The response was textbook Mandel: wry, warm, and unfailingly generous. “If it helps, as alarming as this moment is, I remain certain that this isn't going to end with a traveling Shakespearean theatre company traversing the wasteland of the post-apocalypse,” Mandel offered kindly to one supplicant. Who was she, a novelist who’d fictionalized a thoroughly researched but “not particularly scientifically plausible” pandemic, as she describes it, to be viewed as an authority? Meanwhile, Mandel’s fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, landed with fateful timing that same month when her book tour swiftly went virtual, she spent night after night fielding tidal waves of readers’ pandemic malaise over Zoom and Twitter. But being hailed as a prophetic visionary didn’t sit well with her. No one would expect a novelist’s stock to skyrocket because of a global pandemic, yet that’s exactly what happened to Mandel.
0 kommentar(er)
