Why don’t you swallow broken glass.
Late at night in the Hotel Caiette, someone writes a vicious and weirdly specific message on the lobby’s glass wall. The strangest part of the whole incident is that it happens so late at night that hardly anyone sees it. The grafitti disturbs the night manager, upsets an insomniac customer, and frightens the bartender; after that it’s quickly hidden and the hotel owner – Jonathan Alkaitis – never even knows it was there.
Years later, Mr. Alkaitis will be arrested when the international Ponzi scheme he’s been running collapses and his thousands of clients lose everything.
Inspired (at least in part) by the Bernie Madoff scandal, Emily St. John Mandel’s latest book The Glass Hotel is so, so much more than a true-crime drama or a morality play. It takes the reader inside the lives of the victims. And the perpetrators. And the people close to them. And jumps backward and forward in time (and reality) and spirals out into their histories, their future, their prison time and regrets (if they have any) and the ghosts that they can’t get rid of. It’s dreamlike in places, down to earth in others, and completely addictive. The book took less than a week for me to read, and it’s that wonderful kind of absorbing that kept making me think, “Okay, just one more chapter…”
“So in order for your scheme to succeed for as long as it did, a great many people had to believe in a story that didn’t actually make sense.”
In case anyone’s unclear on the concept, A Ponzi scheme is like embezzlement, except instead of spending someone else’s money on luxuries or gambling, you simply failed to give your client the insanely high return that you’d promised. You can’t admit this for whatever reason, so you tell wild stories of how much money there is to be made in order to recruit more people, and use their money to fulfill your promises to the people who came first. And then recruit more people in order to pay the second group. Lather, rinse, repeat.
A Ponzi scheme will eventually fail. It’s designed to fail. Anyone running one knows that it’s only a matter of time before the worst happens, a lot like someone who uses heroin or stays in a really unhealthy relationship, both of which come up in the story as well. The book is a leisurely, endlessly fascinating character study of people who both know and don’t know (or don’t let themselves know) that what they’re doing is a terrible idea.
There are multiple tracks interweaving in the plot; the main ones follow the charming con man and fantastically wealthy Jonathan Alkaitis, and his companion Vincent (named after the poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay), who made the decision to become Jonathan’s trophy wife for the simple reason that not having to think about money is nothing short of magical. Along with them are characters that show up in extended vignettes, people living completely different lives but with a spiderweb of connections that kept surprising me: Olivia the painter, Jonathan’s host of co conspirators (which do not include Jonathan’s adult daughter), Leon the hapless investor, and Vincent’s half brother Paul, with his drug habit and his ongoing issues with his half-sister Vincent.
I don’t hate Vincent, he told himself silently, I’ve only ever hated Vincent’s incredible good fortune at being Vincent instead of me.
Just like in Mandel’s previous book, events are told out of chronological order. The first chapter starts at the end of the story, and most of the book goes by before we find out what the graffiti on the window of the Hotel Caiette was all about. We jump from 13-year-old Vincent dealing (badly) with the death of her mother, to Paul’s (failed) college career, to Vincent’s life in the lap of luxury with Jonathan, to Jonathan’s life in prison after being sentenced to 170 years for securities fraud. We see Jonathan’s secretary Simone telling someone at a cocktail party decades in the future about her time with a criminal boss, and then back to a few years after the scandal to Leon and his wife spending their retirement in an RV after abandoning their mortgage.
There isn’t anything subtle about the foreshadowing. The reader is told right up front that Jonathan will destroy countless lives, his own included. You know everything that’s going to happen. And at the same time you don’t know. You don’t know how it affects each individual. How did their lives twist and turn to get them to this point? How will they react? How will the people they thought of as friends react? How will they rationalize every betrayal, like Paul with his therapist, endlessly spinning how committing a murder doesn’t really make him a murderer, since he didn’t actually mean it, and anyway he’s different now, and around, and around, and around.
Mandel tells all of this with dreamlike imagery and short sharp punches of dialog. I loved the glass-and-cedar hotel in the middle of nowhere in Vancouver, which ends up being one person’s idea of paradise. And then we have Simone turning down an invitation for drinks in the most satisfyingly cold way possible. I particularly liked an almost homey scene of two people in the office late at night, sipping expensive scotch and shredding documents long, long past the time when it will do any good. There’s the odd wish to see a disaster, just so you can find out what it’s like when the worst happens (ah, remember when Y2K was the biggest thing we were scared of?) and the heart-stopping moment when you know the worst has already happened.
…he rose, and wandered away from her, toward the glass atrium wall, toward the phone call that would split his life neatly into a before and an after.
In addition to time, what the story circles around is the concept of different worlds. The walls between the real world and daydreams start to break down as Jonathan retreats into a reality where he was never arrested. Memories are unreliable; the world that a mother on her last day before prison remembers is completely different from what her shell-shocked children recall. Everyone is haunted by ghosts, which may be hallucinations based on regret, or may actually be real. Vincent spends a lot of time thinking about the Country of Money, or the Age of Money, which creates a different world from the one that people who lose everything (or never had anything to begin with) fall into.
But they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of any abyss.
The Glass Hotel from the title is the Hotel Caiette, but also a nod to how transitory life is, every part of it, and how transparent it is to the other lives around us, even if we don’t always see those other lives…
…or, as I’m sure all of us are dealing with now, just how quickly everything can change