Dispatch from the Field: Joe on Emily St. John Mandel's Latest

Gavin Sasaki is a promising young journalist in New York City, until he’s fired in disgrace following a series of unforgivable lapses in his work. It’s early 2009, and the world has gone dark very quickly; the economic collapse has turned an era that magazine headlines once heralded as the second gilded age into something that more closely resembles the Great Depression. The last thing Gavin wants to do is return to his hometown of Sebastian, Florida, but he’s drifting toward bankruptcy and is in no position to refuse when he’s offered a job by his sister, Eilo, a real estate broker who deals in foreclosed homes.

Eilo recently paid a visit to a home that had a ten-year-old child in it, a child who looks very much like Gavin and who has the same last name as Gavin’s high school girlfriend Anna, whom Gavin last saw a decade ago. Gavin—a former jazz musician, a reluctant broker of foreclosed properties, obsessed with film noir and private detectives—begins his own private investigation in an effort to track down Anna and their apparent daughter who have been on the run all these years from a drug dealer from whom Anna stole $121,000.

In her most ambitious novel yet, Emily Mandel combines her most fully realized characters with perhaps her most fully developed story that examines the difficulty of being the person you'd like to be, loss, the way a small and innocent action (e.g., taking a picture of a girl in a foreclosed house) can have disastrous consequences. The Lola Quartet is a work that pays homage to literary noir, is concerned with jazz, Django Reinhardt, economic collapse, love, Florida’s exotic wildlife problem, crushing tropical heat, the leavening of the contemporary world, compulsive gambling, and the unreliability of memory.

This is literary fiction with a strong detective story element.

Joe says:
"This sad, yet sublime, novel should bring Emily St. John Mandel a widespread readership. The Lola Quartet is about Gavin Sasaki, a failed musician, failed newspaperman, whose sister takes a photograph of a young girl who looks an awful lot like Gavin. Ten years earlier, Gavin's girlfriend, Anna,disappeared among a flurry of rumor that she might have been pregnant. Is the girl in the photograph Gavin's daughter? The possibility of clearing up this mystery brings him back to Florida. What he does not know is the other chain of events unleashed by this photograph's existence.

St. John Mandel tells the story ten years apart in Florida, Utah & New York City. Her true-to-life characters inhabit worlds made up of their poor or desperate choices. Their worlds are made up of late-night diners, endless suburbs, lost dreams and fading memories of a world that once held promise. This book was at times heartbreakingly sad, and yet left me feeling hopeful. While decisions and actions can't be unmade, they can perhaps be left in the past... 

Emily St. John Mandel is a master storyteller. Not one character is superfluous, and their connections to one other were sometimes as surprising as they were realistic. It is exciting to watch an author perfect her craft, and this novel definitely shows that St. John Mandel is a a major writer. The way St. John Mandel lays out the story, slowly revealing the past that has made the story's present. The choices, betrayals, and lies that have lead her characters to their present-day positions.
 
This novel had me hooked from the first page, not only from the crisp prose, but also from its relevance: these are characters struggling to get by, folks who have not achieved what we were all led to believe the American dream means. Once again, Emily St. John Mandel has taken my breath away with her taut storytelling, her flawed and deeply humane characters and a writing style that makes me fall in love with it every time."