The Glass Hotel

Do you ever think about alternate universes?

The Hotel Caiette had been open since the mid-nineties, but had recently been redone in what Raphael called Grand West Coast Style, which seemed to involve exposed cedar beams and enormous panes of glass. Walter was studying the ad campaign photos that Raphael had slid across the table. The hotel was a glass-and-cedar palace at twilight, lights reflected on water, the shadows of the forest closing in.

I must confess that Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven didn't completely work for me, and with that out of the way, I'll happily state that The Glass Hotel totally did. The books feel related – like two sides of the same coin – and while the earlier post-apocalyptic novel felt somehow more realistic, this one (despite ghosts, alternate realities, and liminal spaces) seems to have more to say about our actual world. A thought-provoking meditation on greed, morality, dread, and regret, The Glass Hotel asks if any of us are as bad as the worst thing we've ever done, and encouragingly, opens up the possibility for second chances. (Spoilery from here so I can preserve some of the details.)

Why don't you swallow broken glass.

A lonely man walks into a bar and sees an opportunity. An opportunity walks into a bar and meets a bartender. A lonely bartender looks up from her work and the message on the window makes her want to flee, because the bartender's mother disappeared while canoeing and she's told everyone all her life that it was an accident but there is absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true, and how could anyone who's aware of this uncertainty – as Paul definitely is – write a suggestion to commit suicide on a window with that water shimmering on the other side, but what's driving the bartender to despair isn't actually the graffiti, it's the fact that when she leaves this place it will only be to go to another bar, and another after that, and another, and another, and anyway that's the moment when the man, the opportunity, extends its hand.

The Glass Hotel opens with a short section called “Vincent in the Ocean”, and in a series of brief entries, we learn that this Vincent has fallen off a ship (in 2018) and is able to “move between memories like walking from room to room”. Sections then jump around the timeline – from Vincent's childhood on a small island off Canada's West Coast to the present, flitting in and out of various characters' POVs – and while just about every character muses on the imaginary nature of their lives (living in the shadow country, the counterlife, the kingdom of money), the “apocalypse” this novel centres on (the 2008 economic downturn that collapses a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme) is all too real...and deadly. I remember when Madoff was arrested and the extent of his scam was revealed (billions in lost retirement funds) and my mother said to me, “I can't think of a worse crime.” And I thought, “You're a woman, a mother, a grandmother, and you can't think of a worse crime than a Ponzi scheme?” As the narrative of The Glass Hotel unspools, we learn how Jonathan Alkaitis first began his scam, how Alkaitis' employees (who had thought of themselves as decent people) were convinced to run the fraud, and how the investors (who really should have known that the returns were too good to be true) deluded themselves in order to keep receiving those big dividend cheques. Most are not as righteous as they like to protest.

Look. We all know what we do here.

He leaves the doctor's office with a sense of unease. He knows he messed up on that last answer, but is it his fault that his life here is so boring that it sometimes takes him a minute or two to snap out of the counterlife and back to reality, if that's what this is? “I'm distracted, not demented,” he mutters to himself, loudly enough that the guard escorting him back to the cell block glances at him. It isn't his fault that his days are so similar that he keeps sliding into memories, or into the counterlife, although it is troubling that his memories and the counterlife have started blurring together.

Is it an injustice that Alkaitis' incipient dementia allows him to escape to a counterlife (ironically transporting him to one of those unreal man-made palm-shaped islands in Dubai) when prison life gets to be too much? Or will the ghosts of they who couldn't survive the loss of their money force Alkaitis to make a reckoning?

It's possible to both know and not know something.

In a parallel version of events he might have run, and in his ghost life, his honourable life, his non-Ponzi life, he was never here at all. But in this world Oskar stopped in his tracks, and standing there on the sidewalk in the first snow of that winter, seconds away from his first pair of handcuffs, he was surprised to realize that what he felt was relief.

Is it better to be someone like Oskar – brought to justice and given a sentence – or someone like Enrico: the only member of Alkaitis' team who thought to disappear and now spending every day – living in Mexico under an assumed name with an oblivious wife and children – waiting for the long arm of the law to clamp down on his shoulder? 

What does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there, or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life.

You stare at the road and the road stares back. Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money (just barely) to survive, but the essential marker for citizenship was the same for everyone: they'd all been cut loose, they'd slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.

You feel a lot of compassion for Leon and Marie – in their 70s, they lost all of their retirement savings (and their house) in the scheme and now chase casual work around the US in their RV – until Leon fails a moral challenge. But are rules for survival different in the shadow country?

It is possible to disappear in the space between countries. 

Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.

In the most ironic nod to the notion of alternate realities, we revisit Miranda (and Leon) from Station Eleven (employees of the shipping company responsible for the spreading of the pandemic in the earlier novel), and she wonders what it might have been like if that Georgia flu hadn't been contained. While it isn't always this obvious, throughout The Glass Hotel we are confronted with branching reality: characters make decisions, choices they can't always justify afterwards, and these choices change reality for everyone else they encounter.

Against this big scenario of the Ponzi scheme (and the billions of dollars and thousands of people affected), the (mostly nonexistent) relationship between Vincent and her brother Paul plays out on the small scale, and again, it explores the very human concerns of responsibility, morality, regret, and second acts. Is Paul the worst thing he's ever done? (He doesn't do much to redeem himself, but he may have been doomed from the beginning.) Is it possible for Vincent to reinvent herself? (As the book begins with her gasping for breath in the ocean, it's hard not to think of her as doomed as well.) But as both characters use art to filter their reality into something more meaningful, that seems to bring us back to Station Eleven territory – where art is paramount "Because survival is insufficient". (And come to think of it, as Miranda in this story is too busy being a high-powered executive to create the graphic novels that were so important in Station Eleven, perhaps the main point is that the pursuit of money leads to artifice [like a hotel of glass meant to separate people from the messy reality of the world outside] whereas a more authentic human existence is required for the production of art.) I enjoyed this book at both the sentence level and the overall picture and it leaves me with plenty to think about; what else could I ask for?