- The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel. Pan Macmillan. $29.99.
Emily St John Mandel's The Glass Hotel is ostensibly about the 2008 financial crisis and Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme. It focuses on a series of characters who are affected by the actions of Jonathan Alkaitis, who runs a similar operation to Madoff. Rather than making investments with clients' money, Alkaitis recruits wealthy investors to pay out apparent dividends and to fuel his lavish lifestyle. The novel explores not just Alkaitis' crimes, but the ripples that extend from his theft, examining the consequences for those from whom he has stolen, and for his employees and partner, who to a greater or lesser extent have condoned his crimes.
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St John Mandel is less interested in the development of a singular protagonist than in the experiences of a range of characters. As with her previous work, The Glass Hotel develops multiple interwoven narratives, through which the novel captures its characters' respective subjectivities. These characters include the protagonist, Vincent, a woman named after the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; Walter, a manager at The Glass Hotel; Paul, a failing finance student who dreams of being a composer; Leon Prevant, a man who is initially portrayed as an executive in shipping; and Olivia, a painter. The evocation of these characters' distinct consciousnesses and worldviews is enviably effortless. The interweaving of their narratives at times gives the novel a sense of being the kind of musical composition that Paul dreams of writing, with its multiple melodies and resonances.
The main story focuses on Vincent, who is Paul's half-sister, and who captures landscapes on a video camera given to her by her grandmother after her mother's unexpected death. While working at The Glass Hotel, she meets Jonathan Alkaitis and leaves her job to live with him in Connecticut and, although they never marry, to perform the role of his wife.
The novel's real exploration is into the experience of being robbed: what it is like to have your livelihood - or your art - stolen from you. Prevant, the shipping executive, and others, lose their entire life savings as part of Alkaitis' ponzi scheme. As Vincent realises that she can no longer deny Alkaitis' criminality, she attends a performance given by Paul, who has finally become a composer. At the performance, he plays his score alongside her stolen video footage. The understanding of Paul's theft of her art and Alkaitis' treachery culminates in a moment when Vincent believes that "if she went into the subway, she would die. She knew it as clearly as she knew her own name". For St John Mandel, the experience of being robbed entails a loss of self, and potentially, of life.
But she's not only interested in the interior subjective experiences of her characters. Her novel explores the lived experience of poverty which follows from the swindling of people as diverse as the shipping executive Prevant, and the artist, Olivia. When Prevant and his wife can no longer pay their credit card bills, they abandon their house in Florida and live in an RV, taking work in motels and campgrounds, even though they're in their 60s and in poor health. In this way, The Glass Hotel reads as a critique of the structures that place the old and vulnerable at the mercy of corporations.
It is not only those who lose their livelihoods or their art, but those who steal, such as Alkaitis and Paul, who suffer in a society that exists largely through forms of predation and exploitation. Alkaitis and Paul are both haunted by people from whom they have stolen. Alkaitis' sightings of ghosts in the prison yard-he is sentenced to several lifetimes in jail-include those who committed suicide as a result of losing their money. These people appear real to Alkaitis, just as Vincent appears to Paul towards the end of the novel,.
St. John Mandel's previous novel, the bestselling Station Eleven, told the stories of characters who experience a pandemic with a 99 per cent mortality rate that destroys civilisation as we know it. Read it, for the characterisation-which is disturbingly psychologically accurate-for the book's countless apt and beautiful surprises (unusually, for a dystopia, the novel dwells with a band of Shakespearean actors and musicians touring post-Pandemic North America), and to reassure yourself that the Covid-19 pandemic has nothing on 'The Georgia Flu'.
The Glass Hotel takes on a similarly pertinent crisis. It is a brilliant engagement with theft, portraying all manner of appropriations: actual and financial; metaphysical and artistic. Its preoccupation with haunting and its evocation of the north-western Canadian forests beg the question of whether the theft of indigenous land, which is a question in Canada as much as it is in Australia, is the novel's great unasked question. Is she also asking the reader to think of larger, older crimes, as well as more recent and apparently pressing ones?
- Lucy Neave is the author of Who We Were.