Book Review
Title: The Glass Hotel
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Genre: Mystery/Family
Rating: ****
Review: After reading The Guest List by Lucy Foley which was the winner in the Best Mystery/Thriller category, I couldn’t wait to pick up this book which was a runner up for my Goodreads Reading Challenge. I didn’t know anything about The Glass Hotel going into it and I haven’t read anything by Emily St. John Mandel before even though I’ve only heard good things about Station Eleven. The opening chapters were set in December 2018 and follow Vincent as she seems to be dying and reflecting on little parts of her life but it is disjointed and doesn’t make much sense and we then bounced back to 1994 and 1999, which tells me that this book is going to have interwoven characters arcs as well as interwoven timelines. We are then introduced to Paul, who has a drug problem and we bounced around his life, his time at college isn’t going well and this is made worse when he passes on some pills that end up killing someone and between this narrative, we get interjections from Paul in the future talking to his therapist. We then go back again where we learn that Paul and Vincent are half-siblings and they have a complicated relationship due to their parentage. The siblings share a father but he left Paul’s mother meaning Paul grew up virtually alone and rarely saw his father whereas Vincent had him all to herself and had both parents up until recently when her mother went missing and she is presumed dead. Near where they live the Hotel Caiette is under construction and given how many times it is referenced in a short scene; I had a feeling it is going to be an important location later on.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, we jump forward again to 2005 where both Paul and Vincent are working at the now luxury Hotel Caiette. Paul is working as a night porter which Vincent is a bartender. One night someone defaces one of the windows with a haunting message about swallowing broken glass and something about the incident doesn’t sit right with the night manager, Walter. By talking to other staff, he manages to figure out that Paul was the one who wrote the message seen by Leon Prevant who works in shipping and his favourite ship is the Neptune-Avramidis which he references often so I believe it is another important location. When he speaks to Paul about it Walter manages to figure out that the message was meant for Jonathan Alkaitis, the owner of the hotel but was unaware that his flight had been delayed and he lets Paul go without calling the police if he leaves immediately which Paul agrees to but we know he isn’t in a good place as he mentions that he has debts. The next day Vincent takes an unexpected vacation and then makes it known that she won’t be returning to the hotel and we assume this is because of what happened with Paul. However, when Walter checks up on Alkaitis when he hasn’t visited the hotel in some months, he learns that Alkaitis recently married Vincent, which doesn’t make much sense as they don’t seem to have interacted often but we jump forward again to 2005-2008. At this point in the novel, I still don’t have much of an idea of what is going on other than we seem to be following Vincent and Paul through their lives which ultimately led them to where they are in the opening but I will have to keep reading in order to find out for sure. Although we soon learn from Vincent that her marriage to Alkaitis isn’t real but a contract between them and will Vincent doesn’t understand it, she doesn’t question it because it has led her into the different life, she wanted from the one she was living.
For the next two and half years we follow Vincent through her new life with Alkaitis and she finds for the first time in her life she is somewhere close to content but she can’t shake the feeling that Alkaitis is keeping things from her, things she should know but he doesn’t want her too. However, she does make a good friend in Mirella who like her didn’t come from money but just found herself in this life when she became the girlfriend to a Saudi Prince, Faisal. For the first time, she has someone she can talk to frankly about the list she has found herself in and confesses things she has never spoken aloud before like how she believes that her mother’s death might not have been an accident but has no evidence to prove otherwise and how the distance between her and Paul has been growing ever bigger and has always been there since they were kids but we are also aware when she is seemingly drowning at the beginning of the novel, the one thing she wished for was to be with her brother again and how she regretted letting Paul fall into the life he had when she had some power to change it. At almost halfway through the novel, I am contemplating DNF’ing the book but nothing seems to be happening, we are just learning about the characters and their lives but I am also aware that we know Alkaitis spends the rest of his life in prison and we don’t know why which makes me want to keep reading. I am going to give it until the halfway mark and if it hasn’t picked up by then I may have to put it down.
As we continue to follow Vincent and Jonathan, we are introduced to Olivia who had been a friend to Jonathan’s older brother, Lucas who much like Paul had a drug habit. Lucas and Olivia were both artists and agreed to paint each other but Lucas was angry about Olivia putting in the bruises on his arms in the painting, obviously from his drug use and they feel out of touch. Months later she meet both Lucas and the young Jonathan in a gallery shortly before Lucas’ death. IN the aftermath, she looked for an investor for the money from her painting and began a friendship with Jonathan and is even still in his life when he is with Vincent, despite meeting him for the first time in 1958. We also learn from Olivia the first time she met Vincent and Jonathan described her as a kind of chameleon, disappearing and reappearing whenever needed in whatever form Jonathan wanted her to take, this was three months before he was arrested and then we jump forward to 2009. We find out that Jonathan is in prison and that it was his own daughter, Claire that phoned the FBI and has never once visited him in prison. Jonathan doesn’t actually find it hard being in prison since he is housed with others deemed to vulnerable to put into general population. When asked by a journalist about Vincent, he asks where she is and the journalist tells him that not even, she can find Vincent and she must be keeping a low profile since her association with Jonathan soured the minute, he plead guilty and was sentence to 170 years in prison. We then switch back to Vincent’s story which is now taking place between 2008 and 2013 so it will encompass the few months before Jonathan was arrested and what happened to her after that. It is also brining us ever closer to the opening chapter which took place in 2018 which both Paul and Vincent’s lives at rock bottom.
In the time after Jonathan was arrested, Vincent returned to her old life but is haunted by people she used to know like Mirella, especially since Faisal’s death which may have something to do with why Jonathan is in prison in the first place. She decides to follow in her mother’s footsteps and go to see and a chef on a shipping boat called Neptune Cumberland. There see meets Geoffrey Bell and while she doesn’t believe in love at first sight, she feels something for him that she hasn’t felt with anyone else before. After three months aboard the ship, she is the happiest she has ever been and doesn’t believe there is somewhere on land she can call home anymore. However, this is interrupted by the realisation that Jonathan is either losing his mind unable to separate fantasy from reality or he is suffering from something like dementia. We also learn just before Jonathan’s arrest when she meets Olivia for the first time, she looked up a Brooklyn Academy of Music since Olivia mentioned it and sees Paul for the first time in years doing what he always wanted to do; compose music. At halfway through the novel, I have to admit I do find the characters and their arcs interesting but I was becoming a little bored as there was nothing major driving the plot forward but I am going to continue on for now and just see where it goes. Paul it turns out has been doing well for himself as a composer but using Vincent’s videos as a backdrop for his work which he had stolen from her but due to her arrangement with Jonathan she can’t confront him about it and just decides to continue with her life not realising that the kingdom of money as she calls it is going to come crashing down around her when she learns that most of Jonathan’s business is a Ponzi scheme, which means he has essentially been stealing a lot of money from his investors to fund his lifestyle and Vincent’s too.
We spend the next job portions of the novel following Jonathan and those closest to him in the business that were aware of its true nature as everything they have build begins to fall apart around them. This is also where we see the fragile relationship between Vincent and Jonathan crumble into dust which is emphasized when she sleeps with Oskar that very night before Jonathan is arrested in the early hours of the following morning. It was difficult reading from these characters as we understand why they did what they did but it doesn’t make them any less accountable as some would like to believe. Although, I do feel genuinely sorry for Oskar as by the time he figured out what the business was he didn’t feel he had anyway out and this is shown when he sees Olivia’s painting of Lucas in the apartment and knows this now old woman has already lost everything and she just doesn’t know it as he flees the apartment in tears, genuinely regretting what he allowed himself to become a part of. Very slowly the pieces of the puzzle are beginning to come together as we can know piece together the entire childhood of Paul and Vincent and we have followed Vincent through most of her adult life, her relationship with Jonathan, what happened to her after Jonathan’s arrest, being happy on the sea for the first time in her life which Paul is making a name for himself as a composer but we still haven’t got to the real meat of the novel yet as we don’t know what caused Paul to end up on the streets or drive Vincent to what seems like suicide. We then follow the lives of the people affected by what Jonathan did, not just his investors like Olivia, but his family, Vincent and Claire and his employees too, both those that were in on the scheme and those that were not and we see the absolutely devasting that it brought to many. Leon left destitute by the scheme, Olivia now an old woman forced to live in the guest room of her sister’s home because she can’t afford her own anymore and many, many more.
As we move into the final section of the novel, all the major pieces of the puzzle have now been laid out all that is left is for them to come together and I am not sure how it is going to happen in less than 80 pages. We switch briefly back to Jonathan who is losing his mind as the ghosts of the dead haunt him including Olivia and Faisal and then one day Vincent is among them and I had this sinking feeling she had died. When we switch to Leon as he and his wife Marie continue to work in little jobs while living in their RV, we can see how far they have fallen but a phone call from his old job offers him an opportunity. He is called in as a consultant to be a witness to an investigation into the disappearance of Vincent Smith from one of their ships and he thinks it might be the woman he knew as Vincent Alkaitis but he isn’t sure. During the course of the investigation, it seems like that Geoffrey Bell is responsible for her death and the fact he disappeared at their next stop lends weight to that but his partner in the investigation tells him adding that in doesn’t change anything, Vincent will still be dead but this way if they omit it there is no conflict of interest for Leon and he might get further jobs in the future and he agrees. This causes Leon to questions is own morality, in the same way he called Jonathan’s morality into question but it does seem like Vincent has died in the opening scene but we jump forward to 2029. By the time we reach the end of the novel and everything comes together so perfectly, I was stunned. Mandel has obviously got a genuinely gift for writing and crafting both a wayward narrative that has a purpose. The ending of The Glass Hotel was both heart-breaking and yet so perfect for the story we have been following. I will definitely be picking up more of her work in the future. The only downside to this novel for me personally was it took so long for everything to come together because I normally prefer plot driven novel than character driven ones but I really enjoyed this book.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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