[
originally published at the New York Journal of Books]
“Mandel’s symphony of
belief and offerings builds slowly to a pattern that, in the midst of loss,
insists on meaning and value to the half-understood, half-intended journeys
that people so often take.”
Some places lend themselves to mystery from the
start. In Emily St. John Mandel’s The
Glass Hotel, a luxury hotel on the edge of ocean-isolated wildness provides
a set piece of wonder and mystical connection: the Hotel Caiette, a five-star
location on the north edge of Vancouver Island, off the coast of Canada.
Follow the bartender’s gaze, as she offers both
warmth and intelligence to fabled investor Jonathan Alkaitis. For Vincent,
whose half-brother has little to give her, and whose mother died in the nearby
waters, perhaps of suicide, the elegance and wealth of Alkaitis represent an
opportunity that the island itself could never offer: a chance to live
graciously, luxuriously, embraced by travel, fine clothing, and a blunt but
kind role as not quite wife, not quite mistress, and almost a partner in how
Alkaitis spins his own sense of fantasy.
Alkaits is indeed an expert at raising financial
fiction. Through gazes into the past and future, it’s not long before readers understand the
parallel between this mogul and the now-infamous Bernie Madoff: Without malice,
without any intent to harm, Alkaitis and a close circle of “asset-aware”
employees have stacked investments that turn out to be fictional at best,
tangled in Alkaitis’s own desire to please everyone and make them feel good –
until he can’t meet the call for funds, and the whole pile collapses.
What
Mandel does, in her layered and tender narratives, is show the haunting that
love and good intentions can create. In fact, Alkaitis himself becomes haunted
by the people who’ve died in his “best of intentions” scheme. And Vincent? What
can she find for her own eventual liberation, despite the dragging anchor of
her half brother, whose dreams and pain also become part of this stacking of
tissued longing? Her strength and exuberance ring bold and clear. Still, she
leapt into the game from a position of no power, no assets. Alkaitis doesn’t
seem ready to add to her base, except within the careful agreement the two have
crafted.
Although
Vincent and Alkaitis occupy the heart of The
Glass Hotel’s spiraling story, each character is brought to delicately
blushed color as if in Japanese watercolor, through the moments Mandel provides
for them, either in their visions or in their settings. Like this, between a
relatively minor character, Leon, and his wife Marie:
“’We
move through this world so lightly,’ said Marie, misquoting one of Leon’s favorite
songs, and for a warm moment he thought she meant it in a general sense, all of
humanity, all these individual lives
passing over the surface of the world with little trace, but then he understood
that she meant the two of them specifically, Leon and Marie, and he couldn’t
blame his chill on the encroaching night.”
Trembling
between a crime whose effects devastate the lives of many, including of those
Alkaitis truly treasures, and the hauntings that seem threaded to Vincent’s own
passion and insight, The Glass Hotel
also places life and dying into their necessary parallel positions of
meaning—or, to inappropriately offer another song lyric, “You can’t have one
without the other.”
Mandel’s
symphony of belief and offerings builds slowly to a pattern that, in the midst
of loss, insists on meaning and value to the half-understood, half-intended
journeys that people so often take. And wake up to, and marvel, and perhaps see
through the glass.
NOTE: For a quick take on Mandel's earlier (2014) Station Eleven, a pandemic-related novel, click here.
