Review of The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

When I try to explain why I read Emily St. John Mandel’s books, I don’t ever have a cogent explanation. “She’s Canadian,” I mumble, as if I am somehow bound by CRTC Cancon requirements. “She never writes two novels the same,” I grasp at straws of justification. Why do I feel the need to justify? Probably because her novels straddle genre with an uncomfortable liminality: science fiction but not science fiction, fantasy but not fantasy. The Glass Hotel was science fiction, I thought, but turned out to be fantasy, except not.

Summarizing this book is a challenge. The jacket copy doesn’t do the plot justice. The plot doesn’t do the plot justice. Mandel spins this tale in a spiralling, telescopic way: each chapter follows a different character, many of them new or one-offs. We start with Paul, see a traumatic incident from his university days, and then leave him behind, only meeting him briefly again as a minor character before he comes back for another POV chapter near the end. Vincent, Paul’s half-sister, is nominally the novel’s main character, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call her a protagonist. While the book returns to her more often than most, it is also content to spin her off while chasing other subplots.

Arguably the central story here is that of a banal antagonist, Jonathan Alkaitis, whose Ponzi scheme’s collapse forms the core event around which everything else revolves. Mandel seems interested in our relationship with money: the need for it to survive, the want for it to flourish, the unease we feel when we have too little or too much, the ways others prey upon us. Alkaitis is portrayed as a perfectly ordinary, nice guy, who just happens to be defrauding his investors—including a family friend who expects to live off her investment as retirement income. He knows when the scheme collapses she will be destitute; yet he keeps going. Sociopathic? No, not really. Alkaitis is more like a personification of the indeterminate apathy of a generation of money-making men disconnected from what makes money.

Really, The Glass Hotel might be best viewed as a series of vignettes following several people: Vincent, Paul, Alkaitis, Olivia, Walter, et al. Mandel keeps the “camera” tight on the individual, the third-person perspective so limited it almost squeezes everyone and everything out of frame, an intense character study. I think what kept me reading is simply that her writing is so … focused. Precise. It’s not even that it’s lush or particularly skillful in a rhetorical or linguistic sense; nevertheless, the craft is visible.

And, despite myself and my basic dislike of novels that turn out not really to be novels, I liked this book. I enjoyed spending time with Alkaitis and his Ponzi scheme (what can I say, I love scammers). I enjoyed the harried assistant, ignorant of what she was assisting. The stuff with Vincent on the ship and her disappearance was a bit meh. Paul was just odd. But there were a lot of points in this book where I found myself chuckling, turning the page because I was really invested—not so much in what happened next, I guess, but rather in how Mandel was going to switch things up on me.

So I don’t want to give The Glass Hotel a bad review or rating, for it is a good book. It’s just weird (in a good way). It defies description, and by that I mean, Mandel set out to tell a story her way, without much caring about the conventions of a linear narrative or how we tend to cast a novel. I hesitate to call it experimental—it didn’t frustrate me the way a lot of experimental stuff does. Call it a small departure. Someone shooting in black-and-white in the era of colour. Read it for the characters, for the vignettes, for the scrutiny of human emotion—just don’t expect a single plot or character who ties it all together. Don’t expect a bow on top.