The Glass Hotel
Emily St. John Mandel, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525521143
Summary
From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.
Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: "Why don't you swallow broken glass."
High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients' accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives.
Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan's wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.
In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison.
Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979-80
• Where—Comox, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—Toronto Dance Theater.
• Awards—Prix Mystere de la Critique (France)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, USA
"St. John's my middle name. The books go under M."
Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.
Mandel's latest novel, The Glass Hotel, was released in 2020 to high praise and numerousf starred reviews. Her fourth novel, Station Eleven, published in 2014 was long listed for the National Book Award. All three of her previous novels—Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, and The Lola Quartet—were Indie Next Picks, and The Singer's Gun was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France.
Mandel's short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She lives in New York City with her husband. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The question of what is real—be it love, money, place or memory—has always been at the heart of Ms. Mandel’s fiction... her narratives snake their way across treacherous, shifting terrain. Certainties are blurred, truth becomes malleable, and in The Glass Hotel the con man thrives…. Ms. Mandel invites us to observe her characters from a distance even as we enter their lives, a feat she achieves with remarkable skill. And if the result is a sense not only of detachment but also of desolation, then maybe that’s the point.
Anna Mundow - Wall Street Journal
The Glass Hotel may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker…. Freshly mysterious…. Mandel is a consummate, almost profligate world builder. One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next…. That Mandel manages to cover so much, so deeply is the abiding mystery of this book. The 300 pages of The Glass Hotel work harder than most 600-page novels…. The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next…. The complex, troubled people who inhabit Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create ever more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
[E]erie, compelling…. The ghosts in The Glass Hotel are directly connected to its secrets and scandals, which mirror those of our time…. Like all Mandel’s novels, The Glass Hotel is flawlessly constructed…. The Glass Hotel declares the world to be as bleak as it is beautiful, just like this novel.
Rebecca Steinitz - Boston Globe
Mandel’s prose is such a pleasure to read… [I] gave way to real delight in the skill with which Mandel brings together themes that have occupied previous sections of the novel, revisiting earlier characters and incidents from surprising new perspectives in a narrative sleight of hand…. Mandel’s conclusion is dazzling.
Chris Hewitt - Minneapolis Star Tribune
An ephemeral quality permeates the novel…. It’s a thrill when the puzzle pieces start to fit together…. The final chapter is haunting, taking readers full circle…. It’s a sense readers will enjoy as well when they lose themselves in Mandel’s novel.
Associated Press
[S]triking… and timely…. In Vincent and Paul, Mandel has created two of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction…. Mandel's writing shines throughout the book, just as it did in Station Eleven. She's not a showy writer, but an unerringly graceful one, and she treats her characters with compassion but not pity. The Glass Hotel is a masterpiece… a stunning look at how people react to disasters, both small and large, and the temptation that some have to give up when faced with tragedy.
Michael Shaub - NPR
One effect of Mandel’s book is to underscore the seemingly infinite paths a person might travel…. There is a suggestion, toward the end of The Glass Hotel, that frequent commerce with the dead (or the imaginary) might reconnect us to the living…. Perhaps it is with this in mind that Mandel has constructed a fantasy for our temporary habitation. Her story offers escape, but the kind that depends on and is inseparable from the world beyond it.
Katy Waldman - New Yorker
Mandel... specializes in fiction that weaves together seemingly unrelated people, places and things. The Glass Hotel... is no exception... Kaleidoscopic... Mandel dissects the surreal division between those who are conscious of ongoing crimes, and those who are unwittingly brought into them... The Glass Hotel... examine[s] how we respond to chaos after catastrophe.
Annabel Gutterman - Time
Deeply imagined, philosophically profound…. The Glass Hotel moves forward propulsively, its characters continually on the run…. Richly satisfying… [and] ultimately as immersive a reading experience as its predecessor [Station Eleven], finding all the necessary imaginative depth within the more realistic confines of its world…. Revolutionary.
Ruth Franklin - Atlantic
(Starred review) [W]onderful…. [A] brother and sister… navigate heartache, loneliness, wealth, corruption, drugs, ghosts, and guilt.… This ingenious, enthralling novel probes the tenuous yet unbreakable bonds between people and the lasting effects of momentary carelessness.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Highly recommended; with superb writing and an intricately connected plot that ticks along like clockwork, Mandel offers an unnerving critique of the twinned modern plagues of income inequality and cynical opportunism
Library Journal
(Starred review) Another tale of wanderers whose fates are interconnected.… [With] nail-biting tension… Mandel weaves an intricate spider web of a story.… A gorgeously rendered tragedy.
Booklist
(Starred review) Long-anticipated.… [A] ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical.… In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences… . A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.
Kirkus Reviews
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