The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
Easily the best book Jeselnik has selected so far, The Glass Hotel was his September choice and I’m in love. Mandel has written several novels, but I’ve only read Station Eleven, another book I very much enjoyed. When Jeselnik announced The Glass Hotel, I thought I’d skimmed the book before and that it was an apocalyptic story about a group of people staying in a hotel in Europe when the world seems to come to an end. (That’s not this book at all, but I’m convinced I encountered a book with a plot like that and I’ll have to go Googling after I’m done with this blog post to see if I can figure it out).
I love stories that just offer quiet glimpses into their characters and put the plot second (without discarding plot all together). In terms of narrative, the story is pretty simple. A young woman named Vincent (named after Edna St. Vincent Millay … and I wonder if Emily St. John Mandel was playing a bit with her own name there just a little bit) is working as a bartender in a fancy hotel when Jonathan Alkaitis, the wealthy financier who owns the place, starts chatting her up. His wife is dead, and they come to an arrangement where Vincent becomes something of a trophy replacement. Vincent’s parents are dead (her mother drowned mysteriously) and her stepbrother is a struggling junkie who also happens to be working at the hotel when Vincent meets Jonathan.
We eventually learn Johnathan is running a Ponzi scheme that ruins many people’s lives and he ends up with a lifetime prison sentence. Vincent becomes a cook on a cargo ship and essentially drops out of existence until she turns up missing from the ship years later, leading to a minor investigation.
There’s much more to the novel than that, because Mandel’s real focus is on a slate of characters whose lives she dips into at various intervals, ranging from the junkie brother to the office staff involved in running the Ponzi scheme, the caretaker of the hotel, and so on. It’s the sort of book that could really try a lot of people’s patience, since it’s meandering and nonlinear. What keeps it so gripping for a reader like me is how much time we spend occupying the characters’ lives. Mandel has a real gift for just inserting you into their minds, which is why a book like this really works for me while a novel like The Department of Speculation didn’t quite interest me as much as I hoped.
In the end, it’s a novel whose style matches the symbolism of its title. Everyone’s just sort of coming and going with no real sense of home, which makes every stop along the way little more than a hotel. Glass usually has connotations of fragility. In two instances in the story, glass is vandalized to carry cryptic messages. The novel is a long cryptic, fragile statement about fate and the possibility that living is a nomadic, pointless endeavor without any real mystery to it at all. Vincent goes missing and is presumed dead. Her mother drowns. Were they victims? Or were both occasions the results of dumb accidents?
Bleak stuff? Maybe. But there’s a keynote of hope to it all, a sense of afterlife that ties up loose ends and might offer purpose. I don’t think I’ll ever revisit this book, but I believe it’ll stick with me for a long while.
