3.9 stars

This is my second ESJM (i.e Emily St. John Mandel). I read Station 11 about a year ago and thought highly of it. This one does not begin with anything like the bang of that one. It is a writer's book--carefully crafted, nuanced, both attentive to plot and to character, and unhurried in doing all of that. Yet it is a relatively short book: maybe 70,000 words?

It took me a while to finish this. I got bored (as I am wont to do) and laid it aside for quite a few weeks. Then I reread the first half of the book before finally finishing during the last few days. The latter part of the book is where the plot begins to quicken. The looming threat of violence is theoretical in the first half and gradually begins to seem much more likely as the story progresses. Fairly early on the antagonist Paul, a drug dealer, speaks to another character about paying overdue debts: "Don't look at me that way. If you're in narcotics, you know how it works these days. You pay with money, or you pay with your family."

The plot of the novel revolves around stolen drug money and the flight of a main character from the dangerous consequences of that theft. There isn't really any mystery and, in that regard, ESJM's ending goes over some details that we've already figured out. On the other hand, Paul doesn't get enough time on stage. The two or three scenes in which we encounter him are compelling. They make you want to know more. ESJM does not describe the climactic confrontation with Paul, which is an interesting way of dealing with him. Kind of like in the movie "Stage Coach" where the final shootout happens offscreen, this book cuts away to characters who are peripherally involved but still deeply affected. 

Aside from the missing drug money and the search for the thief, this book is about families and more especially about bad parents. Cruel or neglectful or clueless parents are rife in the book. The thematic implication is that better parents would've made almost all of the main characters's lives better. The principal character of the quartet, Gavin, who spends almost all of the novel looking for his daughter, finally does find her and gets to have a brief conversations with her. He does not touch her or express to her his love. Another member of the quartet, Sasha, when asked about her mother says:
     "My mother isn't any good. I haven't spoken to her since high school."
     "What do you mean, she isn't any good?"
     "She just never was."

I should say one thing about the title, an allusion that appears to be a kind of cinematic in joke. We are told that the band members of "The Lola Quartet" picked their name from a German movie with the name "Lola" in the title. In fact an actual German movie from 1998, "Lola Rennt" (translated "Run Lola Run") exists. In it a young woman (Lola) attempts to acquire by hook or by crook 100,000 Deutsche Marks in order to save her boyfriend who has lost that amount of money, which he was supposed to deliver for the mob. In ESJM's version, a female main character (Anna) has stolen over $100,000 from a drug dealer and is on the run for the entirety of the book. There are several parallels and counter parallels here, but maybe the biggest one is that Anna is fleeing a bad relationship and the theft is meant to give herself and her child a head start. In the movie, Lola is morally admirable because she is trying to save her boyfriend from a catastrophic mistake. In the movie more than one resolution for Lola is proposed. In the novel Anna does not exist in a multiverse and the outcome is of her choosing.

In lots of ways a sad novel. We begin with sympathetic feelings towards all four of the "quartet" plus one other. (Basically five characters tell the tale.) By the end I still sympathized with them, but it's more sympathy as pity for the wrecks these characters have made of their lives than it is hopeful liking for them as people.

Highly recommended.

I should preface this by saying that I read Station Eleven last year and it was one of my favorite books of 2023, so that may have influenced my expectations of this book.

I didn't like The Lola Quartet nearly as much as Station Eleven, mainly because the characters and their relationships didn't feel as fleshed out as I would have liked, and the plot fell flat in some parts of the book. I'm also not sure why this book is billed as a thriller -- I would maybe call it a mystery, but not necessarily a thriller, and even then, I didn't find the mystery aspect of the novel especially intriguing. I read the audiobook version, and I think I would have preferred to read a physical copy. 

All that being said, I think Emily St. John Mandel is a brilliant writer. Her prose is easy to follow and paints a vivid picture in the reader's imagination, which I always appreciate. The Lola Quartet also showcases what another reviewer calls Mandel's signature style: the varying timelines and the connections between characters that are subtly revealed to the reader as the story goes on. These "aha moments" were one of my favorite things about Station Eleven, and I think The Lola Quartet is a great example of Mandel developing this writing style.

Overall, I enjoyed The Lola Quartet once the plot started to pick up, although I think I would have liked it more if I hadn't been expecting a thriller-type story. The writing is excellent and I look forward to reading more of Mandel's books.

It's a literary thriller about a quartet of people who played jazz together in high school and are now caught in a tangled web of mystery around a child who looks like one of the members, and it also features some overlap with other Emily St. John Mandel books. The sentences are beautiful and the pages practically turn themselves. I don't know what else to tell you. I will now read anything this woman writes.

Emily St. John Mandel's books are rewarding to readers who go through multiple books— I love the interlocking characters, names, and situations among them. Up to this point, I have also read Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, both of which had overlapping characters in slightly differing contexts. In The Lola Quartet, we briefly run into the ruinous aftermath of Jonathan Alkaitis's Ponzi scheme, and I believe the Canadian band Baltica is shared as well. As in The Glass Hotel, St. John Mandel grapples with the moral aftermath of the late-2000s financial crisis.

This novel takes place entirely in the United States, mostly in the South, but also in New York and Utah, so the Canadian spellings ("practise," "colour") stick out more. And it is definitely more of a thriller, almost cheekily a noir, than the other titles of hers that I have read so far.