Book Review: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

 

The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

I truly enjoyed the author’s fourth book, Station Eleven, a story about people surviving and continuing after civilization collapses. Just like that book, there is a beauty to the author’s use of language in Glass Hotel that I find enthralling, drawing me forward through the book.

The story begins with a woman named Vincent falling off a ship at sea. Scenes from Vincent’s memory, and possibly more, play out in quick succession. She is a young teen girl, as she scrawls a phrase on a school window using an acid pen, “Sweep me up.” Time moves about uncertainly in this first chapter. “…it seems I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next—"

With subsequent chapters we move forward and backward in time, based on connections born of meaning rather than a straightforward linear progression and we see things from the perspective of different people.

After the acid pen incident, we get quite a jump in time forward and move into the perspective of Paul, Vincent’s half-brother. I would venture to say he is an unreliable narrator.

Then we hear from Walter, the night manager at the Hotel Caiette. Someone scrawls “Why don’t you swallow broken glass” on a window at the hotel, where both Vincent and Paul are working. Walter decides Paul did it, and Paul takes the blame but I can’t help wondering. Vincent was the one who wrote on a window in acid pen earlier in the story, but the words seem much more in keeping with Paul’s character. Who really did it?

There are fascinating observations of human nature, luminous descriptions of settings and charged descriptions of choices and actions.

I love how the author immerses us in the perspective of each character so that we believe what we are hearing but then when we hear about a situation later from another character, we can find that things are not so black and white.

“But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself.” Is it just Paul justifying himself or is it true? Can it be both?

I love the subtle suspense that draws me through the book, from the beginning when we wonder if Vincent is dead or not, and whether Paul is unstable and murderous, to when we read of Jonathan Alkaitis - a successful businessman but then comes the line “Nothing about him, in other words, suggested that he would die in prison.”

It turns out Jonathan has created a Ponzi scheme. He takes people in, right and left, including Vincent. Even in their relationship there is a strange layer of illusion. They are not married but he insists she wear a ring and introduces her as his wife. Ghosts and hallucinations swirl in the peripheral vision as the story progresses.

As with Station Eleven, the author gives the reader beautiful pieces of a puzzle, drawing the reader on with tantalizing glimpses of foreshadowing, that eventually come together to form a complex portrait of people who are neither evil nor innocent.

I highly recommend this book.