The Glass Hotel

Let's get this off my chest right away - I thought this book was all over the place. It picks up threads only to discard them completely in the next chapter, lays out mysteries it will later explain away with a shrug, veers wildly through a growing cast of characters laying down narrative beats I must not be bright enough to fit into a cohesive whole and then, when you think you've got a handle on things, it goes supernatural?

And yet Mandel is still such a disarmingly great writer. She got a light touch that can draw on extensive research into international shipping and Ponzi schemes without completely derailing the story. And the beats she hits just sing. There's the notion of being pulled along in the wake of larger forces and the slow inevitable erosion of personal agency until it's all too late. How a single concession can assume mass over time is beautifully explored. And there is a character's slow descent into madness that is convincingly told both in its psychological causes and its clear manifestations.

Loved it a lot, longed for it be less lumpy.