The Lola Quartet: A Novel

Mandel set the bar really high with Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. Maybe I’m just starting to take her for granted, but this one wasn’t quite at the same level as those books.That said, this is a very good book. Mandel knows how to hit the Goldilocks zone between popular suspense or mystery fiction and the more acquired taste of esoteric literary fiction. Mandel hits that zone, with compelling suspense, deep characters, and a bit of unconventional story-telling.The unconventional with her is often a matter of shifting character perspectives and dances in time. The narrative is never linear. But it’s not hard to follow, and actually in this story, the effects are less abrupt than in the others I’ve ready by Mandel.The story here shifts through five characters, four of them members of the Lola Quartet, high school musicians at a school for the performing arts, and the fifth, a central character around whom the quartet members revolve.Anna is that fifth character, an unwed mother who disappears during the quartet’s final performance. The plot of the story also revolves around Anna, her daughter, why she disappeared, what trouble she has gotten into, where she is, and who the actual father of Anna’s daughter, Chloe, is.The quartet’s members include Gavin, Anna’s high school boyfriend, who is presumed to be Chloe’s father. Gavin is haunted by Anna’s disappearance and wants to find her and Chloe and somehow resolve their relationship and his own responsibilities. Gavin had played trumpet in the quartet.Daniel, bass player in the quartet, works for the police in the quartet’s hometown of Sebastiana, Florida. Daniel carries a peculiar antagonism toward Gavin. Something’s up there.Sasha is Anna’s step-sister and played drums in the quartet. She’s in and out of touch with her sister, recovering from a gambling addiction, working the night shift in a diner in Sebastiana.Jack had been the most gifted musician in the quartet but has fallen into addiction and depression. He seemed to be a gifted pianist, also a saxophonist. But it didn’t work for him, and he’s back in Sebastiana, living in a tent.Gavin’s search for Anna drives the story, and it revisits the relationships among all the members of the quartet, where their lives, especially their emotional lives, have taken them since that final performance.Gavin and Anna are on a circuitous collision course. From that last performance when Anna disappeared, to now, there’s a lot of reckoning to be done on all sides. Why did Anna leave? What trouble did she get into that has her living on the run? And how do Gavin and Anna reach resolution?Mandel keeps things moving both in action and emotion. She’s masterful, and I’m going to keep reading anything she publishes.

Gavin Sasaki is a man of another age. He loves jazz, fedoras and a time before technology, but the biggest challenge Gavin faces is the news he may have a ten year old daughter with Anna, the girlfriend who left him in high school and whom he hasn’t seen since. The news shocks him into a downward spiral that sees him fired from his job as a journalist and living on his sister’s charity in the home town he fled ten years earlier. As Gavin seeks Anna and the truth, he reconnects with friends from his old school band – the Lola Quartet – and soon realises Anna and his former friends have deep secrets that could put them all in danger.The story opens with Anna – seventeen, on the run with a baby, and one hundred and twenty thousand dollars strapped to the underside of the stroller. Yet this is Gavin’s story, and we learn of Anna through his rose-coloured memories. The Lola Quartet has been called Literary Noir. It is the story of a crime, dark secrets and a woman on the run, yet it is principally a tale of broken dreams, redemption and the consequences of choices made. The pace is gentle. The background of jazz clubs and musicians is a wonderful counterpoint for the oppressiveness of the Florida humidity and the dreams destroyed by the sub-prime collapse – all facets of Gavin’s new life. As we learn more of the past and what happened to Anna, it emerges that the slightly enigmatic girl Gavin remembers is a woman of determination and contrasts who will do just about anything to protect her child.The Lola Quartet is literary fiction at its best.Mandel’s deft touch draws you into a contemporary world that is both very real and somewhat elusive and which stays with you long after it is read.

The setting of this book in Sebastiana, Florida is as much a character as the four high school musicians in The Lola Quartet, Anna, the girlfriend of one of the guys, trumpet player Gary, and half-sister to the drummer, Sasha. Jack (guitar) and Daniel(bass) are the other members of The quartet. The novel follows The bumpy paths of these five people for the next decade. Eventually all of them end up back in Sebastiana. The ever present heat of South Florida sends Gary into heat strokes and he left the town behind as soon as he could; he went to school at Columbia and becomes a journalist. The downward slide of all the quartet members and Anna with not so much a mystery but rather a hovering menace stirred into the mix lacks the smooth touch of the author's Station Eleven. It is compelling enough to keep the pages turning to the very end. And the reader is kept off balance till the last page. It is not predictable. It is just not as good as one hopes because Station Eleven was so darn perfect. Good enough. Not a heck of a lot of hope parceled out for anyone. But competently told with interesting characters.

If you are dedicated to reading all the works of the author I would read this one last. Coincidentally, I was/am and I did. It was by far my least favorite of the 6 published works that I am aware of. That being said, I did enjoy it, it just failed to resonate. According to the publisher it's noir but it didn't really accomplish that completely.All of her works have at least one small plot twist while none of them are, strictly speaking, mysteries, but to me plot is not the main joy of Mandel, it's the writing itself. My thought is that the plot here was equal to her other two "normal" novels (maybe even superior in a few ways) but the writing lacked the richness of the other 5 books. I speculate this was due to her attempt to exude the darkness, or really grayness, associated with noir, but to me it just came off flat relative to the others and by contrast actually failed to portray the depth of the characters.It's well worth a read and I will always read anything she writes but for new readers I would just steer you all the way around to fall in love and then back here to fill in the last item on the scavenger hunt.

Tolle Charaktere,glaubwürdiger Plot und bis zur letzten Sekunde spannend, wie all ihre anderen Bücher auch.Die Autorin ist meine Entdeckung in diesem Jahr

Emily St. John Mandel's writing is absolutely beautiful, and this book is no exception. Characters are vivid, plots are never predictable and the narrative flow is masterful. I've read all her books, and I wish she would write more!

'The Lola Quartet' tells the story of Gavin, Jack, Daniel, Sasha who were part of 'The Lola Quartet' at high school, the four of them are talented musicians about to leave high school and looking forward to the future.Anna (Gavin's girlfriend and Sasha's sister) suddenly leaves on the night of the quartet's final performance, leaving Gavin a note saying "I'm sorry", Gavin tries to get in touch with Anna, after numerous attempts he leaves to start college, this starts a chain of events that will change them all.This is the second book I have read by Emily St.John Mandel, the first one being 'Station Eleven', which was a fantastic read. I enjoyed 'The Lola Quartet', I just felt that it was lacking in something and that was the characters, they were well written, I just did not care about them as much as I did with the characters from 'Station Eleven'.I did enjoy how all the characters were connected and how their stories progressed, it made for interesting reading and the story was well thought out.Emily St.John is a wonderful writer and I look forward to reading more of her books.

Ms St John has a way of getting inside her characters heads, then inviting you in for a good look around.

Not bad but not nearly as good as the author's Staion 11.