Reviews with content warning for Cancer - The Glass Hotel

I really loved Emily St John Mandel's pandemic/apocalypse novel 'Station Eleven' when I read it a few years ago (pre-Covid, gulp) and so pre-ordered her newest one, 'Sea of Tranquility', when it came out earlier this year; but scarcely had it arrived on my doorstep when I was informed that actually, SoT was a sort-of sequel to another of Mandel's novels, 'The Glass Hotel'. Anyway I picked up 'The Glass Hotel' at the start of August so that I could read it beforehand, and here we are.

I'm not sure what I expected when I started reading, but I think it was something more sci-fi or more definitively speculative than I found. There are elements of the speculative - a series of ghosts who appear and whose reality isn't quite certain, a shift into possible worlds theory that includes a shout-out to Station Eleven - but broadly speaking, Mandel's novel operates in a world recognisable as our own, or something close to it. The book centres around Jonathan Atreides, a financier closely modelled on Bernie Madoff, the collapse of whose Ponzi scheme affects the lives of the constellation of other characters whose histories and perspectives move in and out of focus over the course of the book.

Technically, I thought this novel was super-accomplished. Mandel hops around chronologically as well as geographically, and shifts perspective between a large number of different characters without ever becoming boring or confusing. (I found myself thinking of Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle, another book I read this year which did great things with a big narrative sweep.) It's also very emotionally compelling: there are several moments that were shocking, moving, upsetting. I believed in the book and its characters, and I cared about what happened to them. I also specifically appreciated the fact that Mandel gave an acknowledgement to her nanny for looking after her daughter while she wrote the novel. It takes a village, guys!

With that said, I find the idea of fraud and Ponzi schemes super stressful so the book disturbed me! But that is not Mandel's fault and is probably more of a testament to the realism and emotional effectiveness of her writing. However, I went and read up on Bernie Madoff after finishing it and thought it was interesting how very closely the novel stuck to the details of Madoff's real-life story. When you're using a recent, real-life event like that I think it's worth asking what the fiction is adding to the existing facts. Mandel says in the afterword that she was particularly interested in the team of staff working for Madoff, who went to work every day in the knowledge that their whole workplace was built on lies, and I think that's definitely an interesting topic, but I didn't feel like that was necessarily what I would have picked out as the central subject of the book. Yes, the team is in it and there's a section where they are the main focus, but they're not really the central characters. However, I suppose 'The Glass Hotel' is about (a lot about) the different ways that people see us, and the way we see ourselves, and the different people we can be or become or inhabit over the course of our lives, and so that does make sense in a novel about fraud. Anyway, I would recommend this one and I look forward to seeing how it intersects with the follow-up.

Content Warnings