After achieving worldwide fame with “Station Eleven,” St. John Mandel waited six years to release her next book. Achieving worldwide fame, obviously, might be like winning a Nobel Prize. Afterward, it’s somehow harder to concentrate on writing. Finding topics becomes more difficult, everything seems to progress slower. In the case of “The Glass Hotel,” it’s not easy to determine what it’s actually about. Because it’s definitely not about a glass hotel.
Is The Glass Hotel just a transparent trick?
Emily St. John Mandel’s book is like listening to a classical music piece. Certain themes, or rather characters, recur throughout, seemingly randomly. One character takes the spotlight at one point, another at another. Some only gain prominence in the final third of the novel, while others appear at the beginning and merely reappear towards the end.
The titular location, the Hotel Caiette, stands in the forest in a secluded cove on Vancouver Island, Canada. It’s only accessible by boat. (It seems they skipped the preliminary market research before construction.) Thirty percent of the book’s characters work here (some only for a fleeting moment), 10 percent are occasional guests, and 5 percent are owners who don’t participate in managing the hotel but have a stake in it for investment purposes.
Alright, ‘The Glass Hotel’ isn’t such a bad title after all, even though the book is much more about the psychology of financial investments.
Psychology of Financial Investments – for Beginners
In 2008, the credit crisis crashed the markets. As the wise old Warren Buffett said, it’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked. Well, typically, those who play a pyramid scheme with investor money tend to find themselves in the buff.
This is precisely the situation with Jonathan Alkaitis, whom you can easily associate with Bernie Madoff, the excellent businessman. A significant portion of “The Glass Hotel” revolves around how Alkaitis was affected by being sentenced to 170 years in prison. (It didn’t bode well for him, I can tell you that much.)
Another significant part is about how Alkaitis’s employees, who were involved in the fraud, were affected by what was bound to happen sooner or later. (It didn’t sit well with them either.)
But you’ll also learn how those who are barely financially literate fare when they lose all the savings they’ve accumulated over a lifetime. (Feel free to guess how.)
Lost Souls
All the other main characters in St. John Mandel’s book, those who aren’t directly related to Alkaitis’s pyramid scheme, belong to another not-so-enviable group: they don’t quite find their place in life. Vincent Smith, who gets the most attention besides Alkaitis, is the typical bored girl who doesn’t know what to do with her life. Having a lot of money doesn’t hurt if you want to strike up a conversation with her.
His half-brother, Paul, is the same, except he’s not a girl, doesn’t look particularly good, but is a real nobody.
Add to them Walter, the thoroughly uninteresting night manager of the Hotel Caiette, and Olivia, an 80-year-old former painter.
What ties these people together beyond occasionally bumping into each other at the glass hotel?
Why, Emily St. John Mandel!
Unpredictable and Unannounced Time Jumps
St. John Mandel jumps from one character to another like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim jumps through time among the most humiliating moments of his life. (See: “Slaughterhouse-Five.”) It’s all completely random and haphazard.
The characters of “The Glass Hotel” aren’t particularly interesting on their own. However, this strange structure, or rather lack of structure, makes them more important. Their appearances are like following an elusive yet catchy melody.
Emily St. John Mandel further increases the book’s mysteriousness by introducing an equally elusive, supernatural motif that serves as another connecting thread between the characters.
But the author’s cunning is evident when she suddenly switches to first-person plural narration in a way that makes it impossible to determine exactly who is behind the words.
So “The Glass Hotel” serves to unsettle the reader in many ways.
By the end of the novel, almost all of its characters find some kind of peace, but it seems to be of little concern to the author. It’s barely mentioned. However, a significant amount of time is dedicated to an investigation following the disappearance of one character, which you know is utterly pointless.
Emily St. John Mandel plays a cruel game with you!
The book titled “The Glass Hotel” is actually like it too is a pyramid scheme: you invest your time and while reading, you constantly wait for the picture to finally come together into something grand and transcendent. But it doesn’t. Not at all. However, by the time you finish it, and despite the continuous nagging feeling of something missing, you somehow feel that maybe reading St. John Mandel’s book wasn’t a complete waste of time after all.
7.9/10
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
307 pages, Hardcover
Published in 2020 by Alfred A. Knopf