In March, as corona virus started spreading rapidly and most of us began to quarantine, I couldn’t stop thinking about Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel about a devastating global flu and its survivors. “This is just like the book,” I’d say, almost daily, while walking through ransacked grocery stores, listening to overwhelmed doctors on the news.
When I got sick of Zoom happy hours, I picked up Mandel’s new novel, The Glass Hotel, hoping for more of the same prescience. While this one isn’t about a pandemic—it takes place in the same world as Station Eleven but in an alternate future, where the Georgian Flu was successfully contained and eradicated—it might be even more relevant to our current circumstances.
Emily St. John Mandel
The Glass Hotel jumps around in time, following multiple characters as their narratives intersect and overlap. They are mostly united by their participation in a Ponzi scheme run by Jonathan Alkaitis, a Bernie Madoff type who has made a lot of financial promises he can’t keep. We get to know Alkaitis’ victims as well as the staff members —in the form of an “Office Chorus”— who helped Alkaitis forge the fund’s documents.
But we spend most of the book with Vincent, who meets Alkaitis while bartending in a hotel he owns and quickly agrees to become his pretend trophy wife. It’s the escape hatch she’s been waiting for, taking her away from her complicated relationship with her half-brother and the ghost of her mother, whose death may have been a suicide. Most importantly, it gives her a sort of economic freedom, entrance into what she calls the kingdom of money. “That’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money,” she reflects. “If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.”
NoMad Bar at the NoMad Hotel, New York, photo by Taylor Davidson.
When Alkaitis’ scheme crumbles, we watch Mandel’s characters respond in ways both practical and not. One employee walks calmly out of the office and hops an international flight. Leon Prevant, a shipping executive in Station Eleven, is here a retiree devastated by the loss of his savings, forced to live out of an RV with his wife in what he calls “the shadowlands” of the poor. Vincent reinvents herself as a crew member on a shipping freighter. Alkaitis, in prison, disassociates—imagining a world where he’s still free, still rich. Though, no matter where he is, he sees the ghosts of his victims.
This is, in fact, a ghost story. Like Alkaitis, some of the characters are followed by actual apparitions of the people they’ve hurt. Affluent characters can’t seem to see the service workers toiling all around them. But most of the haunting is self-inflicted. Mandel’s characters can’t forget the people they used to be, the people they could have been, the people they might still be. Vincent is “struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events.”
The Glass Hotel isn’t about a pandemic. But in a year of lost jobs, anti-maskers, and cancelled plans, when uneven fortunes are more apparent than ever, it asks the questions we’re all grappling with right now. How do we cope with uncertain futures, tragedy, loss? How do we pass our trauma on to others, in ways we might not even notice? And, most importantly, how do we stop?
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