Mandel’s ‘The Glass Hotel’ a tragic tale for the times
Using Shakespeare to take the pulse of America
Emily St. John Mandel, “The Glass Hotel” (Alfred A. Knopf) How does one follow up a National Book Award nominee? With something completely different, of course.
Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel is more grounded in reality and smaller in scope than “Station Eleven”, which imagined a theater troupe traveling across America 15 years after a mysterious flu killed most of the world’s population. (That book is being talked about again because of the coronavirus pandemic.)
“The Glass Hotel” tells the story of Vincent, a young woman whose fate we know from the first sentence — “Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship…” — but it’s the title that inspires the novel’s central theme. “The Glass Hotel” is a more descriptive name for “The Hotel Caiette”, an isolated establishment on the northern end of Vancouver Island. Vincent moves there with her mother as a teenager, wandering the woods and eventually working as the hotel bartender. The clientele pay top dollar to stay in this remote and luxurious place, “a glass-and-cedar palace at twilight” where, as general manager Raphael says to a prospective employee, “there’s a sense of being outside of time and space.”
An ephemeral quality permeates the novel. Many of the characters are haunted and most of the story is told in flashbacks to various times in Vincent’s life. As Mandel writes in the mind of Vincent: “It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.” The thrill of “The Glass Hotel” is that the pieces do eventually connect, from Vancouver to the glittering skyscrapers of
New York.
Characters are introduced at different times and collide throughout the novel to complete a portrait of Vincent’s life and sketch their own stories too. There’s Jonathan, an investor whom Vincent seduces and lives with as a trophy wife back in New York; Vincent’s brother, Paul, whose journey takes him from heroin addiction to an artistic career kick-started by using his sister’s personal videos without permission; and Walter, who never leaves the hotel, working as the property’s caretaker for a decade after it closes.
There are no heroes here and only a couple characters who inspire much sympathy, but the unique structure keeps you turning the pages. At times, you’ll find yourself flipping back to a chapter heading to find out if what you’re reading happened in 1999 or 2004, but it’s a thrill when the puzzle pieces start to fit together. Or, as Paul expresses it near the end: “The smallness of the world never ceases to amaze me.”
The final chapter is haunting, taking readers full circle to those words spoken by Raphael about time and space ceasing to exist. It’s a sense readers will enjoy as well when they lose themselves in Mandel’s novel.
James Shapiro, “Shakespeare in a Divided America” (Penguin Press)
America: land of the free, home of the brave, known for Route 66, Silicon Valley … and Shakespeare? Yes, and from colonial days onward. Back then, the Bard wasn’t even considered high culture — his plays were as familiar to ordinary folks as the King James Bible.
In his new book, “Shakespeare in a Divided
America”, James Shapiro makes the case that arguments about the Bard’s plays have long reflected our conflicted beliefs as a nation about hot-button issues like immigration, adultery, homosexuality and interracial love.
“His writing continues to function as a canary in a coal mine, alerting us to, among other things, the toxic prejudices poisoning our cultural climate,” writes Shapiro, a Columbia University professor whose earlier works include an anthology on Shakespeare in America with a foreword by Bill Clinton.
To explore this novel intersection of social and literary history, Shapiro selected eight particular years to examine which plays were popular, what people were saying about them and how they were staged.
For instance, John Quincy Adams couldn’t stop obsessing about “Othello” — and in particular, the Moor of Venice’s marriage to the white Desdemona. In an 1835 letter to a friend, Adams, then a member of Congress after serving one term as president, condemned her passion as “unnatural.” That same month he wrote an essay arguing that when Othello smothers her, any pity we might feel for her must give way to the grim recognition that she got what she deserved for being physically intimate with a black man.
Given his reputation as a staunch abolitionist, Adams’ reaction seems weird. Unless, as Shapiro contends, he was working out his own ambivalent feelings about what it would mean for former slaves to be truly equal to whites in US society. “By directing his hostility at Desdemona rather than Othello, he was able to sidestep criticizing black men.”
No discussion of Shakespeare as a “canary in a coal mine” would be complete without mentioning the 2017 production of “Julius Caesar” in New York City’s Central Park, which was disrupted by Trump supporters upset at the parallels drawn between the US president-elect and the Roman tyrant who is assassinated.
Shapiro, who serves as a consultant for the Public Theater, which stages the free Shakespeare in the Park festival every summer, is uniquely qualified to give readers a behind-thescenes look at what happened. It’s a fascinating story — one of many in this entertaining and accessible book — that underscores Shapiro’s key point: Shakespeare never goes out of style. (AP)