This is a slow, character-focused story that manages to be a family drama and social commentary at the same time. In this respect felt deeply like Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. To summarize briefly: Anton and his cousin Aria were, until recently, in business together selling forged passports to undocumented people who wanted to stay in America. Anton got out of the business and is now on a small island in Italy. The reasons for this, the relationships around these characters, and the consequences of this former business partnership form the basis of the story.

The elements of St. John Mandel's writing I have come to absolutely love find their genesis here. It snuck up on me; I wasn't noticing how attached to the story I was getting until I found myself unable to stop thinking about it when not reading. It's also a sophomore novel, and there were occasionally repetitious elements to the prose. In my opinion she found her footing with this book and learned the lessons from it well.

Something I couldn't stop thinking about this book—that I also thought was true about The Glass Hotel—was the clear willingness of the characters to leave their families behind to pursue their own often self-centered ends. It's something I don't think always works in books, and something I've been trying to reconcile in my own life: what we fundamentally owe to our kin, what they owe to us. The book at its core is trying to answer this, what we owe to each other. It is about ethics, in a way that broadly worked for me.

St. John Mandel has the rare gift of making unlikeable characters fascinatingly compelling (to me). Anton is a dirtbag. He also has a conscience, if less of one than some of the other characters around him. His parents, ultimately good and also criminal people, counsel him to have a very specific conscience—one of loyalty to kin. Ultimately that counsel leads him to leave them behind, itself a decision of ethics. This is painted as an easier decision for him than I think it would have been for me, motivated mainly by a self-centered desire for class mobility. Different readers will interpret this in different ways. The intensely complicated nature of morality as discussed by this book is only brought to a head in the book's final chapter, when the consequences of Anton's decisions—along with those of his family—are at last laid absolutely bare. All of this made this a fundamentally successful book.

This said, I'm not sure I liked that these characters were so willing to pursue self-motivated ends. This isn't really a slight, but it is a prescient observation: this is a book about white people. For a post-9/11 story about the American immigration system, that is striking. I recognized in Elena a great deal of Vincent from The Glass Hotel: the Canadian girl from a small town who moves to New York, as of course the author did herself. I also start to gnaw my own leg off at the thought of returning to my own small Canadian hometown, but it's also, like... Canada is big. There are several major cities. It is legal to move to Toronto. The fact that Elena is willing to tank her entire life just to avoid being deported, especially when she doesn't have any friends or a job in New York, doesn't really track, and it was by far the least successful component of the book.

Spoiler

This is especially true given that she uses her Canadian passport to leave the States in the end. So it was all for literally nothing? Huge plot hole, and a problem. Characters are, on the other hand, allowed to act inconsistently, and I thought about this mostly in retrospect rather than while I was reading.

In any case, I think it's worth remarking on—even as human trafficking got worked increasingly into the story—that the humans in question were mainly Eastern European. The narrative from all parties was that America would certainly offer them a better life, and that they chose it willingly—sacrificed a great deal—on this basis. I think a book that wanted to grapple successfully with human trafficking as a theme needed to do a deeper, more thorough exploration of just how much "agency" really factors in. But that's the lens: Anton sells passports to people with the money to buy them, and so we are looking at a certain demographic of people being trafficked.

In any case, it's a complicated book that I fundamentally enjoyed. It employed its themes and built its characters with a baseline of competence, and sometimes much more than that. The writing did it for me; it always does. This is my fifth book by this author—I've now read all but one of her current releases—and she's guaranteed to be an auto-read for me for a good long while.