The Glass Hotel Too Ambitious

The Glass Hotel (2020)

By Emily St. John Mandel

Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages

★★★

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was one of my favorite books of 2014, hence I was excited to score a copy of her latest, The Glass Hotel. Mandel is an imaginative writer, but if I might toss a few pebbles at her glass domicile, imagination alone can’t carry a novel. The Glass Hotel has sublime moments, but it’s also one of those books that the more you think about it, the more its holes become apparent.

The book’s central characters are Vincent Smith, a woman named for poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; Paul, her half-brother; and investor Jonathan Alkaitis, who is patterned on Bernie Madoff.  Each is, in his or her own way, a person adrift. Vincent is beautiful, smart, and adaptive, but also impulsive and, in many ways, carries her blue-haired 13-year-old rebellious self into adulthood. Paul is a composer/musician who might have some talent, but he’s seldom off drugs long enough for it to shine for more than a brief moment.  If you recall Bernie Madoff, you can probably sketch Alkaitis’ character—a smooth operator who can be charming and persuasive, but has the morality of a carrion crow.

The three paths cross at the Hotel Caiette, a glass jewel tucked away in a section of British Columbia so remote that it’s a half hour boat ride to the nearest village. (It is apparently based on Quatsino on Vancouver Island.) Why build a luxury hotel in such an out-of-the-way place? That’s what the first owner ended up thinking before selling it to Alkaitis. If you recall the days after Y2K (which makes a cameo in the novel), high-powered executives occasionally sought solace from their workaholic drudgery in Robert Bly camps, golf vacations, and private retreats. Paul has gone there to escape trouble, Vincent because she sort of drifted there, and assorted guests because they are, hope to be, or keep their distance from Alkaitis.

Paul manages to screw things up, as he always does, but when we move the clock ahead to 2005, Vincent is living with Jonathan, who divorced his wife Suzanne. Business associates assume that the 28-year-old Vincent is Jonathan’s trophy wife, because that’s what older men like he collected. Vincent sees no reason to disabuse them of that notion, as she’s in the phase of her life she calls “a fairy tale.” And so it is—sort of. She meets Mirella, who also has a sugar daddy for a season, a Saudi prince who invests with Alkaitis; and Leon Prevant, an older gentleman, and his wife Miranda. Either at the hotel or later, readers also meet others who circle around Jonathan: painter Olivia Collins, who knew his late brother, also a painter; loud mouthed Lenny Xavier, his largest client; and a swath of others. There are also several who don’t fall for Jonathan’s pitch, psychic Clarissa, and Chicago business woman Ella Kaspersky, who finds the numbers she’s seeing on Jonathan’s investments too good to be true. She’s right, of course; it was all a Ponzi scheme. If this all sounds a bit like a Tom Wolfe or Jonathan Frazen novel, it’s a bit more than that—sometimes in good ways and sometimes not.

Once the house of cards tumbles, the resulting wreckage takes its toll on both investors and Alkaitis associates such as Oskar, Harvey, Joelle, and Enrico. Some will fall by the wayside and others adjust from luxury to life among the lower working class. Vincent takes everything in stride, so for her it’s merely an exchange of a fairy tale for life aboard a container ship—owned by a firm Leon used to control—a job as ship’s cook, and a new lover. As he’s serving an impossible sentence of 170s years in jail, Jonathan begins to imagine his “counterlife,” as do several other characters. At key moments in the book, ghosts appear. Are they actual ghosts, or metaphorical ones?

The answer to that question is left to the reader. It’s fair for an imaginative novelist to offer fodder for imaginative readers. I’m less inclined, though, to overlook other lacunae. There is, for instance, a digressive chapter in which the book jumps ahead to the year 2029, where we find Simone—who, as a newly hired secretary, helped Alkaitis shred documents—tell her secretary about her role in saving documents that brought down her boss. There is also a side tale involving Leon’s temp job: as a consultant investigating Vincent’s disappearance. If you’re keeping score, you’ve surmised that there are a lot of characters in the book. Add a bunch more I’ve not mentioned, the details of various lives in different time periods, ghosts, and explorations of those who invent and reinvent themselves and you have a book with an epic sprawl crammed into around 300 pages.

All of this means that more than ghosts are ambiguous. Credit goes to Mandel for making the book as tight as it can be, but leaks invariably spring along the way. To pick just one missing element, morality gets but a wink and a nod. Perhaps Mandel thinks that it can be assumed, but I’m not sure she really addresses the question by showing angry investors one moment and selected fallout the next. One might, for example, feel some sympathy for post-crash Alkaitis. I came away thinking that Mandel needed either to pare the story or write another 150 pages. This glass hotel exposes frauds like Alkaitis and Paul, but draws the curtains on deeper questions.   

Rob Weir