I have tried and tried to read Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s blockbuster hit from 2014, but just haven’t been able to get into it – so I can’t say I am a fan of hers. But after reading the blurb for her latest, The Glass Hotel, I was happy to receive a copy from Knopf Doubleday and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
The book almost feels like two books in one: the first and final sections, entitled “Vincent In the Ocean,” feature one of the main characters: a woman named Vincent who has apparently fallen from a ship and is drowning. It turns out that she is a bartender at a five-star hotel in a very isolated spot on the northern end of Vancouver Island. It’s one of those places where rich people go when they want to experience their version of roughing it: “Very few people who go to the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness…don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent…”
Vincent and her brother Paul, a second main character, work at the hotel, which is located near where they grew up. While away at school, Paul had wanted SO badly to fit in (don’t we all?) One night, he went to a club trying to buddy up to a classmate named Tim, who “…seemed not to understand humor. It was like talking to an anthropologist from another planet.” One night, after a horrific incident occurs at the club, Paul escapes and goes back to B.C. and the hotel where Vincent was working. He’s on the night shift one evening when the hotel owner, the fabulously wealthy Jonathan Alkaitis (the third main character), arrives for a visit and changes the siblings’ lives forever.
It turns out that back in the real world, Jonathan is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through the accounts of his clients in both his brokerage and investment management businesses. It’s very much modeled on the Bernie Madoff scheme, but it’s not a retelling of his activities/crimes. Jonathan’s business empire consists of two distinct entities: the brokerage, a legitimate operation on the 18th floor of a Manhattan high-rise, and the Ponzi scheme, one floor below, which runs alongside the brokerage, and destroys countless fortunes and devastates the lives of a huge number of clients. The story of the Ponzi scheme and its collapse and how that affected the lives of many people, including the three main characters, was the best part of the book for me.
I’ve always been fascinated by the people around financial criminals: did they know? They HAD to know, didn’t they? Could Madoff’s wife and family REALLY not know? In this book, ALkaitis says “…we all know what we do here.” And why didn’t they call the authorities? The perception of the employees who work on the 17th floor is that they “…had crossed a line, that much was obvious, but it was difficult to say later exactly where that line had been. Or perhaps we’d all had different lines, or crossed the same line at different times.” And “…when you’ve worked with a given group of people for a while, calling the authorities means destroying the lives of your friends…we were only one corrupted branch of an otherwise perfectly aboveboard operation.”
I was both attracted to and terrified by the horror of the victims. One of them, Leon, lost everything. When he and his wife lose their home, they move into their RV, and live a somewhat itinerant lifestyle of the somewhat homeless. It’s fascinating to watch their growing awareness of going from fabulously wealthy to being “… citizens of a shadow country.” Mandel uses Leon and Marie’s experiences in the “shadow country” to reveal the grim reality for a growing segment of the U.S. population: “…shelters fashioned from cardboard under overpasses, tents glimpsed in the bushes alongside expressways, houses with boarded-up doors but a light shining in an upstairs window. He’s always been vaguely aware of its citizens…he’d just never thought he’d have anything to do with it. Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country…enough money…but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they’d all been cut loose, they’d slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.”
When everything hits the fan, Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, is able to just walk off into the night and disappear. For all three main characters, it’s a story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel is a terrific writer, and this will be great for book clubs. TBH, I think I would have enjoyed it even more if it had been focused only on the events around the Ponzi scheme, with the three main characters revolving around it. But it’s so beautifully written, I can overlook that. I loved it. Five stars. And I realized I love the “financial thriller” genre…