The Glass Hotel

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3M00K7LZ3N015?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

This is a hard book to evaluate. It is even harder to decide whether it is a book I would recommend to anyone. The first thing pertinent to thinking about this book is that literature - as opposed to genre fiction - is about characters. Literature doesn't put plot, action, or conflict into the driver's seat. Instead, it allows characters to marinate, sometimes, it seems, pointlessly. This book pretends to be literature, which is initially confusing. Coming to this book after reading Station Eleven, I wanted to put this book into the science fiction genre with all its tropes and expectations.

But it isn't science fiction or any genre. It almost makes a nod at science fiction as a kind of alternate universe story, specifically, one where the Georgian Flu never happened. One character muses on that other world where the Georgian Flu was not stopped. Also, we meet two characters from Station Eleven - Miranda (the comic book writer) and Leon (her logistics boss) - who don't survive the outbreak of the Flu but have a bit but inconclusive role in this book.

It is “literature.” So, we have to pay attention to the characters.

I was forty percent of the way into this book when I tried to recap and realized that I didn't know what it was supposed to be about. We start with Paul, who is recovering heroin addict, failing at school, and wanting to get into music. Paul seems a little sleazy and aimless. There is a bit where he buys drugs, gives them away to a member of the band, who dies of a heart attack.

So, the reader notes all that. That's pretty interesting. Maybe the story is going to be about Paul and this bit about bad drugs? File it away.

But that is a waste of time and a distraction because after it happens, it is never mentioned again. It's just a moment, an interlude, in Paul's life that has absolutely no significance.

Next, we snap into a situation where Paul is working at a swanky hotel in the middle of the forest near his hometown. He's working there - the “Glass Hotel” presumably - with his half-sister Vincent, named for the author Edna St. Vincent Millay....and we wonder about the similarity to the author of the subject book, Emily St. John Mandel, whom perhaps we should call “John.”

Well, we are at the “Glass Hotel,” but understand that the Glass Hotel has little to do with the story. It's a location for a few chapters, and we learn that the former manager lives there alone as the custodian for a bankruptcy trustee, none of which advances the story. It's like the deadly drugs - an interlude or filling.

At the Glass Hotel, Paul apparently etches the words “You should eat glass” on a window. None of this is explained as to motivation, until about 80% of the way in the book. It's not very important, but I guess this kind of thing could happen. Paul is fired and we don't interact with Paul again, except a brief glimpse of him twenty years later as a successful avant-garde composer.

Cut to Vincent. Paul is not the glue that holds the story together. Maybe Vincent is? She has a relationship with Jonathan, the owner of the Glass Hotel and a titan of Wall Street. Jonathan's core business is a Ponzi scheme that collapses. This is sad because Vincent like being wealthy - wealth is a different country - so she goes back to being a bartender and gets snubbed by her former friend.

The Ponzi scheme story was an interesting part of the story. The reader gets acquainted with the fraudsters who seem to be cowardly, small people, and their victims, who lose everything when they are on the verge of retirement.

This book is not about the Ponzi scheme, although that might be the most interesting part of the book since it has inklings of conventional conflict and tension. But it doesn't go anywhere.

Jonathan's story concludes with him in jail where he starts having paranormal experiences. He starts being visited by people after they've died, but before he would know that fact. In one case, he is visited by Vincent, which turns into the last part of the book, which re-introduces us to Miranda and Leon from Station Eleven.

But the paranormal experiences of Jonathan go nowhere either.

No one in this book evolves, grows or learns from their experiences. In some way they feel like programmed non-player characters who don't react to their experiences except in a limited patterned way. You gave deadly drugs that killed someone? Never mind; doesn't matter.

When I think about this book as a book, I feel short-changed.

On the other hand, I liked the book. I liked the game of trying to figure out what was going on. I felt engaged by the book. It wasn't a book that I finished like a bag of chips to move on to another nearly identical book.

The writing is well done. The format involves a lot of time hops and perspective changes that make it difficult to follow.

I suspect that this would have been a better book with editing, but my love-hate relationship with this book gives it an odd value.