The Glass Hotel

If I promised you a book about Ponzi schemes and ghosts and murder mysteries; about the little things that happen to us in a life that haunt us forever, you'd be psyched, right? You'd think: this book could not possibly be boring. And similarly: I see what St. John Mandel is doing here. I respect what she's trying to do. I love the idea of exploring the things that haunt us throughout our lives; the themes we cannot help but return to. I like the idea of personifying that with magical realism ghosts and graffiti that is disturbing out of proportion to the real world. There's a lot of potential here.

But it's SO boring. Unbelievably boring. Is it me? I can't tell. But all of these characters are so flat, I couldn't care about them at all. I found small snippets I liked: the themes, the descriptions of shipping. But these were buried within ~400 pages of mundane details about mundane characters. Dozens of pages about how tedious shopping is that nevertheless bore details of everything that Vincent bought. Interchangeable characters named Melissa, Miranda, Mirella, Monica and Marie that I had to keep referencing back to the dust jacket to see which one went with which substory.

A close friend accused St. John Mandel of being too pretentious to be willing to write speculative fiction. Once seen it couldn't be unseen: this is overwritten, too shy to lean into its interesting themes. It does not arrive at ghosts, nor Ponzi schemes, nor the ocean, for over 200 pages, instead leaning into day-in-the-life written to the teeth. It felt interchangeable with hundreds of other books trying and failing to be The Modern American Novel