In the imagination of Justin Cronin ’84, when the world ends, Harvard College is substantially to blame. Not that the novelist has an unkind word to say about his alma mater. He laughs—meaning “no”—when asked if he’s joined the likes of David Halberstam '55 and William F. Buckley, in the tradition of writers warning against the dangers of Ivy League education.
“My experience at Harvard didn’t lead me to the destruction of humanity,” Cronin clarifies. “I always thought that sometime in my writing life, this institution, its social customs, and how it felt to go there would find its way into what I wrote, but the occasion had never arisen,” he says, “and then it arose.” His chance was The City of Mirrors, published this May, the final novel in the fantasy trilogy that has brought Cronin staggering celebrity.
The Passage Trilogy is a bit of an unlikely epic. Famously so: Cronin’s career arc has become a kind of archetype, a template for the Writer’s Journey in our day. Before The Passage, Cronin, who earned his Master of Fine Arts at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, had published a pair of well-received novels in that vast, shapeless genre called literary fiction. The first of these, Mary and O’Neil, earned him a PEN/Hemingway Award, which is nothing to sniff at.
But it was his pivot to the supernatural that won Cronin a multi-million-dollar book deal and a commanding spot atop the bestseller lists. Since the 2010 publication of The Passage, Cronin has been spinning readers an apocalyptic vision: quick and hungry creatures called virals—not vampires, exactly, but vampiric—have scoured most of the life from the Western Hemisphere. Thin patches of humanity hang desperately onto the blasted landscape. The novels, monstrously successful, track a shifting cast of survivors in a plot that telescopes across centuries.
The notion of a tension between the two Cronins, a literary past and a genre future, became the master theme of his success, one revisited in profile after profile. Of course, this was always a reductive narrative, old hat even back in 2010. You could forgive Cronin for losing patience with the dialogue.
In that spirit, in a surprising section of The City of Mirrors, Cronin gives readers a novella-length refuge from the grim future of the two previous books. He gives them Cambridge, viewed with keen sentiment through the eyes of his villain: Harvard College class of 1993. For years and hundreds of pages already, readers have known that biochemist Erik Fanning caught a rare virus on an expedition to Bolivia, becoming in the process the first and master viral. Only now do they learn how Fanning liked his college experience, or which final club he was in. Only now can they appreciate the extent to which the invisible root of the Passage Trilogy led back to a campus love triangle.
Like so many alumni, Erik Fanning is haunted by the entanglements he entered into at Harvard. He met a young man named Jonas Lear on the stools at Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage—“which I have now used in two different novels!” Cronin emphasizes—and fell deeply for Lear’s girlfriend and future wife, Liz. Years later, she and Fanning plan to run away together, but she dies of a longstanding illness before they can meet. The tragedy strands Fanning waiting for hours, ignorant, at Grand Central. His psyche is pinned to the floor of that concourse; centuries on, nostalgic and nihilistic, he makes the ruined terminal his nest.
After learning of Liz’s death, Fanning joins Lear to search in her honor for a virus with miraculous healing properties. The disease, of course, makes the chemist a viral—but love and its special self-obsession will make Erik Fanning a monster. In what’s left of the world without Liz, he sees little of value; he plans to bring the whole play crashing down. Thus, the events of the entire trilogy are revealed to be Fanning’s reply to that ancient loss, his challenge to whatever universal force might have caused his personal tragedy. “Am I a freak of cold nature,” he asks near the end of his narration, “or heaven’s cruel utensil?”
As Cronin puts it, this origin story “has more in common with Brideshead Revisited than Interview with a Vampire.” The section is knit into The City of Mirrors with stunning fluidity, though for some readers it must have been a rude surprise all the same—as if Alien stood unmasked as a sequel to Love Story. The interlude triggers genre whiplash, a dislocation that will strike some as genius, others as bald self-indulgence. (Both are right, though the first group has its priorities straighter.) Certainly it polarized reviewers: The Washington Post’s Ron Charles called the novel’s visit to Harvard “ludicrous” and boring, while The Houston Chronicle praised it as “one of the most engaging sections of the new book.”
Most of all, the section reads like a declaration of principle. For years now, conspicuously strong writers, the likes of Colson Whitehead and Emily St. John Mandel, have been pouring into post-apocalyptic fiction, distending the genre like blood rushing to swollen tissue. Still, many readers insist on maintaining some boundary between the satisfaction of genre—vampires, aliens, detectives—and the satisfactions of literature, whatever that might be. In The City of Mirrors, Cronin bets that he can play hopscotch across that line, without losing hold of his audience.
“Some readers would find it a bait and switch,” he acknowledges, “which didn’t concern me overly much. And other readers would find themselves hauled into at least a temporary sympathy with the villain.” By the book’s own logic, Fanning—who narrates the Harvard sequence in the first-person—needed to be a gifted storyteller, Cronin explains. “I had a narrator who was a very charismatic guy, extremely smart, very well-read, with a hundred years in which to think about his story and how to tell it.” But in a broader sense, Fanning’s style also has to succeed for the book to succeed. If the choice between genre and literature is truly a fork in the road, The City of Mirrors would fail. Too much of the novel—a load-bearing portion of its structure—is staked on the assumption that readers will happily consume both styles in a single book. Whether it works or not is an exercise left to the individual reader. As Cronin puts it, “Your mileage may vary.”
Charles de Gaulle is supposed to have said, “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” Cronin is more forthcoming—an eager cannibal, in the best sense—and the writers he’s devoured are visible throughout the trilogy. He points out where he’s buried the remains, with enthusiasm. The Fanning sequence is his Brideshead, he says; a brief section of the second novel pays homage to Mrs. Dalloway.
And readily, like Fanning, Cronin explains that it all started at Harvard. He can point back to individual assignments. Mrs. Dalloway was the subject of a sophomore essay, and the series’ framing device—an academic study of its plot from the view of an even farther future—was inspired by a presentation on the historicity of King Arthur.
The trilogy is shaped throughout by profuse gratitude, he stresses. “Everywhere in these books,” Cronin says, “I’m writing thank you notes.”
