REVIEW: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

When an advance copy of The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, first arrived at Booktopia, the excitement was palpable. Gasps were heard and reading waitlists immediately drawn up, such is the adoration that Mandel commands. But, of course, this will come as no surprise to anybody who has ever read one of her books.

Emily St. John Mandel

As a writer, Emily St. John Mandel confounds all sense of expectation, writing the kind of intensely interesting stories that break open the novel’s potential to challenge how we engage with the people around us. In Station Eleven, Mandel’s previous novel, she used a global mass extinction event to frame a series of smaller stories about people connected by time, family, love and art, using disaster to articulate a few fundamental ideas about what remains as a culture when the unthinkable happens (a novel that has never felt more timely). It’s something Mandel repeats in The Glass Hotel–albeit on a much smaller scale–to exquisite and devastating effect.

The Glass Hotel is reminiscent of a mystery novel, weaving in and out through time and picking up various threads in order to build its story. The collapse of a Ponzi scheme in a New York investment firm shatters hundreds of lives in an instant, and years later a woman named Vincent goes missing from the upper deck of a cargo ship where she worked as a line cook. The connection between these two seemingly disparate events is slowly revealed as Mandel tugs back on a thread through Vincent’s life and weaves it together with those of many others–her drug-addicted brother Paul, her New York financier lover Jonathan, and many others–right up until the moment the threatening words “Why don’t you swallow broken glass?” appear on the window of the hotel where she works as a bartender.

It’s an unusual story and one that defies easy definition, but its sweeping arcs are evenly matched by Mandel’s contemplative prose. With it, she evokes the cold isolation of the northern Canadian island where much of the novel is set, and also that of its characters as they move beyond it. Vincent is a soul adrift, as are the many people whom her life touches, whose personal tragedies are magnified almost to the point of oblivion. The Glass Hotel hums with the lost potential of many of its key players, and eagle-eyed readers may spot a familiar character from Station Eleven among them, as if Mandel is giving them an alternate timeline. What risks being gimmicky here is instead haunting and totally affecting. Ultimately, the ways in which the characters in this book fashion a life for themselves amidst the chaos leaves the reader with a cautious sense of hope, if not optimism, that feels acutely in tune with our time. It’s quietly, yet masterfully done.

The keen emotional intelligence on display in The Glass Hotel, combined with her uncanny ability to capture the shifting capacity of human resilience, has made Emily St. John Mandel one of my favourite contemporary writers. As both a reader and a reviewer, her novels remind me of why I love what I do, and I’ll keep picking up books forever if it means I’ll find talent such as hers.

The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

Vincent is the beautiful bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel.

When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, a hooded figure scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: ‘Why don’t you swallow broken glass.’ Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from...

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About the Contributor

Olivia Fricot

Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.

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