The Glass Hotel — the downfall of a Madoff-style fraudster
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Can money protect someone from disaster? The theme of The Glass Hotel is a fitting question to consider during a pandemic, and one almost perfectly suited to the imagination of the Canadian novelist Emily St John Mandel. Station Eleven (2014), her earlier success, offered an enthralling picture of life in the near future after a deadly flu wipes out much of modern civilisation. Since reading it, everyday luxuries such as electricity, telephones, running water — even books themselves — have looked different. And that vivid version of a disaster all too close to the one we are living through now makes her latest novel’s publication somewhat unnerving.
In this book, Mandel moves back in time. It is 2008 and we are witnessing a different kind of precariousness: the financial crisis leads to the exposure of financier Jonathan Alkaitis as a fraudster who has been running a Ponzi scheme for over a decade. He and his self-described trophy wife Vincent (the protagonist) inhabit “the kingdom of money” — a place that she, a once and future waitress and ship’s cook, knows she is just visiting. Vincent and some of the characters who are ruined when the scheme collapses then return to the “shadow country”, where people flit between mobile homes, from menial job to menial job. At one point she serves drinks to a former good friend, the wife of an investor, who refuses to acknowledge her — is it the shame of the fraud or the low status that turns her into a subservient ghost to rich New Yorkers on the other side of the bar?
It’s one of many hauntings, metaphorical and real, throughout 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.
But the fates of the restless Vincent and her shiftless brother Paul, the pairing at the heart of the novel, provide a disturbing and unifying bookend — one reinvents himself to cope with the impermanence that is the theme of the novel, but only through theft; the other adapts to survive, but only for a while.
Readers who favour more conventional narratives will enjoy the compelling account of the financial fraud (based, says Mandel in her acknowledgments, on the Bernard Madoff case), which uses multiple points of view with no sacrifice of pace or plot. 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: the outward shapes of those he ruined pop up alarmingly in the prison yard and his cell. He occupies his thoughts with a parallel world, a “counterlife” in which he is still walking the lobbies of luxury hotels. He struggles at times to know which life track he really took.
We begin and end with a fatal plunge overboard into icy seas, and it’s a pretty good indication that there are no safe places in this doom-laden work — it shares Station Eleven’s fascination with the disappearance of known worlds as disaster strikes. The conman’s daughter looks at a photograph of the paterfamilias she is handed as they clear the office, “an artefact of a civilisation that had recently ended”.
No one comes through unscathed and the comeuppances are unfairly and unevenly handed out. Everyone seems to be trying to escape, on the run, but without finding refuge or solace. Eventually, the fractured memories and narratives come together through the conceit of all these lives flashing before the eyes of someone drowning. It’s chilling stuff. But the writer is teasing us too — one whodunnit is solved, another is revealed as no crime at all.
The disorientating feelings really multiply when two of the characters from Station Eleven appear — have they not, after all, been struck down by its pandemic? Did we, the readers, hallucinate the deaths that Mandel so convincingly narrated for us in the earlier book? Is this their “counterlife”? Sadly, as you close the covers of this peculiar and unsettling novel, the horror has become all too real.
The Glass Hotel , by Emily St John Mandel, Picador, RRP£14.99, 320 pages
Miranda Green is the FT’s deputy comment editor
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