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A review by trve_zach
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
I started reading The Glass Hotel a couple of months ago when I was still struggling to focus on much of anything, but it pulled me in right away. Emily St. John Mandel’s great strength (or one of) is the ability to create characters that almost instantly hook you. Vincent and her brother’s various struggles are (to start) kind of mundane, every day, relatable (to simplify: a bartender and drug-addict artist search for existential purpose).
It’s not long before Vincent is caught up with Jonathan Alkaitis (a well-to-do bro) and thrust into high society, living as his placeholder wife. Alkaitis is running a Ponzi scheme with money he’s collected from a vast swath of interesting people. When his Ponzi scheme inevitably collapses (and he loses everything), we see the impact that it has on his investor’s lives.
I love this part of the story because it explores the impact of white-collar crime and really shows the ruinous effect it has rather than, you know, glorifying it and then doing nothing about it/sweeping it under the rug. It also implies a lot of interesting questions. What guilt does Vincent (who has become an almost mythical, cautionary figure) have in this/what price do the people who are tangentially tied to these kinds of crimes pay? What price should they pay?
The setting and some of the characters from The Glass Hotel also play a part in Sea of Tranquility (a book about time travel thus, also, anomalies, and moon colonies, and, thankfully, people still trying to make sense of their lives), but it’s hard to talk about that without spoiling (that said, the way the pandemic and future pandemics play a part in the story is great). I read the whole thing during the down time of a double brew shift, and it made the work much more enjoyable (and small blessings like that sure are hard to come by these days).
It’s not long before Vincent is caught up with Jonathan Alkaitis (a well-to-do bro) and thrust into high society, living as his placeholder wife. Alkaitis is running a Ponzi scheme with money he’s collected from a vast swath of interesting people. When his Ponzi scheme inevitably collapses (and he loses everything), we see the impact that it has on his investor’s lives.
I love this part of the story because it explores the impact of white-collar crime and really shows the ruinous effect it has rather than, you know, glorifying it and then doing nothing about it/sweeping it under the rug. It also implies a lot of interesting questions. What guilt does Vincent (who has become an almost mythical, cautionary figure) have in this/what price do the people who are tangentially tied to these kinds of crimes pay? What price should they pay?
The setting and some of the characters from The Glass Hotel also play a part in Sea of Tranquility (a book about time travel thus, also, anomalies, and moon colonies, and, thankfully, people still trying to make sense of their lives), but it’s hard to talk about that without spoiling (that said, the way the pandemic and future pandemics play a part in the story is great). I read the whole thing during the down time of a double brew shift, and it made the work much more enjoyable (and small blessings like that sure are hard to come by these days).