The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events–a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.

Full disclosure, I decided to read The Glass Hotel purely because I had purchased a copy of the Sea of Tranquility not realizing there’s a bit of overlap and a cameo appearance by the character of Mirella who has a supporting role in The Glass Hotel and a main arc in Tranquility (they’re both standalone but I wanted to read them in order regardless). I had little expectation based on the vague and convoluted synopsis for the Glass Hotel, but perhaps having no expectations enhanced the reading experience as I was blow away by the back half and ending of this book. This was an absolute page-turner for me from the half-way mark but not in a traditional sense or one that most readers will agree with.

It’s difficult to describe and summarize, but the gist of The Glass Hotel involved the reveal and collapse of a large-scale Ponzi scheme involving investments and the impact it has on a giant cast of characters (money and wealth is a constant theme throughout but that’s not the only fallout involved). Reading the Glass Hotel feels like watching Mandel play a game of chess with herself. The novel includes no less than at least 12 different notable characters (not including supporting characters) who each have an incredibly fleshed out and elaborate backstory and role to play within the sequence of events mostly occurring between 1999 and 2018. Particularly with the first 1/3 of the book, it can be difficult following such a large ensemble with the 1st person perspective narrative constantly jumping from different perspectives. But if you stick with it, the payoff to seeing how each characters’ lives leading up to the Ponzi scheme, during, and after is so rewarding. There’s just a hint of fantasy/sci-fi in there but without giving away spoilers, it could also be attributed merely to the mind playing tricks on you.

The book constantly involves the topic of morality, corruption, and one’s conscious decisions/fallout (sometimes a decade or more later). There is no good or bad character or chivalry anywhere to be found, each character’s choices closely mirrors what I would expect people in real life to do when you cast off any preconceived sense of self-righteousness all too common today with people trying to be politically or morally right. The character work is also stunning and incredibly subtle. There’s so much the characters say and show based on what they choose not to actually say aloud and the variety of introspection and internal processing of loss, anger and betrayal left me very impressed.

Despite my love for this book’s style, I think a vast majority of readers will find the characters off-putting due to the moral grayness in their portrayals and lack of outspoken or obvious intentions. This is a really smart novel that expects you to read beyond what each character says and does and the core “mystery” introduced at the beginning of the story merely serves as a catalyst for the events that follow. What I mean to say is that this is not a relaxed or straightforward read; there are countless negative reviews that find The Glass Hotel boring, slow, characters nonsensical or unlikable. I acknowledge where these opinions are coming from, however this novel is clearly not meant for them. This is for a logical reader who loves the thrill of watching giant set pieces moving n a complex choreographed motion and gets a bit of satisfaction in moments of “I told you so”. Apparently Barak Obama listed this as one of his favorite novels and I can clearly see why.

This was a solid 4.5 and I’ll go with a 4-star for now as I have a tendency to overrate reads when I finish them and then go back to lower scores accordingly but wow was this a well-constructed narrative. The slow beginning (while completely necessary in hindsight) coupled with the sneaking suspicion that I liked the execution and planning of the book more than actually liking the actual reading experience has me stuck between 4 or 5. However regardless of which, I have zero regrets reading The Glass of Hotel which nails its conclusion and has every character (no matter how minor) and every plot thread neatly accounted for.