The Glass Hotel

Last updated

The Glass Hotel
The Glass Hotel (Emily St. John Mandel).png
Cover of first edition
Author Emily St. John Mandel
Audio read byDylan Moore [1]
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish
Set in
  • Canada
  • United States
Publisher HarperCollins
Publication date
24 March 2020
Media typePrint (hardback and paperback)
Pages320
ISBN 9781443455725 (hardback)
OCLC 1128887395
813/.6
LC Class PR9199.4.M3347 G53 2020
Website www.emilymandel.com/glasshotel.html

The Glass Hotel is a 2020 novel by Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel. It is Mandel's fifth novel, and the first since winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015. [2] It follows the aftermath of a disturbing graffiti incident at a hotel on Vancouver Island and the collapse of an international Ponzi scheme.

Contents

Plot summary

Paul is a lonely student at the University of Toronto. At a nightclub, he gives some tablets to band members he was hoping to befriend and one of them dies shortly after. Paul flees to the apartment of his half-sister Vincent.

Five years later, Paul and Vincent work at a hotel on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island in the fictional Caiette, which is based on the real hamlet Quatsino. [3] Graffiti is discovered written on a window in the lobby with an acid marker, saying, "Why don't you swallow broken glass." Paul is immediately suspected and soon fired. The graffiti would appear to be intended for Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor who owns the hotel. Vincent, who is working the bar, soon enters into a relationship with Alkaitis and moves into his house in Connecticut. Her life becomes one of extreme wealth and accommodating her partner.

Alkaitis is arrested and it is revealed that his investment success is a Ponzi scheme. His complicit staff reacts in different ways to their impending demise. One flees the country, another writes an elaborate confession. Alkaitis is sentenced to 170 years in prison, where he dreams of a "counter-life" in which he escaped to a hotel in Dubai. He is often haunted by the people he defrauded.

After the collapse of the scheme, Vincent discovers that Paul has taken old videotapes of hers as the basis for musical compositions. Refusing to confront him, she takes a job as a cook on a shipping freighter. She disappears from the ship in the midst of a storm. Her onboard boyfriend is suspected of killing her. Leon Prevant, who lost his life savings investing with Alkaitis, is sent to help investigate. His co-investigator instructs him to cover up possibly incriminating evidence from an interview.

Paul finds some success as a composer. He has a long-term heroin addiction.

In an epilogue, it is revealed Vincent fell from the ship after becoming distracted by a vision of one of Alkaitis' investors. As she drowns, she experiences a series of apparent hallucinations (some of which have been referenced by other characters earlier in the book) of Alkaitis, Paul, and finally her mother, who disappeared herself when Vincent was a small child.

Inspiration

Jonathan Alkaitis' Ponzi scheme is based on the crimes of Bernie Madoff. Mandel said, "I do want to be clear about this book: it's not about any real people. It's not about Madoff — or Madoff's family or Madoff's actual staff — but the crime is the same. That was my starting point. The thing that fascinated me the most was the staff involved. I found myself thinking, 'Who are these people who show up at work every morning to perpetuate a massive crime?'" [4]

As with Station Eleven (2014), Mandel is inspired by the "invisible world" of shipping and the "ghost fleet" of freighters off the shore of Malaysia after the global financial crisis in 2008. [5] The Glass Hotel includes a reference to the "Georgia flu," the illness which drove the plot of Station Eleven. However, in this novel, the illness never became a pandemic. Two characters from Station Eleven (shipping consultants Miranda and Leon) also appear in The Glass Hotel.

Television series

In April 2022, it was announced that HBO Max will be adapting the novel into a television series, produced by Paramount Television Studios with Mandel and Patrick Somerville co-writing. [6]

Reception

On the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the novel received a cumulative "Rave" rating based on 47 reviews: six "Mixed", and the others either "Rave" or "Positive". [7]

The Atlantic said, "The Glass Hotel is a jigsaw puzzle missing its box. At the book's start, what exactly it is about or even who the major figures are is unclear. The structure 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." [8] The New Yorker said, "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 timeline." [9]

NPR claimed, "In Vincent and Paul, Mandel has created two of the most memorable characters in recent American [sic] fiction. The two are both haunted by longing and self-doubt, trying in vain to run away from their respective demons." [10] Seth Mandel at The Washington Examiner agreed, "Mandel's characters are crisply drawn, all sharp lines and living color. Everyone in the book is witty; no one is particularly likable. But taken together, their overlapping stories are gripping." [5]

Former USA President Barack Obama included the book on his list of favorite books of 2020. [11]

Awards and nominations

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Ponzi</span> Italian businessman and con artist (1882–1949)

Charles Ponzi was an Italian swindler and con artist who operated in the U.S. and Canada. His aliases included Charles Ponci, Carlo, and Charles P. Bianchi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Denny Chin</span> American judge (born 1954)

Denny Chin is a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York City. He was a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York before joining the federal appeals bench. President Bill Clinton nominated Chin to the district court on March 24, 1994, and Chin was confirmed August 9 of that same year. On October 6, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Chin to the Second Circuit. He was confirmed on April 22, 2010, by the United States Senate, filling the vacancy created by Judge Robert D. Sack who assumed senior status. Chin was the first Asian American appointed as a United States District Judge outside of the Ninth Circuit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernie Madoff</span> American fraudster and financier

Bernard Lawrence Madoff was an American financial criminal and financier who was the admitted mastermind of the largest known Ponzi scheme in history, worth an estimated $65 billion. He was at one time chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange. Madoff's firm had two basic units: a stock brokerage and an asset management business; the Ponzi scheme was centered in the asset management business.

Andrew Madoff was an American financier, best known for exposing alongside his brother the financial crimes of his father, Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme has been widely described as the most successful in history.

Mark David Madoff was an American financier who alongside his brother exposed the multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme committed by his father, Bernie Madoff.

Ruth Madoff is the widow of Bernie Madoff, the convicted American financial fraudster who served a prison sentence for a criminal financial scheme until his death in April 2021. After her husband's arrest for his fraud, she and her husband attempted suicide in 2008. While she had $70 million in assets in her name, after her husband was imprisoned, she was stripped of all of her money other than $1–2 million, by the government and by the trustee for her husband's firm, Irving Picard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Madoff investment scandal</span> Investment scandal discovered in 2008

The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former Nasdaq chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Participants in the Madoff investment scandal</span>

Participants in the Madoff investment scandal included employees of Bernard Madoff's investment firm with specific knowledge of the Ponzi scheme, a three-person accounting firm that assembled his reports, and a network of feeder funds that invested their clients' money with Madoff while collecting significant fees. Madoff avoided most direct financial scrutiny by accepting investments only through these feeder funds, while obtaining false auditing statements for his firm. The liquidation trustee of Madoff's firm has implicated managers of the feeder funds for ignoring signs of Madoff's deception.

Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot is a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) attorney. She worked on the Bernard Madoff investigation in 2004, as the Lead Investigator for the SEC on the case. She discovered key elements of the Madoff Ponzi scheme and reported them to her superiors. She was moved off the case prior to being able to complete the investigation.

Kenneth Ira Starr is an American accountant and former money manager convicted of running a $35 million Ponzi scheme with the money of numerous wealthy and celebrity clients. Sentenced in March 2011, Starr has been released from the Otisville, New York Federal Correctional Institution under the supervision of the Residential Reentry Management (RRM) field office in Brooklyn, New York. Starr served the remainder of his 7.5-year sentence in a halfway house, and his term ended in December 2016.

Shana Diane Madoff, sometimes referred to as Shana Madoff Skoller Swanson, is an American former attorney who is now a yoga teacher.

Eric J. Swanson is an American lawyer who worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and dated and eventually married the niece of Bernard Madoff while the SEC was investigating Madoff's investment firm for what was eventually revealed to be a massive Ponzi scheme. Swanson is currently the Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of BATS Global Markets, the third-largest stock exchange in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patrick Somerville</span> American novelist

Patrick Somerville is an American novelist and television writer living in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily St. John Mandel</span> Canadian writer (born 1979)

Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian novelist and essayist. She has written six novels, including Station Eleven (2014), The Glass Hotel (2020), and Sea of Tranquility (2022). Station Eleven, which has been translated into 33 languages, has been adapted into a limited series on HBO Max. The Glass Hotel was translated into twenty languages and was selected by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020. Sea of Tranquility was published in April 2022 and debuted at number three on The New York Times Best Seller list.

<i>Station Eleven</i> 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven is a novel by the Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel. It takes place in the Great Lakes region before and after a fictional swine flu pandemic, known as the "Georgia Flu,” has devastated the world, killing most of the population. The book was published in 2014, and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award the following year.

<i>The Wizard of Lies</i> 2017 Bernie Madoff biopic Barry Levinson

The Wizard of Lies is a 2017 American television biopic film directed by Barry Levinson and written by Sam Levinson, Sam Baum, and John Burnham Schwartz, based on the 2011 non-fiction book of the same name by Diana B. Henriques. The film stars Robert De Niro as businessman and fraudster Bernie Madoff, Michelle Pfeiffer as his wife Ruth Madoff, and Alessandro Nivola as their older son Mark Madoff. It aired on HBO on May 20, 2017. This is the fourth film featuring De Niro and Pfeiffer, following Stardust (2007), New Year's Eve (2011) and The Family (2013), as well as their first collaboration for television.

<i>Station Eleven</i> (miniseries) 2021 American dystopian fiction miniseries

Station Eleven is an American post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction miniseries created by Patrick Somerville based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel. The miniseries premiered on HBO Max on December 16, 2021, and ran for ten episodes until January 13, 2022.

Laurie Sandell is an American author. She had been a working journalist for over a decade before she published the first of her two books.

<i>Sea of Tranquility</i> (novel) 2022 novel by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility is a 2022 novel by the Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel. It is Mandel's sixth novel and a work of speculative fiction.

References

  1. ↑ "The Glass Hotel: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel, Dylan Moore". HarperCollins Canada . Archived from the original on 14 March 2022. Retrieved 14 April 2020.
  2. ↑ Anders, Charlie Jane (6 May 2015). "Station Eleven Wins This Year's Arthur C. Clarke Award!". io9 . Archived from the original on 14 December 2015. Retrieved 19 July 2015.
  3. ↑ Goldenberg, Judi (8 November 2019). "A Ghost Story: PW Talks with Emily St. John Mandel". Publishers Weekly . Archived from the original on 21 August 2020. Retrieved 14 August 2020.
  4. ↑ "Emily St. John Mandel's latest novel, The Glass Hotel, is a timely look at a world derailed by financial fraud". CBC Radio. 20 March 2020. Archived from the original on 30 March 2020. Retrieved 15 April 2020.
  5. 1 2 Mandel, Seth (26 March 2020). "Worlds' end". Washington Examiner . Archived from the original on 27 March 2020. Retrieved 15 April 2020.
  6. ↑ Andreeva, Nellie (1 April 2022). "'Station Eleven's Emily St. John Mandel & Patrick Somerville Team For 'The Glass Hotel' & 'Sea of Tranquility' Series Adaptations in Work at HBO Max". Deadline Hollywood . Retrieved 2 April 2022.
  7. ↑ "All Book Marks reviews for The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel". Book Marks . Literary Hub. Archived from the original on 14 March 2022. Retrieved 7 May 2020.
  8. ↑ Franklin, Ruth (March 2020). "The Art of Second Chances". The Atlantic . Archived from the original on 20 April 2020. Retrieved 15 April 2020.
  9. ↑ Waldman, Katy (26 March 2020). ""The Glass Hotel" Is a Profound Study of Responsibility in Times of Crisis". The New Yorker . Archived from the original on 10 April 2020. Retrieved 15 April 2020.
  10. ↑ Schaub, Michael (24 March 2020). "In 'The Glass Hotel,' The Disasters Are Smaller But Still Disruptive". NPR. Archived from the original on 14 April 2020. Retrieved 15 April 2020.
  11. ↑ Aklilu, Simret (18 December 2020). "Barack Obama lists his favorite books of 2020 | CNN Politics". CNN. Retrieved 23 June 2023.
  12. ↑ "3 novels, 2 short story collections shortlisted for $100K Scotiabank Giller Prize". CBC Books. 5 October 2020. Archived from the original on 5 October 2020.
  13. ↑ "2021 Winners". Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence . Archived from the original on 13 February 2021. Retrieved 12 January 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.