The Glass Hotel (edizione 2020)

Having read (and loved) Sea of Tranquility I was surprised to discover the same characters in this earlier book by Emily St. John Mandel. I may be reading the books in the wrong order, but once you realise that time doesn’t flow in normal ways in these novels, it doesn’t really matter. While the more recent book has been labelled a time travel story, which was its appeal for me, this is more of a ghost story. Though neither of those labels are really fully accurate. Let’s just say that these are stories with characters one grows to care about, even if these characters are deeply flawed. I finished the book with a profound sense of sadness, and yet I would recommend it to others. If that makes any sense. ( )

I came to this book after falling in love with the author's Station Eleven. While the new book shares some characteristics of the earlier book (highly non-linear telling of the story, interrelated characters popping up at unexpected moments) I wasn't as impressed by this book. Still good, but no cigar.
I think the non-linear time jumps in the Station Eleven worked well because there were clear markers for the reader to stitch the different eras together. In this book the year was given as a time stamp for each segment, but I found that wasn't enough to bring the content together, especially in the first half of the book.
The Bernie Madoff connection was explicit to me from the very early mention of a sceptic questioning the lack of variation in returns. This made the rest of the gradual unfolding (unravelling?) of that subplot a bit boring and anticlimatic.
So, looking forward to Sea of Tranquility and much more from Emily Mandel, but hoping they deliver more like Station Eleven than Glass Hotel. ( )

This is a fascinating and beguiling book, but a hard one to place. It’s kind of a mystery (but not really a crime novel, although it does feature a number of crimes), but also has a healthy dose of magical realism and lots of human drama. Like Mandel’s much-loved ‘Station Eleven’ it features a large cast of characters and skips back and forth in time. In the hands of a less skilled writer, this might have been confusing, but Mandel makes it work brilliant. It gives the book a dreamlike feel at times, but also a real weight. It’s an enjoyable read, but also one that feels quite important. For a lot of the book I struggled with the sense that I didn’t really know what it was about, but by the end everything came sharply into focus. ( )

Similar in format to The Topeka School with different perspectives and jumping back and forth in time but this one worked for me. Interesting narratives, characters, and settings. The interwoven stories with clues added piecemeal were kind of predictable but enjoyable nonetheless. ( )

There is an interesting sub-class of the literary fiction genre that involves plots and themes based on significant events that have taken place in the financial markets. Although by no means as prominent as, say, mystery, crime, or romance, the “fiction of finance” strain of the literature includes the work of some of the very best writers of their respective eras. A partial list would include Theodore Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire, a series of novels chronicling the exploits of an avaricious and unscrupulous financier in the 1800s, Tom Wolfe’s brilliant social satire of the financial excesses of the 1980s in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, a post-modern take on Joyce’s Ulysses that follows a currency hedge fund manager having a very bad day, and Gain, Richard Powers’ extraordinary look at two centuries of U.S. economic history through the lens of the rise and fall of a modern multinational corporation. Of course, these are all novels and so the point is not the economic details per se but the remarkable personal stories those backdrops allow the authors to tell.

That context is useful to appreciate what Emily St. John Mandel attempts in The Glass Hotel. At its center, the book is a fictionalized account of the asset management Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernie Madoff over a period of several decades. That fraud, which at $65 billion is said to be the largest in history, left no one in its wake unscathed, from the hundreds of mostly unwitting investors to Madoff himself and everyone who had a personal or professional connection to him. In Mandel’s version, Jonathan Alkaitis (the Madoff character) meets Vincent Smith, a much younger woman with a troubled past, at a luxury hotel he owns in a remote part of western Canada. He convinces her to assume the role of his wife, without being married, to support the ruse he is running with his investment business. On that visit, Alkaitis also meets Leon Prevant, a guest who will become an unfortunate investor in the scam. Much of the tale is told from the alternating perspectives of these three characters as they are forced to deal with the considerable emotional and financial fallout when the Ponzi collapses.

There was so much that I found appealing about The Glass Hotel. Above all, I suppose, is that it is an engaging story that has been told in an interesting way. There is a decidedly dream-like quality to the author’s writing—in fact, ghosts play an important role as several of the main characters blur the line at times as to where reality leaves off—that was very effective in telling this particular tale. It is a story that is also revealed in a non-linear manner, jumping around in time to events that occurred before, during, and after the point where the investment scheme unraveled. While some readers might be troubled by this narrative device, I found it to enhance the overall atmosphere a great deal. My only complaint about the book (if that’s even the right word for what is probably a minor quibble) is that the whole story-arc involving Paul, Vincent’s drug-addicted half-brother, seemed a little forced and superfluous to the main plotline. Still, this was a satisfying reading experience for me as well as one that serves as a reminder of the tremendous human cost that comes with financial misconduct. ( )