Reading Alex Schulman’s Station Malma is like booking a scenic train ride through Sweden and discovering the conductor is your own repressed childhood, while the snack trolley serves nothing but unresolved resentment and lukewarm coffee.

Schulman remains a master of the troubled family theme. Few writers capture emotional numbness with such accuracy. But at this stage, he has become almost like the CEO of the “Cold Father / Vanishing Mother” industry. If you’ve read The Survivors, you’ve already visited this theme park. The landscape has shifted, but the rides are the same. You start to suspect he is no longer writing novels but remixing his own therapy notes. The distant father. The mysterious mother. The child was left to stew in silence. What once felt raw now risks seeming branded.

The deeper issue, however, lies in the novel’s structure of misery. Schulman weaves together the lives of Harriet, Oskar, and Yana across three timelines, aiming to resemble a complex emotional inheritance. In reality, it feels more like a game of Sudoku, where the numbers are fixed, and the challenge is simply to fit them into place. The coincidences needed to connect these lives build up until they form a sort of narrative gravity, pulling every event towards the same conclusion: trauma, inherited and unavoidable.

Critics often praise Schulman’s restraint, but here it borders on something more mechanical. Genuine grief is shapeless and defies understanding. Station Malma, by contrast, is flat-packed. Its revelations arrive with the smooth inevitability of an IKEA instruction manual: twist here, align there, click. The secrets do not surface; they are installed. What should feel like a psychological discovery instead resembles an escape room whose solution is always the same: more sorrow, more backstory, more proof that pain reproduces itself.

This is where the novel’s emotional power begins to turn into emotional manipulation. Suffering is not just shown; it is carefully measured, timed, and aesthetically shaped. The result is a melancholy that feels less genuine than curated, less like memory than atmosphere.

There is something quietly exhausting about this predictability. One does not fear what will happen so much as wait for it. The novel promises depth but delivers design: an elegant system for producing despair, a prestige-sadness machine humming efficiently along the tracks.

By the end, Station Malma has less the weight of tragedy than the polish of a product. It wants to be about inheritance, but what it really inherits is Schulman’s own formula: family damage as destiny, coincidence as insight, atmosphere as argument. You board expecting revelation and disembark with another beautifully wrapped package of sorrow, familiar, functional, and faintly hollow.