Olivia closed the door behind her and stood for a moment in silence. She set her keys on the kitchen table and sat for a while, trying to adjust to the world at hand.
The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel, 2020
Emily St. John Mandel excels at creating puzzles out of human stories. She likes to assemble a portrait of multiple human lives meshed perfectly together, break that portrait up into jagged but intersecting pieces, and then scatter those pieces across the table. In The Glass Hotel, as in Station Eleven, the puzzle pieces only reassemble into that portrait again in the novel’s final few pages.
I dove right into The Glass Hotel immediately after rereading Station Eleven for the fourth time. While Mandel’s newest work is a fantastic read and I promise to talk about it in its own right, the two make for a fascinating comparison.
THE STORY
The puzzle of The Glass Hotel follows two major story arcs: the troubled relationship between half-siblings Vincent and Paul, and the downfall of Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy man who runs a successful pyramid scheme. The two arcs intersect through Vincent, who eventually becomes Jonathan’s second wife (well, not technically his wife, but wife for all intents and purposes). Like Station Eleven, this book hops back and forth through time, examining the ever-widening circle of people whom Alkaitis and Vincent impact.
Paul and Vincent have never been close: Paul’s father left his family for Vincent’s mother, and Paul failed to act as a steadying hand for Vincent when her mother tragically drowned. Paul has struggled with heroin addiction since his mid-teens, and the novel traces the ups and downs of that lifelong struggle. Vincent, meanwhile, has felt self-reliant but also somewhat untethered since her mother’s death. Alkaitis meets her while she’s on shift as a bartender for the Hotel Caiette (which he owns), a shimmering hotel with large glass windows located in a remote part of Vancouver Island.
The novel traces the kaleidoscope of people impacted by the Hotel Caiette’s existence, by Paul’s existence, by Vincent’s existence, and above all by Alkaitis’ pyramid scheme and its eventual collapse.
THE BABBLE
Give me quiet, he thought, give me forests and ocean and no roads. Give me the walk to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again.
The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel, 2020
What a difference six years can make.
While Station Eleven contains a thread of optimism about human culture and persistence (and that’s what I love about it), The Glass Hotel feels so much bleaker. (Which, I mean, I’m assuming Mandel wrote this one mostly during 2017 through 2019 and it was released in March 2020, so…understandable perspective shift, yeah?)
[FROM HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. YE HAVE BEEN WARNED.]
Much like the real world at large, you’ll find little sense of justice in this novel. Vincent dies, y’all. She dies on the first few pages, so that’s not much of a spoiler, but she also dies tragically and ultimately without fanfare. The investigation into her death is closed and covered up. Similarly, Alkaitis goes to prison without much of a fuss, once his pyramid scheme unravels, but that fact provides precious little relief for his victims. Mandel doesn’t shy away from showing us the impact that a successful 21st-century con artist can have on people from all walks of life, and all financial levels. In the end, Jonathan keeps most of the blame, but it’s clear that his numbers never added up, and to a certain extent his victims fell prey to his pitch because they wanted a way to make easy money.
The novel’s explorations of wealth provide one of many fascinating comparisons to Station Eleven. When you boil them down, both novels follow the individual lives that ripple out from an aging wealthy man: Arthur Leander in Station Eleven, Jonathan Alkaitis here. (Even more specifically, you could argue that both novels have two primary protagonists, an older wealthy man and a younger woman with whom his life intersects; Kirsten would be Vincent’s parallel in Station Eleven.) Yet while Arthur Leander certainly has his flaws, Alkaitis has him beat in the slimy human department by a long mile. In Station Eleven, flashbacks into the world of the rich and famous have a sheen of glamor to them, even when we’re meeting rich people who act obnoxious or insensitive. The world of New York finance painted in Glass Hotel, while just as rich and just as fancy, lacks that luster.
Mandel digs into the question of what makes people steal from fellow human beings: steal their money, steal their art, steal their hope. For Jonathan, it seems to be a fascination with his own ability to charm others. For those who work for him, who knowingly set up the ruin of thousands of lives, the answer is simple: it’s about taking home a healthy paycheck. So many of the bad decisions in this book stem from financial insecurity. Even poor Paul, who can often feel tangential to the larger story, steals Vincent’s video work as a way to build his artistic career. Vincent’s death is covered up because the investigator lost his entire life savings so that Alkaitis could get richer, and he needs more investigation contracts to help support both himself and his wife after a forced retirement. Because this is a contract economy, of course, those hoped-for contracts never appear. Like I said…bleak. This story left me sympathizing with Walter, the eventual caretaker of the eponymous glass hotel in the wilderness. The ultimate feeling is less, “Ah yes, thank goodness, humanity will preserve art and civilization and the best of itself even to the end of the world,” and more along the lines of:
All in all, Station Eleven is the novel that 2020 needs, but The Glass Hotel might be the novel 2020 deserves.
rating
***1/2 out of 4
random babble
- Love love LOVE the easter eggs for Station Eleven readers, the way we gradually learn that this is an alternate universe version of the world from the previous novel. Miranda is alive, you guys! She gets to be so successful and takes over Neptune shipping company and I was so happy! Vincent also has that great moment where she idly wonders what might have happened if that Georgian Flu hadn’t been so effectively contained. (Keep in mind, the novel asking this question came out the first week of March, 2o20. Cue Twilight Zone music.)
- My main complaint about this book is small, but I think it’s legit: I wish we could have had one or two more scenes with Vincent and Geoffrey to establish their relationship. Plotwise, I understand why Mandel didn’t give any to us, because she clearly wanted to set up suspense around Geoffrey as Vincent’s potential murderer. But by the end of the novel, I found I cared less about the mystery of Vincent’s death and more about this one true meaningful relationship that she finally found, so close to the end of her life. I would have traded some mystery to see more of that. I feel like Mandel had to rely on telling us it was meaningful at the end, rather than showing us.
- I love the Office Chorus section. I can’t remember another time I’ve read something in a plural first person voice, weaving in and out with omniscient narration. It’s a delicate balancing act, but Mandel pulls it off and the effect is SO COOL.
- As always, Mandel somehow manages to mix deeply human characterization with gorgeous, poetic prose, especially in the descriptions of Caiette. It doesn’t exist (I checked) but I still want to stay at that friggin’ hotel.
- Honestly, Vancouver Island has never been at the top of my travel list. But after this recent Mandel dive, it now is. If travel ever becomes a thing we can do again.
Back to books for children and young adults next time! Stay safe, stay healthy, happy reading, and remember:
Bookshelves & Babble 