in the new order alternated with glimpses of a lost past: dinner parties and air travel, the flash of a paparazzo’s camera. Wandering among texts, viewpoints, and possible trajectories, “Station Eleven” announced Mandel’s obsession with contingency, with who we might be if we weren’t ourselves. (The troupe’s tagline, “survival is insufficient,” could double as the novel’s.) The book sold more than one and a half million copies, and muddied the boundary between genre and literary fiction, sneaking a study of art-how it’s used, inherited, and remade over time-into a post-apocalyptic thriller. Adapted by HBO last year, it’s the tale of a travelling Shakespeare troupe whose members are piecing themselves together after a world-annihilating flu. On tour and beyond it, she seems to be wrestling with the fact of her art in the world: what power it can hold over people, and what claims they might make on her in return.īehind “Sea of Tranquility”-a book about the consequences of writing a juggernaut book-looms “ Station Eleven,” Mandel’s own juggernaut book, from 2014. She speaks in awed tones about connecting with those whom her words have touched-sometimes literally, as when a fan exposes her left shoulder to reveal, tattooed in “curly script,” a line from “Marienbad.” Yet Olive isn’t above a sort of gentle wryness, the subtext of which is, more or less, “Can you believe this shit?” She’s more interesting for her hints of prickly impatience, and her gratitude can feel as dutifully cultivated as her indignation is carefully curbed. But it’s worth noting that Olive, one of three protagonists in “Sea of Tranquility,” is immediately sympathetic: gracious, funny, and thoughtful about her work.

No critic has waded into the “likability” marsh and left smelling better than when she arrived. Hence the tour, which Mandel narrates in dry, clipped fragments-the lingua franca of autofiction, and a flashing clue about what she’s up to.

Olive’s blockbuster novel, “Marienbad,” about a “scientifically implausible flu,” will soon be adapted into a film. Strangers she meets on the road, in Ubers and fancy receptions, wonder why she’s racking up Marriott points instead of taking care of her daughter. Event attendees ask why her narrative strands don’t cohere. Journalists lob inquiries about whether she prefers sex with or without handcuffs. John Mandel, an author named Olive Llewellyn goes on book tour, where she is subjected to terrible questions. In “ Sea of Tranquility,” the new novel by Emily St.

Sea of tranquility a novel