By some miracle, although it’s hard to determine what it’s about, The Glass Hotel is never dull. Tracing the permutations of its characters’ lives is like following the intricate patterns on Moroccan tiles. The pleasure, which in the case of The Glass Hotel is abundant, lies in the patterns themselves, not in anything they mean. This is a type of art that closely approximates life, and a remarkable accomplishment for Mandel, whose prose style in this novel is more transparent and less deliberately fussy and 'literary' than in Station Eleven. This novel invites you to inhabit it without striving or urging; it’s a place to be, always fiction’s most welcome effect.
... a novel that's so absorbing, so fully realized that it draws you out of your own constricted situation and expands your sense of possibilities. For me, over the past 10 days or so, the novel that's performed that act of deliverance has been The Glass Hotel ... gorgeous and haunting ... This all-encompassing awareness of the mutability of life grows more pronounced as The Glass Hotel reaches its eerie sea change of an ending. In dramatizing so ingeniously how precarious and changeable everything is, Mandel's novel is topical in a way she couldn't have foreseen when she was writing it.
... the world of money...materializes in Ms. Mandel’s new novel, The Glass Hotel, as both familiar and profoundly strange ... The question of what is real—be it love, money, place or memory—has always been at the heart of Ms. Mandel’s fiction ... her narratives snake their way across treacherous, shifting terrain. Certainties are blurred, truth becomes malleable and in The Glass Hotel the con man thrives ... lyrical, hypnotic images—of a shoreline at dusk, for example, or a city street at dawn—suspend us in a kind of hallucinatory present where every detail is sharply defined yet queasily unreliable ... All of which is clever and, perhaps intentionally, alienating. For in this hall-of-mirrors novel, Ms. Mandel invites us to observe her characters from a distance even as we enter their lives, a feat she achieves with remarkable skill. And if the result is a sense not only of detachment but also of desolation, then maybe that’s the point.
... deeply imagined, philosophically profound reckonings with life in an age of disaster ... If Station Eleven is a mosaic—we see the outlines of the picture nearly at once, but precisely how the pieces fit together appears later—The Glass Hotel is a jigsaw puzzle missing its box ... moves forward propulsively ... The structure of The Glass Hotel is virtuosic, as the fragments of the story coalesce by the end of the narrative into a richly satisfying shape. There are wonderful moments of lyricism ... But for the most part Mandel’s language is understated, fading almost invisibly to serve the familiar pleasures of character and plot. Despite the initial disorientation of its kaleidoscopic form, The Glass Hotel is ultimately as immersive a reading experience as its predecessor, finding all the necessary imaginative depth within the more realistic confines of its world ... Mandel’s affirmation that a somewhat old-fashioned fictional model is not only relevant to our alarming new world but also deeply appropriate for it manages, remarkably, to feel both consoling and revolutionary.
Like Station Eleven,, The Glass Hotel is a hash of temporal crosscutting ... The jumping around is eventful, and feels formally daring, so that it takes a while to ask yourself whether it adds anything to the story ... Mandel doesn’t offer particular insight into either side of the Alkaitis/Madoff scheme—in flat prose, she describes both the perpetrators and victims at substantial and dutiful length, but they mostly remain opaque or generic. (The novel suffers from the fact that almost everyone in it sounds indistinguishable and is, unfortunately, as smart as the author. Too often, theirs is written dialogue, not spoken.) I wasn’t sure whether Mandel wants us to think that the wealthy are more interesting than we think, or just as lame as the caricatures have it, but if it was the former, she doesn’t succeed in showing us how, and the latter is not a very stirring premise for a novel ... Mandel’s interest seems to lie more in pointing out the ways random lives intersect rather than deriving anything enlightening from the fact that they do ... To her credit, these encounters don’t feel contrived, and certainly never for plot reasons. Simply, from time to time, her camera lifts and shows us another place and time involving one or more of the same people. Who among us hasn’t wished to look through the same viewfinder?
... may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker. It remains freshly mysterious despite its self-spoiling plot. Mandel is always casually revealing future turns of success or demise in ways that only pique our curiosity. Indeed, the fate of the story’s heroine appears in a brief, impressionistic preface, but you won’t fully appreciate that opening until you finish the whole novel and begin obsessively reading it again ... Mandel is a consummate, almost profligate world builder. One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next ... The 300 pages of The Glass Hotel work harder than most 600-page novels. When she turns to the art world, to a federal prison, to an international cargo ship, each realm rises out of the dark waters of her imagination with just as much substance as that hotel on the shore of Vancouver Island. The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next ... The complex, troubled people who inhabit Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create ever more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass.
... a striking book that's every bit as powerful— and timely—as its predecessor ... In Vincent and Paul, Mandel has created two of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction ... Mandel dedicates much of the book to the victims of Jonathan's crimes, following several people who lost their life savings in the Ponzi scheme. She treats them with compassion, which she also extends to Jonathan, humanizing but not excusing him .... Mandel's writing shines throughout the book, just as it did in Station Eleven. She's not a showy writer, but an unerringly graceful one, and she treats her characters with compassion but not pity. The Glass Hotel is a masterpiece, just as good — if not better — than its predecessor. It's a stunning look at how people react to disasters, both small and large, and the temptation that some have to give up when faced with tragedy
Mandel’s gift is to weave realism out of extremity. She plants her flag where the ordinary and the astonishing meet, where everyday people pause to wonder how, exactly, it came to this. She is our bard of waking up in the wrong time line ... One effect of Mandel’s book is to underscore the seemingly infinite paths a person might travel ... Mandel is not the first writer to observe that the world seems to hang in a delicate and improbable balance ... Mandel freshens these ideas by examining what they do to notions of responsibility ... There is a sense that, the more susceptible characters are to visions of an alternative life, the less they care about causing harm. What does crime matter if, in a parallel universe, one obeys the law? ... [Mandel's] story offers escape, but the kind that depends on and is inseparable from the world beyond it—not unlike the hotel of the title, which is triumphant and precarious at once, 'lit up,' as Mandel writes, 'against the darkness of the forest.'
Mandel’s absorbing, finely wrought new novel...paints an intricately plotted, haunting portrait of heartbreak, abandonment, betrayal, riches, corruption and reinvention in a contemporary world both strange and weirdly recognizable ... One of Station Eleven’s peripheral characters becomes part of The Glass Hotel’s plot, and a more central character in the earlier book appears here as a peripheral one. Mandel is having a bit of fun there, creating a world where her Georgia flu pandemic never happened, where these two—along with billions of other fictional people—lived on, blithely unaware of the fates the author’s imagination had visited upon them.
While The Glass Hotel is not a novel about the 2008 financial crisis, Mandel brilliantly evokes the political and historical stakes of the crash by submarining deep into the personal and moral foundations of several people involved in or affected by the Ponzi scheme ... For all the metaphysical ponderings, The Glass Hotel’s most apparent virtue is its breakneck pacing and compulsive readability. It bodes an elegant and fragmented form, one that excellently matches Mandell’s magnificent storytelling. And what more needs to be said about her storytelling? It is nothing short of an insistent and astonishing gift.
An ephemeral quality permeates the novel ... There are no heroes here and only a couple characters who inspire much sympathy, but the unique structure keeps you turning the pages. At times, you’ll find yourself flipping back to a chapter heading to find out if what you’re reading happened in 1999 or 2004, but it’s a thrill when the puzzle pieces start to fit together ... The final chapter is haunting, taking readers full circle ... It’s a sense readers will enjoy as well when they lose themselves in Mandel’s novel.
Mandel follows her bestselling post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, with a more intricately layered—and better—novel ... Mandel’s narrative does not unfold as directly and cleanly as this summary suggests. Rather, the story circles through time, deepening with each pass. This is one of its wonders. Another is how lively and sometimes mysterious the novel’s minor characters are ... Mandel is a vivid and observant storyteller. Some small observations make you laugh out loud ... a dark, disturbing story but also an enthralling one.
The novel’s multiple, at times complex changes in locale, perspective and time are signalled and made smooth through corresponding stylistic shifts ... Other times, The Glass Hotel presents like an old-fashioned mystery novel, the mystery being how the phrase 'Why don’t you eat broken glass' ended up on one of the hotel’s high glass walls around the time Vincent and Alkaitis first meet. (The horror this induces in staff and guests struck me as a bit old-fashioned. Aimed at no one in particular, the phrase is arguably more odd than menacing.) Narratively speaking, St. John Mandel is an effortless multitasker. Threads are dropped, picked up and relaced like a cat’s cradle, while the sprinkling of fantastical elements...mitigates the use of coincidence as plot strategy. It’s not always seamless. My attention wandered during a few detail-heavy stretches that felt a bit too explainingly faithful to the Madoff source material. I could not help feeling, too, that the peevish, victim-blaming Alkaitis who ends the novel, familiar from post-arrest Madoff interviews, did not quite jive with the more empathetic and reflective man we meet at the beginning. (In their inner voices, St. John Mandel’s characters can blend a bit.) Where the novel persistently shines is in its nuanced probing of the themes—guilt, complacency, loss, and theft—that serve as its ballast.
Like her last novel, The Glass Hotel shows off Mandel’s extraordinary talent for weaving a story that loops and swirls and reconnects with itself through the choices of the characters. The reader has the feeling that Mandel is an observer describing the actions of real, in-depth multidimensional characters, not a puppet-master determining the movements of cutouts she has created. The narrator’s voice, and through it the author’s, always seems genuinely curious and surprised by the story’s twists and turns ... Through it all, a surreal sense of anxious expectation mixes with a kind of comforting certainty that we are never alone, and our lives are never inconsequential ... perhaps because Mandel’s writing style is simple, straightforward, and engaging, I found myself captivated.
... in Emily St. John Mandel's fiction, there's a before and an after, but the action never feels less than rivetingly current. The author of Station Eleven returns with a new novel, and it's just as good if not better than her post-apocalyptic triumph ... Mandel's elegiac, playful rendering of the fallout remains singular, delicately threading characters and stories and worlds into an epic tapestry. The plotting marks a master in her prime, gradual before breathless; a marvel of intricacy from beginning to end — and back again.
Emily St. John Mandel’s eerie, compelling follow-up to her award-winning bestseller Station Eleven is not your grandmother’s Agatha Christie murder mystery or haunted hotel ghost story ... The novel’s ongoing sense of haunting extends well beyond its ghosts ... The narrative bounces about in time, madly foreshadows...and wraps its characters in their memories ... the ghosts in The Glass Hotel are directly connected to its secrets and scandals, which mirror those of our time: addiction, abandonment, suicide, lies, and crime, especially Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme. Mandel meticulously depicts Alkaitis and Vincent’s life of misbegotten wealth, the collapse of his scheme (modeled after Bernie Madoff’s), and the aftermath for all involved, with criminals and victims alike thrust from 'the kingdom of money' to 'the shadow country.'
Mandel asks us to feel sympathy...but the multiplicity of the collective voice keeps us at arm’s length. We are never quite implicated in their wrongdoing. Indeed, I get the distinct feeling that Mandel would rather have us sympathize with the drifters of her world. Vincent, our way into the narrative, is the heart of the novel. Apart from her propulsive monologues, which bookend the novel, she is not a character who is tied to one way of existing in the world ... In this world of parallel countries and existences, it’s difficult to get a handle on what’s worth holding onto. Like the novel’s more transient characters, success in this world is slippery, and often temporary; the possibility of a backslide is always present. Yet, Mandel succeeds in grounding the narrative. She delivers a wide-ranging tale of ruin and reckoning, without ever leaving the reader unmoored. For a writer so concerned with fracture, she’s remarkably good at keeping disparate elements all in one piece. In crisis, she creates cohesion—perhaps even community. Instead of embracing the insularity of Alkaitis’s counterlife, Mandel looks outward. The Glass Hotel reminds us there’s a whole world out there, beyond the boundaries of our bunkers.
It’s hard to see at first, but the conceit’s logic is solid ... The novel is rife with reflections, dimensions, and layered perspectives ... One of the triumphs of the book, then, is that the reading experience isn’t heavied by concept. At times the many structural divisions-titled sections within chapters, chapters within parts, seem to be a map for the writer more than the reader, but generally the scaffolding supports the spectacle without obscuring it ... reads evenly and the gaps feel intentional; Paul disappears for much of the story, but this is justified by theme and structure, the sensation of circling forward and back ... Mandel’s prose is restrained, beautiful for its observation and precision rather than its flourish. The style prevents the larger-than-life ideas from falling off balance ... Whether or not the Ponzi scheme can hold isn’t what propels The Glass Hotel. Rather, the novel explores the phenomenon of being beholden to a centre, to a conscience, to a perception of normality and time. If the centre fails, that hold can remain as a kind of haunting, one which occurs in our starkest reality ... Then again, Mandel’s work deals in catastrophe which means it looks for hope. The other way to read The Glass Hotel might be as an offering of possibility: when life as we know it fails, there’s always another one out there.
... a very artfully constructed novel ... a strange...ambitious book, and its strangeness is very much its virtue ... the novel moves between different milieux, and part of the excitement of reading it is wondering where the characters will be—or even who they will be–—as we progress ... there is a narrative momentum in wanting to know how these disparate lives will be entwined ... St John Mandel is the real real, psychologically astute, morally wise and all done in singingly beautiful prose.
... irresistible ... the large cast can be hard to keep tabs on at times, but Mandel is skilled at multiple timelines and points of view and bringing a character back into focus ... Mandel is brilliant at describing America’s 'shadow country' of displaced persons that some of Alkaitis’s victims enter after they lose all their money ... No one exists in isolation, Mandel reminds us in this gripping novel, and the ghosts of our pasts return to us again and again.
The Glass Hotel is full of ghosts ... a dreaminess...softens its complicated, elegant plot ... evocative and assured; both delicate and disturbing ... The themes may be high octane, but it is the characters—and the vignettes, asides, anxieties and the very specific identities of their ghosts—which really drive the novel. Mandel writes beautifully, saying so much with such economy, and she makes a complicated plot involving so many faces and places feel effortless. For a story so interested in morality, it never moralises: the crimes of its characters are not politicised nor used for some higher purpose, but presented as experiments in human action. Many of its threads are left untied, but somehow this is never unsatisfying: instead, the fates of those characters become benign ghosts of your own, ensuring Mandel’s extraordinary novel haunts long after you’ve finished it.
It’s in construction, rather than storytelling, where The Glass Hotel falls short. Mandel structures it non-chronologically ... Rather than intriguing us about how seemingly disparate events are connected, Mandel’s book frustrates us because, just when we’re beginning to warm to new characters in a new situation, she introduces a whole new set of characters in another new situation with another new narrator ... Mandel is adept at creating believable dialogue and situations ... The other stuff, though? Yawn ... Mandel’s prose is such a pleasure to read, and I remained curious about her protagonist. But my let’s-wrap-this-up attitude gave way to real delight in the skill with which Mandel brings together themes that have occupied previous sections of the novel, revisiting earlier characters and incidents from surprising new perspectives in a narrative sleight of hand ... Mandel’s conclusion is dazzling, and even though there are moments in the book where you may wonder if it’s going anywhere, The Glass Hotel is absolutely worth checking into.
... brilliant ... Mandel’s exquisite narratorial juggling is her way of casting light on how we see our lives and attempt to shape them — in retrospect, in anticipation, in our imaginations ... fascinating ... Mandel is ingenious at evoking how deceptions take hold ... Mandel is a marvelous writer...But the keenest pleasure of The Glass Hotel is simply in the magic with which it immerses you in the calm, disorienting way that Mandel and her stubborn, enigmatic heroine see the world.
... a stunning tapestry of interconnected stories that explore corruption, alternate lives, haunting pasts, and consequences. The way Mandel gets inside the heads of her characters and puts their thoughts on the page is masterful. Mysterious, philosophical, and intricate, The Glass Hotel is literary fiction at its finest.
... much more than a retelling of one of the 20th century’s most spectacular financial frauds. There is a complex grace to The Glass Hotel that’s often lacking from contemporary fiction, particularly contemporary thriller fiction. It’s not simply Mandel’s deft prose, her ability to write Dickensian networks of coincidence, but her keen observation of human behavior: our fears, our dreams, what drives us, and what might ultimately destroy or save each of us ... From the opening scene of the book, I was hooked ... There is a sort of musicality to the novel that appears not only in Paul’s musical obsessions but also in the repetition of small phrases that are lyric-like throughout; appearing as sort of refrains or hints of connectivity ... a superbly wrought ending to the novel: a stunningly good meditation on human frailty, the nature of love, and what it means to survive in the modern world.
... masterful ... prescient as Station Eleven has proved to be in our current moment, The Glass Hotel”— despite its near-past setting in the years between 1999 and 2018 — feels uncannily reflective of the crisis we’re living through now ... heartbreakingly resonant ... Maybe we don’t understand life during a pandemic better by reading about a fictionalized pandemic. Instead, we need art like The Glass Hotel, a novel that argues that our stories are tied up in each other’s, that reminds us, when we are in isolation, of our connection.
The novel proceeds via a series of vignettes ... They gradually knit themselves into a single story in a way that will remind readers of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad ... The Glass Hotel plays out not just in real locations but in shadow worlds of fantasy and in the 'counterlives' of the characters. Some of the satisfaction we might have gotten from seeing characters resolve their issues with one another is lessened when matters are taken care of by ghosts. This is a strange, ethereal, and very well-written book, so interesting it might actually take your mind off things for a while.
The delicate braiding of many different characters’ perspectives is most tantalizing in Station Eleven ... It’s a joy to pull at the threads and follow their knots and loops. This interweaving is displayed prominently in The Glass Hotel ... windows frame compromises and catastrophes in Emily St. John Mandel’s fiction. And despite all the glass, there is more conflict than clarity. This makes for compulsively readable novels, carefully crafted page-turners. Don’t just say you’ll visit someday. Call ahead. Make a reservation. Check out the view from The Glass Hotel. Enjoy your stay.
It might not be the right moment to revisit a novel about viral apocalypse, but Mandel’s piercing eye for precarity and possibility is still a welcome one. The Glass Hotel is just as timely as its predecessor, with its flickering images of financial collapse, the opioid epidemic, and the genuinely different spheres of existence that different classes inhabit. A novel of disaster, guilt, and ephemeral human connection, it is a ghost story for a post-2008 world ... Mandel’s ability to connect these different forms of haunting is a magic act in and of itself...she haunts through tone, through emotional resonance, and through missed connections and fleeting moments of insight. I’d be hard-pressed to describe this novel as genre fiction, but the relationship it weaves between the supernatural and the very real realm of human emotion is a fascinating one ... bizarre and literary and utterly haunting. In an era of social upheaval and economic precarity, it’s a novel that lays bare the grief at the heart of our disconnection.
...a novel that jumps back and forth through time and place, with a fracturing narrative and a constant sense of deliberate disorientation. Extraneous characters with strange connections to each other multiply, and there are too many apparitions. The shards of storytelling splinter. This is by design, but it adds up to less of a coherent whole than Station Eleven, where Mandel pulls off similar tricks to great effect ... The hours before the whole edifice of ludicrously high returns comes crashing down, the arrests, court case and fallout as the staff who were complicit face disgrace — it’s all masterfully done. And the conman Alkaitis in jail is an interesting study of corrupted memory ... It’s chilling stuff.
As with many contemporary novels, the narrative follows a nonlinear path. Early characters fade far (too far?) into the background, and the past and present lives of newly introduced characters fill the frame ... The novel’s ever-present metaphors of glass and water allure. Yet a certain coldness spills over onto central characters. The pretense of the their shiny, glass-like lives influences our feelings, and it’s hard not to crave greater warmth and character development. Vincent isn’t unlikable, and we don’t blame her for choosing a different life. Neither is Alkaitis intensely unlikable, but the reader hungers for clues providing insight into the workings of their minds ... The Glass Hotel circles back to revisit...connections, yet it leaves the reader longing for a richer exploration of their import.
... an elegant, haunting story ... I classified it as a thriller at first, in part thanks to its eerie cover, but it turns out to be something more nuanced: although we start with a woman falling from a ship, and end by finding out how she went overboard, the death ultimately is almost peripheral. Mandel introduces a large cast with their own well-realised preoccupations ... I was so absorbed by each of their perspectives that I was bereft then to have them drift in and out of the novel, as every character does, and indeed the way the narrative hops between locations, people and moments in time may try the patience of some readers. But Mandel’s storytelling is imaginative ... Throughout the book people see ghosts and visions, but Mandel never indulges fully in the supernatural; instead, it’s a unique rumination on guilt, grief and regret.
Alkaitis is a fairly straightforward avatar of Bernie Madoff. The Glass Hotel finds its originality where Mandel blends her fable of financial collapse with ghost stories ... Sometimes these ghosts are literal: A dead character from some half-forgotten chapter will suddenly appear in another character’s life. Other ghosts are figurative: Though Alkaitis goes to jail rather than dying, the specter of his crime follows his victims wherever they go. It’s as if money itself has a ghost, in the form of the chill it leaves behind when it’s gone ... Mandel once said that she has struggled to talk about genre, since her books skirt sci-fi and crime fiction but do not belong to either. I, too, struggle to describe what kind of fiction this is. There’s a slight lethargy to The Glass Hotel, which comes from its odd rhythm: that explosive first scene gives way to a pacing that ebbs and flows. In moving away from plots with conventional rhythm, toward a pulsating, push-pull fascination with crisis situations and disintegrating systems, Mandel has taken her novel-writing practice somewhere both traditional (the polyphonic psychological novel) and quite experimental (I had to read The Glass Hotel twice to figure out where two major characters had come from—it can be difficult to keep up).
... lofty moral and social meditations which, while rewarding, can feel untethered ... The shifting narrative voices can make it difficult to emotionally connect with any one character ... It requires an act of faith to trust that Mandel will find a way to meaningfully connect these threads. She's earned such trust; have faith it will be rewarded.
...as we face Covid-19, the strange, masochistic allure of havoc-lit has catapulted Mandel’s post-pandemic tale of itinerant Shakespearean actors back into bestseller territory. How better to while away a stint in lockdown than by bending our waking terrors into the most comforting and redemptive of shapes – the narrative arc ... Mandel has not penned a ticking-clock prequel; rather, her new novel is a portrait of everyday obliviousness, the machinery of late neoliberalism juddering along with characteristic inequity ... It’s a beguiling conceit: the global financial crisis as a ghost story ... All contemporary novels are now pre-pandemic novels – Covid-19 has scored a line across our culture – but what Mandel captures is the last blissful gasp of complacency, a knowing portrait of the end of unknowing. It’s the world we inhabited mere weeks ago, and it still feels so tantalisingly close; our ache for it still too raw to be described as nostalgia...
While it’s an expansive ensemble, The Glass Hotel is at its most compelling when centered with Vincent, who serves as a somewhat chilly yet fascinating protagonist ... Mandel makes it clear in the end notes that the Madoff scandal was a key inspiration for Jonathan’s plotline, and one of the novel’s weakest points is how much she draws upon real life for this ... The Glass Hotel is a challenging novel to discuss with digging into crucial plot developments, but what remains haunting about it is the way it transforms familiar environments into expansive worlds. Mandel’s prose is clean and richly detailed, and she seems to know just the right amount of depth to include in each moment ... It’s far from an optimistic text, but its realism is a more soothing balm at times.
What Mandel does, in her layered and tender narratives, is show the haunting that love and good intentions can create ... 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 ... The Glass Hotel also places life and dying into their necessary parallel positions of meaning ... Mandel’s symphony of belief and offerings builds slowly to a pattern that, in the midst of loss, insists on giving 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.
...a mesmerizing puzzle box of a book, one whose many interconnected parts are in seemingly constant motion, both through space and time. That sense of propulsive perpetuity creates an almost insatiable hunger in the reader; we simply can’t stop ... A work of literature that is truly special is a rare thing. Knowing that said work of literature is special even as you read it is much rarer. The Glass Hotel is an example of the latter, a book that announces itself with such triumphant confidence that you’re ready to sing its praises to the skies after just a scant handful of pages. Compelling characterizations, narrative vividity, thematic complexity – often, you’re lucky to get just two of those three, even in quality works. To have the trio represented so fully is a gift ... Mandel is a writer of many gifts; one of her greatest is the ability to breathe life into unusual settings ... We see the lifestyles of the rich and famous juxtaposed against the people eventually destroyed by those lifestyles, either directly or indirectly. And every setting – physical, emotional or both – is rendered with breathtaking clarity by Mandel ... The Glass Hotel is masterful, an elegantly constructed work of great emotional power and literary sophistication. While the narrative complexity is significant, it never once enters into the realm of convolution; every piece of the puzzle is placed just so, allowing the overall picture to appear in exactly the manner in which the author intends ... Truly a great book, one that will stay with you long after the last page is turned.
... a richly rewarding take on the fallout of fraudulent financial schemes and the unintended consequences that seep into the lives tarnished by them ... a breathtaking narrative that shuttles forward and backward in time and bounces geographically ... past, present, and future will collide and converge in ways that delight readers and could leave them feeling a little shocked. The stunning appeal of The Glass Hotel is how author Mandel uses overlapping scenes like a split screen and artfully replays previous moments until the novel circles back on itself to a haunting revelation in 2018.
Mandel’s crystal ball and uncanny sense of timing remain intact ... simply stunning, a boldly experimental work which hooks the reader from its first pages, wending to a powerfully emotional conclusion ... a delicate web of a novel, tentative and fragile connections woven over time ... but...the strands are so strong, the weaving so complex, that this intimate book is able to carry the weight of global socio-economic ruin, shattered careers, and betrayal ... The Glass Hotel becomes stronger, and more powerful, with every page.
Mandel's work, in Station Eleven and elsewhere, is best characterized by its rapturous fascination with those quiet, often-overlooked moments in which character is determined and lives are shaped ... With The Glass Hotel, Mandel again proves her ability to shift between points of view and to disguise thoughtful character studies in the garb of action-driven drama, this time that of a mystery novel ... Mandel's characters are always possessed of a complex and thrilling inner life — and they are often on the run, haunted by their mistakes and secrets ... If Station Eleven, with the Traveling Symphony's motto of 'survival is insufficient,' paints a hopeful picture of society's rebirth from its own ashes, then The Glass Hotel is a reminder of the kindling that fed the flame — and the detritus of a selfish society that, if rebirth is to occur, must be left in the past.
...an icy-smooth tale crafted in crystalline prose ... Mandel delicately illuminates the devastation wreaked on the fraud’s victims while brilliantly teasing out the hairsbreadth moments in which a person can seamlessly slide into moral corruption, as both Vincent and Paul—an addict in and out of recovery—do, rudderless The Glass Hotel isn’t so much plot driven as it is coiled—a taut braid of lives undone by Alkaitis’ and others’ grifts. Unlike its predecessor...the book relies not on a dystopian vision of the future but on where we are now: negotiating slippery ethics and questionable compromises, and the liminal space between innocence and treachery.
The Glass Hotel is a sprawling, immersive book. In places it is disorientating, as the narrative chops between timelines and perspectives. Minor characters, such as Vincent’s half-brother, drift in and out. And yet the novel’s scope and brimming vitality are also its strengths. Vincent’s encounters with the plutocracy are memorably realised; so are Alkaitis’s concoction of a 'counterlife' in his prison cell and his employees’ struggles to save their skins ... In the end, all the stories are drawn together by a single question: can you ever escape what you have done in the past, and what has been done to you? 'There are so many ways to haunt a person,” the author writes, “or a life.'
The novel’s ever-present metaphors of glass and water allure. Yet a certain coldness spills over onto central characters. The pretense of the their shiny, glass-like lives influences our feelings, and it’s hard not to crave greater warmth and character development. Vincent isn’t unlikable, and we don’t blame her for choosing a different life. Neither is Alkaitis intensely unlikable, but the reader hungers for clues providing insight into the workings of their minds.
The book is loosely based on Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but The Glass Hotel is vastly different from the economic thriller it could have been. Instead of focusing on the logistics of the scheme itself, the book intricately weaves together the lives of many characters who come into contact with Jonathan Alkaitis and his investment venture, both before and after his arrest. Although the novel lacks the excitement that might be expected of such a book, Mandel has done again what she does best: wrapping up the stories of a large cast of characters into one cohesive package ... The downfall of this novel is that it isn’t particularly exciting or suspenseful. It’s clear early on that at some point, Alkaitis will get caught ... Luckily, the novel is fairly short and Mandel has a trick up her sleeve. As in Station Eleven, this book comes full circle by explaining strange occurrences from the early chapters and giving characters symbolic ends to their story arc in a way that feels particularly poetic. Almost everything falls into place — though Mandel does leave the slightest bit of mystery — which propels the story for the final 50 pages or so despite the story’s overall lack of excitement.
Highly recommended; with superb writing and an intricately connected plot that ticks along like clockwork, Mandel offers an unnerving critique of the twinned modern plagues of income inequality and cynical opportunism.
Mandel follows her breakout dystopian hit, Station Eleven ...with another tale of wanderers whose fates are interconnected, this time by a Ponzi scheme rather than the demise of most of the world’s population ... Mande...manages to build nail-biting tension ... Mandel weaves an intricate spider web of a story, connecting the people whom Jonathan and Vincent’s lives touch and irrevocably change, from Vincent’s feckless brother to the small group of colleagues abetting Jonathan’s scheme to the people whose fortunes are decimated by Jonathan’s machinations. A gorgeously rendered tragedy.
Mandel’s wonderful novel...follows a brother and sister as they navigate heartache, loneliness, wealth, corruption, drugs, ghosts, and guilt ... Using flashbacks, flash-forwards, alternating points-of-view, and alternate realities, Mandel shows the siblings moving in and out of each other’s lives, different worlds, and versions of themselves, sometimes closer, sometimes further apart, like a double helix, never quite linking. This ingenious, enthralling novel probes the tenuous yet unbreakable bonds between people and the lasting effects of momentary carelessness
Slowly, Mandel reveals how her characters struggle to align their stations in life with their visions for what they could be ... It's in these dreamy sections that Mandel's ideas about guilt and responsibility, wealth and comfort, the real and the imagined, begin to cohere. At its heart, this is a ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical ... In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure … A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.
