A review by pacifickat
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Long review ahead...

Some quotes to ponder:

“Where am I? […] I am aware of a border, but I can’t tell which side I am on, and it seems like I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next.” –
Vincent shortly before or after death, the beginning of the novel

“There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.” –
Jonathan Alkaitis’ perspective in prison

“It’s like the moment just before sleep, when you’re not quite unconscious. You’re awake enough to  realize that you’re falling asleep, but your thoughts and your memories begin unspooling into narrative, and realize that you’ve already started to dream. One last moment of waking. […] Out of air, out of time.”
– Vincent describing drowning

“She sought me out and found me, there on the ship, filming the storm. […] We’re in some in-between space, or so it seems to me, between the ocean and something I don’t want to think about.” – Vincent describing seeing Olivia on the ship right before she falls overboard

“The ocean isn’t exactly where I am, or if I am there, I am also somewhere else.” –
Vincent shortly before or after death, the end of the novel

Overview

Can I just say, I loved this book. I loved it even more than Station Eleven, which makes no sense to me given that one is ostensibly a post-apocalyptic survival story and the other revolves around
a corporate Ponzi scheme
. It is loosely connected to Station Eleven, but certainly could be read as a stand-alone. Mandel’s writing seems to dodge easy categorization or straightforward analysis, so I will do as I did with my review of Station Eleven and outline some the themes that stood out to me:

1. Moments of collapse:

Mandel seems fascinated by situations involving large-scale collapses in her character’s lives and the larger world. This was
true in Station Eleven with the Pandemic on a global scale, but also the collapse of marriages and relationships on an individual scale. In The Glass Hotel, there is the 2008 global financial collapse in the background, but also
the collapse of “the Kingdom of Money” in her character’s lives due to corporate fraud in the form of a large-scale Ponzi scheme.


2. Cargo shipping and complex interconnectedness:

Madel returns to pick at an idea introduced in Station Eleven, namely the complex interconnectedness of modern human life on a global scale as exemplified by international cargo shipping. It’s something we all should constantly marvel at, but goes largely unnoticed by the majority of people who rely on it and benefit from the nearly miraculous reliability of goods delivered all across the world.

“I have colleagues who resent the general public’s ignorance of the industry, but I think the fact that you don’t have to think about it proves that the whole system works.” – Leon Provant

“Here you are in the world surrounded by all these objects that arrived by ship. You ever find it distracting thinking about all those shipping routes, all those points of origin?” – Jonathan Alkaitis to Leon Provant

A person can tune in and out of noticing this kind of detail, but it would be overwhelming to be cognizant of all that was happening simultaneously all the time. I think Mandel is illustrating what she is doing with her kind of storytelling – giving us a panoply of specific, interconnected stories and zoomed-in details from individual points of view, all connected in time to overarching events on a global scale (an economic crash,
an international fraud scheme
, a civilization-ending pandemic…).

I am left to wonder if the uncanny interconnectedness of human life is the point, or if it’s something else, something more unbelievable and strange, which we can sense at the edges but aren’t quite tuned into. Mandel doesn’t seem to be highlighting randomness, but rather some sort of overarching pattern emerging from all the individual threads, punctuated by incredibly precise details. Zoom in or out too far and the scale hints that some strange pattern is at play, but look at the swirl of events and lived experiences from a singular perspective and the pattern fades from view, swallowed by the individual narrative.

3. The idea of there being many different versions of a true story, layers of knowing and not knowing, which impact the nature of reality:

“It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.” – Vincent

Mandel plays with knowledge and versions of events, details that get included, omitted, remembered, or forgotten. She does this by exploring versions of events told in interviews with a journalist, and the stories her characters tell themselves about themselves and the events around them. There is a line that gets repeated like a refrain, “It is possible to both know and not know something.” What does this imply about reality, or our perception of it? What does a character know or not know at any given moment? What can the reader then know or not know about reality (or realities) within the book? Mandel hints at the unreliability of her character’s accounts, all while employing close third-person omniscient narration. 

She again toys with the nature of reality itself through the lens of
Oscar, an insider to the Ponzi scheme.
 

“He’d always secretly loved the intrigue […], the feeling of being in an inner circle, of operating outside of the edges of society, perhaps even outside of the edges of reality itself. Was there any difference actually, in the grand universal scheme of things, between
a trade that had actually occurred and a trade that appeared to have occurred […]
?” - Oscar

It is disconcerting to imaging that what we believe to be true about our existence may not need to have actually happened in order to be “real” to us. We are so limited in our perceptions, both as readers of this story and as humans in general. If Oscar can
pull the strings of reality for unknowing victims of fraud
, who or what could possibly be pulling the strings of reality in general? What are the larger implications of this idea in relation to the plots of Mandel’s books?

4. Differing parallel lived experiences that might as well be alternate realities:

“Money is its own country.” – Mirella

“He’d begun formulating a philosophy of layered and overlapping countries.” – from Leon Provant's persective

Even in this single world, there can be layered planes of reality. Using Vincent’s point of view, Mandel describes life in New York for the everyday person vs. those in the Kingdom of Money. Vincent has walked both worlds and is uniquely aware of their overlap. There is also Simone’s daily experiences as a receptionist vs. that of Jonathan the business tycoon.

5. Alternate parallel realities in other universes:

There are numerous scenes where various characters consider alternate possibilities for their lives or certain events, but
the repetition and branching relationship with the previous novel, Station Eleven, suggests more than just theoretical versions of other realities.
This theme was gently teased at in the first novel, but becomes a more obvious and overt motif in The Glass Hotel.

“Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events, an alternate reality […]. She would often read a news story and find herself uneasily distracted by its opposite, imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example. Or, where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained, an alternate world where the Georgia Flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed […]. She could only play this game for so long before she was overcome by a kind of vertigo and had to make herself stop.” – from Vincent’s point of view

“He likes to indulge in daydreams of a parallel version of events, a counterlife if you will,
in which he fled to the United Arab Emirates. Why not?” – Jonathan Alkaitis’ perspective from prison

All of this musing on variations of reality, parallel versions, and counterlives begs a few questions. If there is an alternate reality where
Jonathan escapes Dubai, then there is also the possibility of one where The Prophet from Station Eleven is not killed on the road and succeeds in rising to even more power in that post-pandemic world.


6. More impossibly beautiful details, seemingly superfluous to the story itself:

Mandel indulges in brief yet stunning descriptions of minute details perceived by her characters: a pair of buttery yellow gloves, birds flying in and out of a prison yard, a yellow Lamborghini parked on the street in the rain, shipping containers being lifted weightlessly onto a cargo vessel, cherry blossoms across the street from a bar window, sandpipers running on the beach, a frisbee catching the last of the light of dusk as it spins through the air, the mountains and trees out the window of a passing bus… I love this aspect of her writing, but is it more than pretty prose? Why include so many sharp and striking details?

7. Becoming figuratively and actually visible or invisible to others, as ghosts out of context,
perhaps pulled from other possible counterlives
:

“What does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life, but uncertainty would always pull at him and he could never be sure.” – Paul

This idea swirls around a few characters, specifically Vincent, Olivia, Paul, and Jonathan. It’s often described as becoming a ghost (invisible) or appearing as a ghost (visible). 

Olivia describes how the world treats an aging female artist as invisible, fading out of notice. Vincent experiences this
with her friend Mirella, once the Ponzi scheme comes to light and Mirella ignores her out of anger.
These are every day, mundane invisibilities that actually exist in the world.

However, Mandel also explores seemingly impossible moments where
“ghosts” become visible to her characters, catching glimpses of people that can’t really be there and describing experiences of time slippage and stuttering memories. These particularly happen to Jonathan Alkaitis in prison, Paul as he descends further into drug addiction, and Vincent as she nears her death at sea. Each character seems to be coming to the close of their story arcs, possibly rendering them more susceptible to tuning into other realities where they can see versions of the people they care about across planes of existence. They each seem to fall into “one of those liminal spaces that proliferate on this earth” and experience “dissolving borders” from which to glimpse alternate realities.


“It is possible to disappear in the spaces between countries.” – Vincent
on the Neptune Cumberland

8. Mass delusion, liars, and implications for reality itself:

“In order for your scheme to succeed for as long as it did a great many people would have had to believe in a story that didn’t actually make any sense.” – journalist Julie Freeman to Jonathan Alkaitis in prison

Mandel plays with the idea that people who are comfortable tend to not ask any questions, even if their seeming “reality” wouldn’t hold together under scrutiny. Does reality actually make any sense? Why this exact version of events, these exact patterns of triumph and tragedy? 

One character comments in passing that it is in supplying too many details that a lie can be discerned. What happens when we then layer the idea of mass delusion beingthe suggestion of excess detail being a sign of deception?
The narratives of both The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven contain a ton of oddly specific and striking details, breathtakingly beautiful minutia noticed by their characters in “moments of unwarranted vividness and weight”. How do we know that the conscious realities of all these characters aren’t part of a mass delusion? Is this a Matrix or 1899 situation? Or is Mandel simply doing a meta-analysis of fictional storytelling, poking at the suspended disbelief required of readers?


These ideas are teased but not answered. However, the disparate yet interwoven lives of the characters in her stories, swirling around each other and occasionally crossing in uncanny ways,
seem to stretch credulity. Does Mandel mean for her web of narratives to feel impossible in order to cast doubt on the veracity of the carefully constructed realities found in her stories? Perhaps it all seems a little too detailed, a little too perfect.
I'm probably reading too much into this.
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