Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

Yes, I read a book about a global pandemic during global pandemic. And, weirdly, it made me feel better about our particular global pandemic. We still have the internet, for example. And cars. And planes. And grocery stores. And more than .01 percent of the human population.

Station Eleven is a gorgeous book about a world where a deadly flu (the “Georgia Flu,” a moniker nobody lives long enough to decry as racist) has wiped out 99.99% of humankind in less than a month. The story weaves between the world before, during, and twenty years after the pandemic, tenderly stitching together a tapestry of human suffering and resilience. I learned many things from this book, but the one I’m going to talk about here is a technique St. John Mandel uses to tell us about civilization’s harrowing final days without showing us. Writers are generally urged to show, not tell. But, like the best horror movies, what’s left to the reader’s imagination can sometimes be more visceral than anything a writer could put on the page.

What St. John Mandel does is show us the aftermath of suffering through the eyes of a character who can’t bear to think about what must have happened, but who, by not thinking about it, paints a picture more vividly in our minds than if St. John Mandel had written the missing scene itself.

Here’s one example. Twenty years after the plague, a man and a woman are wandering the post-Apocalyptic landscape and stumble upon a rarity: an intact, un-ransacked house. Inside is a time capsule of life at the end of days in the form of an ordinary American family’s perfectly preserved home. As the they wander the rooms, St. John Mandel lingers over stacked plates in a dish rack, a wedding dress in a closet, a jar of Q-Tips in a bathroom. In a bedroom decorated with posters of the solar system the woman finds a dead child, “a husk in the bed.” On the wall is a picture of the family, “beaming and resplendent with life, the boy in a Little League uniform with his parents kneeling on either side.” Down the hall the parents lie dead in their own bed. The woman sees them but does not react. Then, in the bathroom, she opens a cabinet, sees a stack of clean towels, and St. John Mandel gives us this heartbreaking passage:

“The one on top was blue with yellow ducks on it and had a hood sewn into the corner. Why hadn’t the parents taken the boy into their bed, if they’d all been sick together? Perhaps the parents had died first. She didn’t want to think about it.”

But you’re thinking about it, aren’t you? You can see that family’s final hours The mother, too weak to go and get her son from his bed. The boy dying alone. I had to put the book down for a bit when I read that paragraph.

St. John Mandel does this many times, but I will highlight only one more example. As the pandemic is shutting down the world, a number of planes are diverted to a small airport in Michigan, similar to the diversion of planes to a small airport in Newfoundland when the World Trade Center was attacked. As the passengers mill about, watching the news in growing horror, a final plane lands, but instead of taxiing to a gate, “it made a slow turn on the tarmac and moved away from instead of toward the terminal building. It parked in the far distance, and no ground crew went to meet it. Clark abandoned his nachos and went to the window. It occurred to him that the Air Gradia jet was as far away from the terminal as it could possibly go.”

This plane will sit on the tarmac for the rest of the book. No one will ever come out of it. St. John Mandel mentions it from time to time, reminding us of its presence, silent and brooding and alone. No one will ever go into it, either. We don’t know anything about its passengers or its crew. But, again, St. John Mandel gives us another beautiful, empathetic passage:

There were things Clark trained himself not to think about. Everyone he’d ever known outside the airport, for instance. And here at the airport, Air Gradia 452, silent in the distance near the perimeter fence, by unspoken agreement never discussed. Clark tried not to look at it and almost managed to convince himself that it was empty, like all of the other planes out there. Don’t think of that unspeakable decision, to keep the jet sealed rather than expose a packed airport to a fatal contagion. Don’t think about what enforcing that decision may have required. Don’t think about those last few hours on board.

Well, I had been thinking and wondering about that plane for entire chapters before this passage, but with these few sentences, I know all I need to know in a way that is far more gutting than if I’d read scene after scene depicting what happened on board. It all happened in silence, from the reader’s perspective and from Clark’s, and that is, somehow, so much worse.

I’ve never seen this technique used so effectively before, and it shows a restraint that all writers should learn to exercise. Sometimes, it really is better not to show or to tell. Better to have a character imagine something without putting it into words. Because in the end, we are all our own best storytellers. As a writer, I hope to find the confidence I need to trust you as much as Emily St. John Mandel does.