The Glass Hotel
Emily St. John Mandel
★★★★★ 4/5
Fiction
Meditative writing and reading
I started the year (2022) watching the excellent Station Eleven on HBO adapted from Emily St. John Mandel’s book of the same name. It is some coincidence then that my last read of the year is also one of her books, The Glass Hotel. I rather enjoyed Sea of Tranquility and it motivated me to pick this up. That Barack Obama highly recommended it, helped too.
My second read by Ms. Mandel (third if you count the TV series), made me realize that her writing is captivating because of a soothing, meditative style. After all, how many writers can describe a woman falling overboard at sea drowning and make it lyrical and haunting, and yet a calming reading experience? That is exactly what she accomplishes in the monologue that both opens and concludes The Glass Hotel.
Intertwined lives and overlapping narratives
Emily St. John Mandel’s books seem to have in common a handful of characters whose lives are pieced together non linearly through episodes that are themselves connected by a few mainly random events or places. In The Glass Hotel, a five star hotel in a remote Canadian island so small that it has just “one road and two dead ends” is the main connecting element.
Very few people who go to the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness—at least not the people who stay in five-star hotels. Guests want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to be wilderness adjacent.
The other is a Ponzi scheme whose perpetrator is the owner of the hotel.
In both Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, the lives of the characters are upended by forces outside their control. Where Station Eleven had a civilization ending pandemic, the Ponzi scheme is the calamity befalling the characters, whose intertwined lives unravel along with their livelihoods. The Ponzi scheme and con man are both heavily modeled on Bernie Madoff—down to the floors where the infamous fraudster had his brokerage firm and large conference room! Ms. Mandel clearly did a lot of research on old Bernie!
You know what I've learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that's when I realized that money is its own country.
The writing is often melancholy. The story is one that describes characters being catapulted from penury to wealth and back. How much of these outcomes is constrained by family and circumstances, and how much by choice? More than one character explores this through the counterlife—a thought exercise or in the case of some, the mind playing tricks as they age—how would their lives have ended up had they made different choices?
There’s even an ode to Nomadland where a retired man and his wife, victims of the Ponzi scheme, having lost their life savings, are forced to live a nomadic lifestyle in their van, not unlike Fern in the Oscar winning movie.
Overall
Ms. Mandel’s writing is exquisite. She has that rare ability to weave vignettes from the lives of her characters into a whole that is vastly greater than the sum of its parts. I’m glad I concluded the year with a good read.