The Glass Hotel
By Emily St John Mandel
Published 2020
Read June 2021
This is the third Mandel novel read by this reader. This book was written and published following her highly successful Station Eleven. This reader had high expectations. Once again Mandel uses an asynchronous story telling approach and there are a number of characters. The book starts and ends with a death of one of them.
Station Eleven had a unifying character and event for the various characters, Arthur, and the Georgian Flu pandemic that provided a central thrust—what’s lost/ what’s gained by the pandemic, how did it impact various characters, how is it see by various characters, etc. The Lola Quartet also had a unifying character—Anna. Her on-the-run story and pursuit of her by one of the characters forms the thriller aspect of the story.
When considering the unifying theme or character in The Glass Hotel, it is less obvious. Vincent (a girl) and Paul are half-siblings whose individual stories of personal loss, seeking a place in the world, and art are told in pieces across the novel. A third character, Jonathan, owns The Glass Hotel at which Vincent and Paul both work for a short time. Vincent, the hotel bartender, serves Jonathan drinks one night and shortly thereafter readily accepts a role as his apparent (but not actual) second wife (first died of cancer) and lives in the world of the wealthy. We eventually learn Jonathan’s wealth was gained by a Ponzi scheme which crashes. Vincent leaves him and starts a new life on a transport ship as a cook and ends up in the ocean– providing the scene that starts and ends the book.
Amongst all of this we learn about some of the victims of the Ponzi scheme including Leon, who was Miranda’s boss in Station Eleven. Miranda is mentioned as well as is the Georgian Flu which apparently comes and goes without devastation in the background of this novel. Leon and Miranda have different stories than they did in Station Eleven. Some reviewers discuss this in terms of Mandel’s exploration of transience of life and multiple potential paths. This reader found the presence of these characters somewhat off-putting and wondered if the author was trying too hard to be literary.
This reader anticipates that her views of the book may not reflect other readers’ reactions. Perhaps this reader’s lack of engagement by the characters was because none of them were particularly likable or even that interesting to this reader. This reader does expect to read more by Mandel in the future.
MarshaReads.com 