Unbridled Books

In his lost career at the New York Star Gavin had begun all his stories with a new page in his notebook, names and ideas and associations scrawled out into the margins. At the beginning of his second week in Sebastian he drove to an office-supply store and bought notebooks—he couldn’t find the kind he liked best, but close enough—and wrote Anna across the top of a page. But where to begin? He had already spent some time trying to find Sasha, but had gotten nowhere. She wasn’t in the telephone directory and seemed to be among the disconcerting population of people who don’t exist on the Internet. He wrote Sasha buying baby clothes at mall? beneath Anna’s name and The Lola Quartet below that. It was evening, the lights of the freeway streaming across the top of his window behind the reflection of the room.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

Django Reinhardt was a prodigy at thirteen playing the cafés of Paris. A burn victim at eighteen when he came home from a gig and knocked over a candle in the caravan where he lived with his young wife. The materials for the celluloid-and-paper flowers she made to supplement their income were highly flammable, and the caravan flashed quickly into flame. A small miracle at twenty, when he emerged from a long convalescence after the fire that ruined half his left hand and revealed an improbable new technique: he worked the frets with two fingers and made his own substitutions for the standard major and minor chords. The miracle was that he played better after the fire than before. He carried the fire with him through all the days of his life, in his two curled fingers and in the way he used a match to hold the bridge of his battered guitar up to the proper height.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

He’d recently come out of rehab for the second time and he felt skinless, his bones exposed to the open air. His hands shook. Every light was too bright. He knew he could repair this awful fragility with a pill or two but that was the point, he’d promised his parents, he was wracked with guilt for how expensive he imagined rehab must be although they kept the numbers from him. “You don’t want to drift through life all addled, Jack,” his mother’s voice as she served him dinner his first night home, breadcrumb-covered casserole in a blue dish from childhood, these impossibly moving small details that kept him perpetually tripped-up and on the edge of tears. In rehab he’d spent a lot of time watching videos and now his thoughts were a fog of old movies.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

Step inside and it was just another bar, all chatter and shadows and the faint smell of stale beer, but at the back of the room was a window, a red paper umbrella attached to a wall, a doorway covered by a velvet curtain. The window was almost soundproof. From the dark of the bar he would stand and look through into a brighter world, a small dim room with a lit-up sign that read Hotel d’Orsay and a few rows of people sitting on uncomfortable chairs. Under the Hotel d’Orsay sign musicians set up their instruments, plugged in their amplifiers, milled about drinking beer while the audience stared at them, tested the mikes at their leisure, eventually got around to settling down behind their instruments, and then played some of the best music Gavin had ever heard.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

The tattoo story: before she transferred to Gavin’s high school Anna had run away three times in search of peace and quiet or maybe in search of adventure and change, the story shifted a bit with each telling. She’d fallen in with a dangerous crowd at her old school and a police officer had brought her home at two a.m. She’d been gone for three days but her parents hadn’t reported her missing. She was high out of her mind, laughing in the foyer while her parents talked to the cop, a black new tattoo bleeding softly on her shoulder, and the story Sasha told Gavin was that the cop had seen the squalor of the house and called Family Services, and it was the social worker’s idea to get Anna transferred to the magnet school. Something about getting her away from her sinking friends, a new environment, the positive influence of her less-screwed-up older half-sister, but Anna never talked about any of that, Anna only smiled and touched the tattoo on her shoulder and said “Even when I’m stoned I have good taste in tattoos.” 

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

The Lola Quartet was playing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” for the second time and a pretty girl named Taylor from Choir was singing in her best dusky lounge voice. They were all in love with the music and also a little in love with Taylor, or at least Gavin was and he imagined that everyone around him was caught up in the same dream. And then he caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye and that was the paper airplane, arcing down through the air to land at his feet. He knew only one person with aim that perfect. He looked up and saw her, Anna standing just beyond the dancers at the edge of the light, and he half-smiled around the mouthpiece at her but she didn’t smile back. There was something urgent in the way she looked at him.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

He felt that he was slipping, but it wasn’t just him. The city of New York had gone dark so quickly, and at times Gavin was dazzled by the speed of the fall. Because it hadn’t actually been that long since he’d been walking hand in hand with Karen down Columbus Avenue and they’d come upon a newsstand with a New York Magazine cover that read “The Second Gilded Age” in gold letters, and the headline had seemed perfect to him. This is the second gilded age, he’d tell himself, looking around at his fellow diners at expensive restaurants or studying photographs of $1.3 million one-bedroom apartments in the windows of real estate offices. The phrase fit the era. But within months the stock market had plummeted and banks were collapsing, everyone was losing their jobs and there were food shortages in the soup kitchens, and the second gilded age seemed distant.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

There was an afternoon spent staggering through swamps under a wide-brimmed hat, listening to a park ranger named William Chandler talk about the new monsters that had been appearing since the early ’90s. The creatures in the Florida swamps were terrifying and new, and the canals delivered the swamps to the suburbs. Experts speculated that some of the animals had been blown deep into the swamps by Hurricane Andrew—greenhouses that had held snakes had been found shattered and empty once the storm had passed—but most were abandoned pets. Small glittering lizards who’d seemed manageable enough when they were babies but then outgrew aquarium after aquarium until they’d become seven-foot-long two-hundred-pound Nile monitors with eerily intelligent eyes and extravagantly pebbled skin, perfectly capable of eating a small dog.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

Please take a minute to watch this “book rush” — a scene taken from the novel HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD by Janyce Stefan-Cole and filmed by Red Cube Pictures.