The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

I loved this.

Oh, I enjoyed it very much.

I’ve read some of Emily St. John Mandel’s books before – the gritty and excellently constructed Station Eleven, set in the aftermath and build-up to a society-destroying global pandemic – and Sea of Tranquility – a centuries-spanning text about time slips and humans living on (and then giving up living on) the Moon – and I liked them both a lot.

Mandel plays, in both of those texts, with non-linear narrative structures, and here she does the same, with The Glass Hotel starting at its ending, before slipping back decades, circling around key moments in the lives of its very many protagonists, moving back and forth between these points and (a handful of times) going a little bit beyond the start-ending moment of the novel’s intricate knotted structure and creating and closing a loop that is absolutely and undeniably satisfying. So neat, so taut, so good…

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Loosely, The Glass Hotel is (if I’m simplifying those other novels of hers as “post-apocalyptic” and “time travel”) a ghost story, though playing with the conventions of this “genre” as much as – more so, really – those other books play with the [sub-]genre conventions they’re exploring…

Ghosts are statements of regret as much as statement of loss, here, and the people who are haunted by ghosts are haunted by other things, other thoughts, other memories, long before they begin to be haunted by manifestations of their dead; and everyone who does seem to witness what could be (what is?) a ghost is mentally unravelling, yes… and it is only the consistencies of these visions across multiple people and the final page narration of one of the witnessed ghost’s meanderings beyond their own death before peace arrives, that it becomes confirmed that [within the novel’s narrative and world] these ghosts are all real.

The dead interact, the dead exist; the dead haunt what haunts them, the haunting is a universal, inward and outward experience.

This is a collage-like novel, though arguably the central and most memorable thread is the narrative of a guy who is running a Bernie Madoff style Ponzi scheme, which collapses and is exposed in the fallout of the 2008 Financial Crisis. He is a guy in his 60s at this point who has been conning people for decades, lots of them being the rich guests who he met at the hotel he owned in the near-wilderness of British Columbia. This sleek, modern hotel in the woods by the water is the titular one, and it is here we meet several of the other recurring characters – a shipping executive who loses everything in the scheme; a beautiful bartender who becomes the conman’s much younger “trophy wife” for several years before the collapse and then later a cook on massive ships; her half-brother who is an opium-addicted composer who later achieves some success and (possibly?) some sobriety, who briefly works at the hotel; the extended family of these siblings, and friends and acquaintances from both of their lives… There is a once-successful but not consistenly so female visual artist a decade or so older than the conman who knew his older brother who died of an overdose many decades ago when they were hip and young and the conman seemed to genuinely like (in his way); there’s the very competent lawyer who clocked the scheme as criminal decades ago and reported it to the authorities but they botched that initial investigation and so she has trying to bring the conman down as a hobby ever since; there’s the conman’s dead first wife who was as sinister and slimy and complicit in his crimes as he was; there is another trophy wife who the former bartender befriends who later ghosts her when the moneydream is dead for both of them… There is the small team of people who work for the conman and do all the admin necessary to keep the con going (one of whom fucks his second “wife”, one of whom confesses everything, one of whom is savvy enough to run away to a country without an extradition treaty when it’s obvious the gig is up)… There’s the new, young, secretary who is asked to shred some weird documents for her weird boss, who dines off this early career experience at cocktail parties for decades… There’s the man the bartender has a happy(ish) relationship with later in her life and the echoes around him that possibly imply that the happiness is dangerous… And there’s probably more, definitely more. But all of them, every last one of the wide and disparate cast of deeply different people included in Mandel’s novel, is a rounded and complex and deeply believable person.

The structure of the novel takes us back and forth through time, with full lives visible even when not described, and Mandel weaves a tapestry in a non-linear way that may not be clear in its wider scope as the reader experiences its detail, but in the pull back at the end, we see all and it all coheres in spectacularly neat fashion.

The characterisation is effective and potent and neat, and though the writing isn’t necessarily poetic, it’s always evocative and effective and often incredibly witty. So, yes, though it might be difficult to ape or even characterise Mandel’s sentence level writing, in terms of her impressive structural prowess and ability to create deeply felt and real-feeling characters, it’s not really appropriate to offer that as a critique. The Glass Hotel isn’t a novel asking you to look at each word and each clause under a microscope – it is using words as tools more than as adornments. And when the work being done is this fucking good, I don’t think that’s any kind of problem at all.

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A beautiful novel full of rich characters, circling and knotting around each other with a powerful sense of narrative and literary control.

I absolutely loved it; if the purpose of a novel is to tell an engaging story, make you believe in and care about the lives of imaginary people, and do so in a way that feels fresh and unique and memorable, then this fucking does all that.

Honestly, I loved it. I would – and I will – read Mandel’s work again.

Really, truly, excellent stuff.

See you soon!