THE GLASS HOTEL
By Emily St. John Mandel
The success of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 National Book Award-nominated novel “Station Eleven,” in which a band of artists travel a post-pandemic North American landscape (and which may merit a rereading after you’ve finished rewatching “Contagion”), inspired a lot of the usual talk about genre and literary fiction, and whether here was another shining example of the distinction’s decline. “The thing that makes ‘Station Eleven’ National Book Award material,” Joshua Rothman wrote in The New Yorker — in other words, the thing that makes it literary — “is that the survivors are artists.” As further evidence, Rothman cited the fact that the Travelling Symphony (as the group calls itself) performs Shakespeare rather than whatever will pass for pop culture after the apocalypse.
For me, the boundary has always come down to something different: the complexity of the feelings and ideas the work inspires; the labor that has gone into its voices; and, simply, how engaging it is. These criteria have less to do with what makes fiction genre vs. literary than, simply, what makes it good. For me, it isn’t enough that a book deploys Shakespeare, and even cites “King Lear” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” fluently, as “Station Eleven” did. Rather, does it have anything interesting to say about Shakespeare? Or about pop culture, for that matter?
In this formulation, “genre” is a pejorative adjective for any kind of mediocre writing rather than a designation for nonliterary styles, and can easily refer to mediocre fiction that happens to carry “literary” markers. The postapocalyptic reality I fantasize about has done away with jacket copy, blurbs and bookstore shelf markings, and we all wander around in a happy daze, finding joy from the last things we expected.
[ Read an excerpt from “The Glass Hotel.” ]
This brings me back to Mandel, who has a new novel out, her fifth, “The Glass Hotel.” By the prevailing definitions, this is a literary novel without even a whiff of genre around it — it’s largely a description of events, public and personal, surrounding the exposure of a Ponzi scheme with close resemblance to Bernie Madoff’s. In the novel, Jonathan Alkaitis claims he acted alone, as did Madoff; there is an ignored Cassandra in the image of the Madoff whistle-blower Harry Markopolos; here, too, the S.E.C. mishandles an early investigation; and exactly five Alkaitis employees are involved.
Like “Station Eleven,” “The Glass Hotel” is a hash of temporal crosscutting. We get a young man named Paul screwing up first at university and then at a job at a remote British Columbia hotel, before reappearing 100 pages later to some success as a video artist, except that the videos aren’t his, as he claims. We see Vincent, Paul’s half sister, whose mother apparently drowned herself, move from a bartender job at the same hotel to life as a trophy partner for Jonathan Alkaitis and then to a grimmer fate still. We see Leon Prevant, who had a cameo in “Station Eleven,” start as a well-off shipping executive and end as something less exalted. All these histories flash back and forward.
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. The reason for the before-and-after in “Station Eleven” was baked into its premise, though for reasons of technique more than the “strange twist of fate that connects” the main characters, as promised by the back copy. A novel about the gradual onset of apocalypse would have to spend a lot of time elaborating the incremental transformation of our lives, whereas a novel set in the future has to describe only what it’s like then. It’s less clear why “The Glass Hotel” hopscotches in time.
Mandel doesn’t emphasize it or suggest it as a reason for the time travel, but this book has a before-and-after as well, its repercussions for this continent potentially as irreversible as a flu pandemic. “The Glass Hotel” begins in 1999, which, in retrospect, feels a little like 1899 — no smartphones, no streaming, no social media, and right around the time C.E.O.-worker salary ratios were skyrocketing from worrisome to obscene. Since then, it has become a lot easier to ignore one another’s difficulties, the not-seeing made possible by money and technology.
“Station Eleven” had a uniting element, and so does this book, also brought forth at the end. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal it: “We both got corrupted,” Vincent tells Paul, presumably speaking also for Alkaitis and even Leon Prevant, who goes along with a lie though for somewhat more excusable reasons. As book-culminating insights go, Vincent leaves this reader longing for something more elusive. And 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.
There are quite a few overarching metaphors — about things like seeing and invisibility, visions and corporeal being — lurking around the book, but I hoped to encounter a more interesting psychological consequence of Alkaitis’s fraud than the fact that he starts having visions of people he wronged. This happens a lot to the novel’s characters when intense emotion overcomes them. These moments call out to one another in a well-constructed matrix of nominal associations, but they rarely feel inevitable or indispensable.
“Station Eleven” had a similar difficulty. The Travelling Symphony’s motto, “Survival is insufficient,” comes from “Star Trek.” A comic book plays a central role. But the troupe mainly performs Shakespeare because “people wanted what was best about the world.” High-low, high-low. But these attachments — to “Star Trek,” to comic books, to Shakespeare — manifest weakly in the characters. As Sigrid Nunez wrote in these pages, “The survivors do not think, act or speak like people struck by such a cataclysm” as the flu pandemic. “The hairs never rose on the back of my neck; my eyes never filled with tears.” Something very dramatic happens to Vincent at the end of “The Glass Hotel,” but I merely knew — rather than felt — why she does what she does, Mandel having hinted at it earlier in the story.
In “The Glass Hotel,” as in “Station Eleven,” 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. (Though she does provide very knowledgeable elaboration of all sorts of disparate fields, from shipping to finance.) 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?
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