The three characters’ lives entangle in Montreal, where Eli pursues Lilia after she abandons him where Michaela promises to help fill in the blanks Lilia has blotted out from her childhood where Eli comes across Michaela tightrope walking between two balconies and is drawn into the shared history between the two women. He had vanished into his work even when he was physically there, engrossed in his pursuit of a girl taken from her mother’s home one frigid night. Michaela, in Montreal, is Lilia’s inverse: physically rooted but fatherless, abandoned well before her father actually disappears. Shortly after meeting in a Williamsburg coffee shop, they move in together: he, working on a thesis about dead languages, well past its due date she, leaving only the barest fingerprints on the world she inhabits with him, right up until the day she goes out for the paper and never comes home.
So she does, long after the private investigator on her case has stopped tailing her.Įli, meanwhile, is waiting for something interesting to happen, when he happens upon Lilia.
“I wish to remain vanishing,” she writes in a motel room Bible as a child. Abducted by her estranged father as a child, she has continued to live out their transient existence in early adulthood, abandoning cities and lovers in increments of six months or less. Lilia, around whom the book’s action revolves, has spent most of her life on the run. Mandel packs so much depth of feeling into a plot that could easily have been a milquetoast contribution to the Girl in the Window on the Train with the Tattoo canon. It’s uneven, the way many debuts are, but affecting. It’s not speculative fiction, like her most lauded novel, but there’s an artful detachment to the prose that foreshadows the unsettling futures of Station Eleven and (parts of) Sea of Tranquility. Last Night in Montreal is Mandel’s first novel, and while it covers a whole lot of territory in North America, significant portions take place in two of the three cities I’ve called home. I’ve been making my way through her bibliography ever since. I devoured it, then moved on to Mandel’s enchanting Sea of Tranquility. I’ll never forget the damp squib that was Under the Skin (the book is so much more worth your time). I’m always hesitant to read a book or see a movie I’ve heard too much about or been interested in for too long. John Mandel’s much-celebrated, accidentally prophetic Station Eleven. I didn’t plan on reading a book largely set in those two cities on that anniversary, but the étoiles so aligned.Įarlier this year, after much equivocation, I picked up Emily St.
It’s been 10 years since I left Montreal for New York.
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