I ripped through it yesterday in a few hours’ time. It was so… flimsy? Like more of a too-long short story or merely an outline of an idea? It was as if Mandel just had to get something, anything to the publisher to fulfill a contract real quick. The author character made me never ever want to write a book. The characters had no depth, the concepts weren’t fleshed out, and the vision of the future wasn’t credible to me. What did everyone else think?
It was okay. Agreed broadly with you in that it feels like it’s not substantial enough. There are some evocative moments, but the work as a whole felt like it wanted to try and say a lot with a little, and only ended up saying a little. I wasn’t really impressed with the imagery, but I’ve read some really weird, bombastic stuff recently that’s difficult to top. I’m not even opposed to “minimal” worldbuilding, but the rest of the book felt… generic? Like literary sci-fi lite.
There was one bit where Mandel’s self-insert character is lecturing on her book tour and says a few things about storytelling, narcissism, and the notion that maybe the world is ending all of the time and we’re not special for thinking we’re living at the end of the world right now. In the context of the book as it exists, those statements feel very on the nose; they might have felt more at home in a more fleshed-out novel, but it was her book to write, not mine. Still, I wish they were in a better story.
I was especially disappointed that the WWI-related arc fizzled out like it did. I would have read a whole novel just about that guy and his problems,>! time travel or no.!<
Side note, this was my first Mandel. Should I be worried about the rest of her work?