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.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven

By Emily St. John Mandel

The book opens with a play in Toronto starring Arthur Leander, who has a heart attack on stage. A member of the audience, Jeevan who is training to be an EMT, jumps onto the stage and performs CPR, but to no avail.

 “The lights changed, the blues and whites of the snowstorm replaced by a fluorescent glare that seemed yellow by comparison. Jeevan worked silently in the margarine light, glancing sometimes at Arthur’s face.”

Mostly, the language in the book worked beautifully. The first chapter is full of literary description, but margarine? That was a shade too far. Not a typical description and it confounded me, made me wince.

The play has ended unceremoniously and all go their separate ways. Jeevan leaves the theater after the paramedics take Arthur away and wanders a bit. His girlfriend had left him behind and he doesn’t really feel like going home to her. “The theater tickets had been intended as a romantic gesture, a let’s-do-something-romantic-because-all –we –do-is-fight…”  

Chapter 2 takes us into the lives of the actors and gives us the lay of the land very sparsely, like a script, as they talk over the loss of Arthur. The last line particularly struck me. “Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”

In chapter 3, Jeevan gets a call from his friend who works in an ER warning him to flee the flu pandemic in the city. “If it had been anyone other than Hua, Jeevan wouldn’t have believed it, but he had never known a man with a greater gift for understatement. If Hua said there was an epidemic, then epidemic wasn’t a strong enough word.” Just the phrasing of that struck me as lovely.

We follow Jeevan a little bit but then he disappears. We meet Arthur’s ex-wives and his one child. We follow a child actor who was in the theater that night but survived the pandemic as part of a traveling symphony. The book shifts between time periods frequently but easily. “Twenty years after the end of air travel, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony moved slowly under a white-hot sky.”

Chapter 6 begins with “An incomplete list” of things that don’t exist after the pandemic. It is simple and intense. A couple of comic books play a strangely important role in the book.

An inordinate number of people who knew Arthur seem to survive, considering the sheer number of people who are estimated to have died, something like 99% of the world population. You’d still have around 74 million people but you’d expect them to be more separated. Some of it seems wildly improbable, but I’ve seen far stranger things in real life.

It’s funny, even though you know it’s a book about an incredibly severe flu pandemic, there are some characters you just don’t expect to die. No one is immune. There is one character that I just kept wondering whether he would survive into the later portion. Then one person, you get a mention of how and where she dies, and I’m just shocked. Perhaps because it is a piece of foreshadowing and the events happening at the time weren’t directly related to her death.

We drift in and out amongst these disparate threads, getting a full picture of the people who survived, some of the people who didn’t, but how they affected those that did, over a long span of years. And, in the end, it all comes together in ways I never expected. A fascinating journey. Six degrees of separation? The butterfly effect? We see the connections here, given time. It will keep you wondering until the end.

“Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.”