Sea of Tranquility
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The moon is so back, baby! Artemis II was a successful mission, and I successfully read Sea of Tranquility despite my daughter sucking up all my time and energy à la a black hole.
This is my first exposure to Emily St. John Mandel, although I know that people love Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, including my boy Obama. I’m intrigued by her as a person because she got married at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, which is a place I enjoyed in my young, wild, and free NYC days.
Without spoiling anything, Sea of Tranquility experiments with time travel and the nature of reality. The only time travel book I’ve ever liked is Slaughterhouse-Five; Vonnegut can do no wrong in general, but I specifically like his irreverent tone. He explores these themes like a silly goose. On the other hand, Sea of Tranquility simultaneously tries to do too much and take itself too seriously when, at the end of the day, we’re all just makin' shit up here.
Additionally, by nature, time-travel books are pretty disjointed, given the whole break in the time-space continuum thing. This book didn’t really start to make sense until halfway through (and even then… how much sense can a time travel book really make?). So, it requires patience, and I don’t feel like the payoff is adequately met. I also did not have patience with the main character’s name. Gaspery is a stupid name, and it was actively distracting. I’m sorry to any Gasperys out there.
So, this book was not a big hit for me, but it also wasn’t a big miss. While the details miss the mark, on a higher level, I appreciate the philosophical musings it evokes. She writes about the narcissism enmeshed in apocalyptic thinking; we want to think that we’re uniquely important, so we emphasize the idea that things are the worst they could possibly be right now. For me, it became a book about facing your subjective experience head-on, regardless of whether ot not that experience aligns with objective ‘reality’, and cherishing it, finding your own tranquility.
I like the messaging, and there was some ethereal quality to her prose that made me feel like I was being transported to an alternate reality, but I’m not crazy about the noncommittal world-building. Vonnegut is on one end of the spectrum; you totally suspend disbelief and just roll with all the bonkers stuff he throws out there because it’s about the philosophy and not the bonkers stuff itself. On the other end of the spectrum, you have fantasy tomes like Fourth Wingand ACOTAR, which make very concerted efforts toward world-building. Sea of Traquility fell somewhere in between– wanting to be taken seriously as a fictional universe but not fully committing to the bit. It receives 3 out of 5 flames.
