Alternate apocalypse
Author Mandel returns with a thriller about deceit
The Glass Hotel Emily St. John Mandel Knopf
Bad timing: Emily St. John Mandel is releasing a novel in the middle of a pandemic that has shuttered libraries and bookstores across the country.
At least Mandel knows what she’s getting into. Her previous novel, Station Eleven, described the world decimated by a deadly virus. Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and a finalist for a National Book Award, Station Eleven was terrifically successful when it appeared in 2014, and it’s showing up on everybody’s grim coronavirus reading lists.
But don’t let that dystopian classic overshadow her new novel, The Glass Hotel. In this story, Mandel focuses on a different kind of apocalypse: Her inspiration is Bernie Madoff’s Us$65-billion Ponzi scheme. The real pathogen this time around is deceit. Everyone in these pages is eager to wash their hands of culpability, but the wreckage keeps spreading, infecting an ever-widening group of friends and colleagues.
Told in a stream of disclosure, the story swirls around two troubled siblings, an addict named Paul and his “absurdly gorgeous” half sister, Vincent. Though never particularly close, they find themselves working together in a remote five-star resort on Vancouver Island. Beyond the reach of cellphones, accessible only by boat, the Hotel Caiette is a “glassand-cedar palace” at the water’s edge, with ancient trees closing in. An ominous mix of opulence and dread is heightened early one morning when a phrase appears written in acid across a window in the lobby: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.”
As graffiti, that’s weird and threatening, like some freebie Jenny Holzer. The phrase alters the entire ambience of the hotel. Staring at the window, the night manager realizes that someone must have crept out into the woods and written those words onto the glass backward.
But the arrival of the hotel’s wealthy owner, Jonathan Alkaitis, immediately distracts everyone. Alkaitis is a charming investment wizard. When he falls for Vincent, she trades her bartending job at the hotel for the life of a trophy wife in New York City. She may not feel any passion for Alkaitis, but she’s adaptable to the requirements of any social or romantic situation.
The 300 pages of The Glass Hotel work harder than most 600-page novels. When Mandel turns to the art world, to a federal prison, to an international cargo ship, each realm rises out of the dark waters of her imagination with just as much substance as that hotel on the shore of Vancouver Island. The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next.
No one character moves through all these places, but what binds the novel is its focus on the human capacity for self-delusion, particularly with regards to our own innocence. The complex, troubled people in Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass.