Not quite halfway through “The Glass Hotel,” a new novel by Emily St. John Mandel, a woman named Vincent takes stock of her existence. “She felt that by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life,” Mandel writes. I read these words in self-quarantine, while watching my boyfriend remove five varieties of pasta from a grocery bag. Join the club, I thought.
The coronavirus may have heightened our sense of living in an “extraordinary” moment, but current events—climate change, the President—have been stoking it for some time. It is possible, then, to tear through Mandel’s fiction in a delirium of recognition. (Her previous novel, “Station Eleven,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award, in 2014, follows the survivors of a flu that wipes out ninety-nine per cent of humanity.) Mandel’s gift is to weave realism out of extremity. She plants her flag where the ordinary and the astonishing meet, where everyday people pause to wonder how, exactly, it came to this. She is our bard of waking up in the wrong time line.
When Vincent, the woman in “The Glass Hotel,” marvels at the implausibility of her life, she is standing on a terrace, gazing out at the “otherworldly blue” of the Mediterranean. She’s just arrived in Nice with her boyfriend, the financier Jonathan Alkaitis, whom she met on the lip of the wilderness, at a five-star hotel (the splendid glass edifice of the title) where she was working as a bartender. The relationship plunges Vincent into a “fairy tale” of luxury. Its origins, though, are shadowed: the same night that Vincent and Alkaitis start talking, graffiti appears on a window in the hotel lobby, its message—“why don’t you swallow broken glass?”—intended for Alkaitis.
He never sees it. Vincent, however, does—along with her half brother Paul and a shipping executive named Leon Prevant. Mandel fans will recognize Prevant from “Station Eleven,” where he runs the freight company that inadvertently spreads the virus overseas. Other metafictional connections emerge: Prevant’s secretary in the previous book, Miranda, has an extended cameo in “The Glass Hotel,” as a successful C.E.O. For some readers, this will be jarring and lovely at once: “Station Eleven” closes with Miranda dying in the pandemic that burns across the globe, annihilating most of humanity and rewinding civilization. “The Glass Hotel” is spared that apocalypse. It is as if the two novels were unspooling in parallel universes, one unthinkable and the other beset by the types of evils—fraud, drug addiction—that, until recently, would have struck a reader as “more realistic.”
Indeed, the organizing trauma of “The Glass Hotel,” a ruinous Ponzi scheme, has a 2008 flavor. Those affected include investors (an artist with eroding health, Prevant and his wife, and a Saudi prince), the white-collar staff privy to the scheme (who, wonderfully, narrate their downfall in sections titled “The Office Chorus”), and Alkaitis himself, who orchestrates the crime. When her partner’s ruse comes to light, Vincent switches tracks once more, enlisting as a cook on a cargo ship that belongs to Prevant’s old company. The novel opens and closes with chapters titled “Vincent in the Ocean,” which are juddering, dreamlike, and told in an elliptical first person. “I am aware of a border but I can’t tell which side I’m on,” the narrator says. “I am out of time—”
One effect of Mandel’s book is to underscore the seemingly infinite paths a person might travel. Vincent is not the only character to experience rebirth: her sojourn in what she thinks of as “the kingdom of money” corresponds to Prevant’s exile to “shadowland”—poverty—after his savings vanish. “We move through this world so lightly,” Prevant’s wife remarks, having traded her house and retirement plans for an R.V. The “glass” of Mandel’s title suggests the fragility of circumstance: the ease with which we can slip into alternative lives, and the tenuousness of our presence in any of them. That she expresses this theme through plot (characters thrown into radically new environments), structure (story lines bleeding into one another), and referentiality (members of the “Station Eleven” ensemble playing new roles) is almost ironic. She evokes contingency through its opposite: intention.
Mandel is not the first writer to observe that the world seems to hang in a delicate and improbable balance. That a person can end up, apparently without effort, in a place she did not anticipate is the premise, for instance, of choose-your-own-adventure books. (See also: “Life After Life,” by Kate Atkinson, which spins out multiple timelines for its hero.) Mandel freshens these ideas by examining what they do to notions of responsibility. It is fair to say that “The Glass Hotel” explores endlessly refracting options; it is equally fair to say that the novel studies people (well, men) who flee the consequences of their actions. (Paul, Vincent’s half brother, drops out of university after he accidentally kills an acquaintance by giving him bad E.) Throughout the novel, the possible becomes an ethical trapdoor. Before he backdates a transaction, Oskar, an employee of Alkaitis’s, imagines “a ghost version” of events in which he “closed the door to his office and called the FBI.” The Ponzi scheme itself consists of an intricate edifice of trades that did not occur, but very plausibly could have. There is a sense that, the more susceptible characters are to visions of an alternative life, the less they care about causing harm. What does crime matter if, in a parallel universe, one obeys the law?
No surprise, then, that Alkaitis turns out to be the book’s most helpless fantasist. Mandel titles his chapters “The Counterlife,” after the vivid daydreams that grip the broker during his hundred-and seventy-year prison sentence. (“Hallucinations is the wrong word,” Alkaitis thinks, struggling to explain his problem to a doctor. “It’s more like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders.”) Sometimes, sitting in his cell, Alkaitis finds himself on a flight to Dubai, or in hospice with his first wife, Suzanne, or throwing a Frisbee to his brother in the twilight. Sometimes, ghosts—the Saudi prince, who committed suicide, or a businesswoman who died of a heart attack—visit the jail yard. The novel is lousy with phantoms. A scene of Paul crouched in a doorway flashes into Vincent’s mind; Paul himself is constantly recoiling from apparitions of the man he killed. Mandel theorizes death as an opportunity to traverse many lives, real and imagined—“it seems I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next,” a dying character muses—and yet these ghosts are also, possibly, manifestations of guilt.
What is a ghost but a hidden consequence made visible? If Alkaitis’s victims were insufficiently real to him when he stole their money, they acquire an eerie presence after the fact. Mandel is interested in what it means to really see someone, to appreciate the existence of others. In “The Glass Hotel,” invisibility is conferred to alleviate the inconvenience of caring. Prevant construes poverty as “a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived.” A wealthy woman confides to Vincent that she no longer notices her bodyguard, and Vincent reflects that “there was something appalling and also seductive in the idea.” By contrast, it is quietly shocking, and almost sweet, when, speaking to a friend, Alkaitis correctly pegs Vincent as an artist of self-adaptation. In that moment, Alkaitis sees what other people cannot.
The dangers of dwelling in counterfactuals, then, are the dangers of opportunity cost: actual men and women fall by the wayside. This is a problem relevant to fiction itself, and, specifically, to fiction in moments of emergency. And yet there is a suggestion, toward the end of “The Glass Hotel,” that frequent commerce with the dead (or the imaginary) might reconnect us to the living. A ghost’s intervention can renew one’s sense of responsibility. Memories provide crucial guidance for the future. Perhaps it is with this in mind that Mandel has constructed a fantasy for our temporary habitation. Her story offers escape, but the kind that depends on and is inseparable from the world beyond it—not unlike the hotel of the title, which is triumphant and precarious at once, “lit up,” as Mandel writes, “against the darkness of the forest.”
