I just finished reading Last Night in Montreal, Emily St. John Mandel’s 2009 debut novel. It was beautiful and haunting, finely wrought and elegantly prosed in that singular Emily St. John Mandel way. I could go on with a thousand other book-jacket superlatives, but plenty of book reviewers and critics and bloggers have done that already, and much better than I could. I won’t pretend that this is anything close to a review. Instead I will use this space to log one way her book spoke to me.

Lilia, perhaps the central character of the novel, has a highly unusual upbringing. Abducted by her father at age seven, she spends her childhood drifting across an ever-shifting landscape of dusty American towns with him, forever itinerant, forever in flight from the private detective her mother hired. Even when she tries to settle down, she can’t; she moves endlessly from city to city, leaving a string of lovers in her wake. She can’t remember what it’s like to have a permanent home.

What is it like not to have a home, not to have roots? What is it like to “skate over the surface of the world for your entire life, visiting, leaving, without ever really falling through” (p. 224*)? I am one of the (presumably many) readers who don’t share her flighty peripatetic background. I had a home and a healthy childhood. So why does Lilia’s story compel me so?

I think I do feel itinerant. Not physically, not in the same way that she traverses undreamable distances, never putting down roots in one town, but socially. Replace a map of the United States with a graph of the social network, and a profound kinship with Lilia overcomes me. I know of people who have lifelong friends, who have laid roots in their own special corner of the network, but in my life I have drifted, gathering moss but never settling. The friends I had 16 years ago are completely separate from the friends I had 8 years ago, and both have no relation to the friends I have now. I am acutely aware of how fleeting a human connection can be.

I think I am far from alone here. I think a lot of us are like Lilia when you recast her story in the way of this social-network metaphor.

But perhaps she’s not the best metaphor for me. I do desperately want to find myself a social town to stay sometime; I have no allergies to settling down. Her intentions are more enigmatic than that and I am still processing them. Perhaps I am more like her latest boyfriend, Eli, whose dead-end thesis-writing arty-but-sterile Brooklyn life is upended by her disappearance. I crave human connection dearly, especially in its abrupt absence. Do I crave it enough to chase it across the border into an alien city, lonely and cold and swamped by an alien language, in the scarce hope of getting it back? I don’t know. But sometimes when I contemplate the whole vast fragile web of human connection, with its severed links and unanswered distress calls and ships passing in the night, I am filled with deep and complex sorrows that I can’t articulate but that Emily St. John Mandel captures in her writing.

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My pie-in-the-sky silly fan theory, as if that were at all an appropriate thing to have, is that Lilia’s husband at the end of the book is Anton Waker from The Singer’s Gun (2010). The time and place can be made to work out, so hey, why not?

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*This page-number citation thing is a holdover habit from high school days, but I have no intention of shaking it. It does make my writing a bit more high-school-essay-like, which I’m not sure is a good thing?