The Glass Hotel: peering at the world through thin glass
Title: The Glass Hotel
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 320
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Who will like it? Anyone who would like to sit perfectly still in an hotel constructed entirely of glass, staring out at the brilliant beauty of landscapes, mesmerized by the complexity of our mundane world and ourselves.
The narrative in this book is dreamlike, fluid and lucid, as if every character’s ending were already revealed, and as if all of the suspicions and loose threads were hidden in a pocket of my mind all along. All the storylines weave together seamlessly, without adrenaline-rushing surprises, but instead, the thoughts and emotions of the characters are subtly embedded into one’s deep unconscious mind. When I read this book, the characters were beautiful and dimensional but almost like apparitions surfacing in my mind. It almost felt like I was gazing through a thin veil staring at them, and all of these people are hiding secrets, leading lives behind veneers. I was stunned by the Ponzi scheme, learning how finances can be beyond intricate and abstract, yet someone somehow manages to manipulate the fortunes of others with some suavity and calculatedness. I watched these “investments” ruin the life of a person from the bottom to the top, until the wind whispers and the deck of cards placed in a perfect tower flutter to the ground, and the Ponzi scheme collapses, returning according to the rules of gravity, or the laws of finances. These outwardly fine, physically unharmed victims die down like a fleck of dust on someone’s old couch, or then vanish off in a trailer somewhere in the mid-west. Some people couldn’t handle the impact of the fraudulent investments that Atkins conducted, and committed suicide because they didn’t have other options. As abstract, and lucrative, and invisible as finances can seem, sprinkled with some charisma and careful laughter, mishandling finances can manifest into an unimaginably abhorrent crime. Jonathan Atkins was sentenced to 120 years in prison when he was already reaching the end of his middle-aged stage in life. It was quickly decided that he deserved every single year of this sentence.
It is odd that someone will conduct a Ponzi scheme, even though it only thrives in the present. Sooner or later, the pyramid will collapse, and with that collapsing every trace of his life will fall apart. But there is a sense of evasiveness in the looming presence of the end, because we know that everything will end one day, for all of us. It is just up in the air when that will happen. Bathing in the luxury of the present, hopping on private jets to Dubai and southern Florida is enough to distract our minds temporarily, although the doom is still there in the corner of the room, always watching us, always reminding us that our time will be up. As readers, we didn’t know the details of Atkins’ scheme, and like Vincent, we were in the dark, although even when we first met Atkins at the glass hotel, something slightly sticky about him lingered in our minds.
The beginning and the end connect fluidly as if Vincent is cycling through her memories, again and again, living through the empty extravagance, and the empty heartbreak, and the empty joy that twisted her life. When she walked into her life, some choices were already made for her, and as prolific as her life appears, any outward happiness was almost always a reflection on clean glass. Vincent was drowning in the ocean, in the ice-cold sea, the way her mother did. She didn’t intentionally commit suicide, and she wasn’t pushed into the rolling ocean as some investigators suspected. She was just flowing along with the swirls and eddies of her life, following her subconscious “id” as Freud might have said, and at that point, she didn’t have anything truly to live for. She was just standing on the edge when she slipped — an accident — but she was fully aware of that possibility, reaching over the ledge that stormy night.
All of the narratives of many troubled people navigating their bitterness in life and their past and present decisions wind up tying beautifully together. The manipulation, the guilt, the regret all manifest in a haunting way.
