Reading Roundup: Time-Travel Fiction of the Early Pandemic

Pomander Walk, NYC, a key location in Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow. Photo by Michelle Young for Untapped New York.

Q: What do I have in common with bestselling authors Emma Straub and Emily St. John Mandel?

A: We all started writing time-travel novels during the lockdowns of 2020.

Sure, they got their novels completed and published by Summer 2022, while I stalled out at about 5K words, daunted and discouraged. But! If you’re in San Francisco, you can come see me read an excerpt of my never-to-be-finished time-travel novel this Thursday, November 17. And in the meantime, wouldn’t you like to read my thoughts on Straub’s and Mandel’s works?

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the first pandemic lockdown, in March 2020, I sort of lost my mind. I didn’t finish any books for six weeks (my Goodreads stats bear this out). I tried reading Connie Willis’ time-travel/pandemic novel Doomsday Book , a copy of which was hand-delivered to my apartment by masked workers from my local indie bookstore, but I petered out halfway through. I thought obsessively about time travel, and all that had happened in the first two decades of the 21st century, and how we had wound up here. I drafted several thousand words of a time-travel novel of my own before realizing I had probably bitten off more than I could chew.

All of which means that it was pretty strange for me to learn that Emily St. John Mandel, who became famous in the mid-2010s for her pandemic novel Station Eleven , spent Spring 2020 writing time-travel fiction too. Unlike me, she actually knew what she was doing, and the resulting Sea of Tranquility is a short but assured novel that covers 4 centuries but can be read in a day.

There are definitely echoes of several other acclaimed 21st-century novels here. The book has the same structure as Cloud Atlas and shares some of its themes: the protagonist of the first section is a young Englishman who is starting to feel uneasy about his country’s imperialist project, the second section introduces us to a modernist composer, the middle sections get sci-fi futuristic. The reverence for the trees and forests of the Pacific Northwest is like a much, much less irritating version of The Overstory . And, like Sally Rooney’s latest novel, this book prominently features a female novelist who seems intended as a stand-in for the author. Except that Mandel’s stand-in, Olive Llewellyn, lives on a moon colony and wrote her eerily prescient pandemic novel around the turn of the 23rd century.

The different time periods are tied together by intimations of approaching pandemics, and by Gaspery, a bumbling but sympathetic time-traveling detective. He makes you realize how if time-travel were real, it’d be the opposite of an escapist fantasy: he’s burdened with knowing what the future brings, but can’t reveal himself or his future knowledge.

Even a few months into the pandemic, some readers were speculating as to what kind of literature would come out of it, and other readers were saying that after having lived through such a strange and traumatizing time, who would ever want to read fiction about it? I come down somewhere in the middle: I currently have no interest in immersing myself in the Great American Pandemic Novel, and I think it will take at least another decade before some author has enough perspective to write such a thing. But I also think that art can help us make sense of senseless events, and that strange new times can birth strange new stories. Sea of Tranquility, which Mandel herself has described as a “deranged” thing she started writing to keep sane in Spring 2020, is not trying to be the Great (North) American Pandemic Novel, and thank goodness for that. It’s a quick read, it’s got engaging mystery and sci-fi elements, it taps into the weirdness of the last two years but in oblique and unexpected ways. Station Eleven is a novel about pandemic survivors shoring fragments of art—Shakespeare plays, comic books—against their ruin. Sea of Tranquility, born from chaos, feels like another one of those fragments.

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In my review of Sea of Tranquility – like This Time Tomorrow, a literary time-travel novel that was written during the pandemic and came out in 2022 – I mentioned having tried to write a time-travel novel of my own in 2020. So I’m fascinated by this mini-trend and was eager to read This Time Tomorrow, especially because its premise is weirdly similar to that of my attempted novel: a contemporary woman, vaguely dissatisfied with her life, suddenly travels twenty-odd years back in time, her adult consciousness and memories inhabiting her teenage body. Were Emma Straub and Emily St. John Mandel and I all tapping into some kind of collective unconscious, even while deeply isolated in lockdown?

(Even more intriguing, Straub is about the same age as Mandel, they both live in NYC, and their time-travel novel is their sixth published book. Somebody needs to put the two of them on a podcast together!)

I’m glad I gave Straub’s fiction another chance, after being disappointed by her first novel, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures . That book was ambitious but half-baked, a historical novel that spanned half a century but never felt fresh or true. After all, the more time a story covers, the more difficult it is to structure it in a compelling way... but that also means that time-travel stories are really difficult to structure. Here, Straub has to establish the circumstances of Alice’s life at age 40, then take her back in time to her 16th birthday and give her an opportunity to make different choices, then show how her life has changed and how she reacts to it… it’s a tall order! But she carries it off with confidence; she’s definitely matured as a writer since her debut.

It probably helps that one of the time-travel rules in this book is that you can go back in time for 24 hours, then you return to your own time. Therefore, Alice’s time-travel trips have a sense of urgency and compactness; she isn’t stuck in the past for weeks or months. (This is where my own novel went wrong!)

And it also helps that this book is semi-autobiographical. Like her heroine Alice, Straub is on the Gen-X/Millennial cusp and grew up in New York City with a well-known genre novelist (Peter Straub) for a father. This Time Tomorrow is a love letter to NYC, particularly mid-‘90s NYC, and the details ring true in a way that the details of Straub’s historical-fiction novel didn’t. So does the depiction of the close and caring relationship between Alice and her father, Leonard.

I also appreciated the way that Straub wrote about present-day Alice’s situation as a single, childless woman approaching 40 and wondering how the decades went by so fast. She feels okay about her life—but were there choices she could have made, somewhere along the line, to feel more than just okay? She’s a relatable 21st-century archetype, neither a role model nor an object of pity. The time travel shenanigans allow Alice some believable character growth without tipping over into insane wish-fulfillment fantasy.

(highlight for spoilers) Although, is it a sly joke that instead of choosing the timeline where she has the hot wealthy husband and the Park Avenue flat, Alice ends up in a timeline where she’s still single, but has a slightly nicer job and a slightly nicer apartment? What could be more appealing to Elder Millennials than that? (end spoiler)