The Glass Hotel

Let's get this off my chest right away - I thought this book was all over the place. It picks up threads only to discard them completely in the next chapter, lays out mysteries it will later explain away with a shrug, veers wildly through a growing cast of characters laying down narrative beats I must not be bright enough to fit into a cohesive whole and then, when you think you've got a handle on things, it goes supernatural?

And yet Mandel is still such a disarmingly great writer. She got a light touch that can draw on extensive research into international shipping and Ponzi schemes without completely derailing the story. And the beats she hits just sing. There's the notion of being pulled along in the wake of larger forces and the slow inevitable erosion of personal agency until it's all too late. How a single concession can assume mass over time is beautifully explored. And there is a character's slow descent into madness that is convincingly told both in its psychological causes and its clear manifestations.

Loved it a lot, longed for it be less lumpy.

Really wanted to love this book but it didn't click. Smooth read and reasonably crafted, there was just this cold indifference from any of the characters, making it harder to latch onto any of them.

If I were forced to dig for thematic elements, it's ghosts of the past and our own mistakes haunting us and how the fates of all the characters were interwoven by a ponzi scheme a la Madoff.

Vincent was as close as we got to a relatable protagonist, but even then parts of her story and personality were omitted to build to what was, I'll admit, a very well-written ending.

There's a strong undercurrent of isolation and feeling adrift in here that helps keep everything together.

Best book I've read so far in 2021. This book is up for some awards. Book spans about 30 years of life for a group of people associated with a Ponzi swindle, criminals and victims alike! Very good book and just about 320 pages! David N.

I really, really enjoyed Station Eleven. I was a little hesitant to pick this one up because of the disappointed reviews I kept seeing and hearing, but I'll honestly say without a trace of doubt that I'm glad I read it. It's told nonsequentially, much like Station Eleven, which will give you that same feeling of having to piece together a puzzle. It also involves a world-ending event, albeit on a smaller, personal, financial sense than a global, everyone, pandemic sense, which was satisfying to piece together.

Unfortunately the underlying themes of The Glass Hotel were less interesting to me than the themes of Station Eleven. Financial drama just doesn't get the same imagination cells firing for me as “survival is insufficient” from Station Eleven. I also didn't really like any of the characters from The Glass Hotel, because it's hard to feel connected with a Ponzi scheme operator, a trophy wife, or any of the others impacted by the event. I felt things about them, though, which still earns this book points from me.

I also felt like the ending of this book was a little weak. I was disappointed to find out that the ghosts were actual ghosts, and not Jonathan's guilty conscience driving him a bit crazy. You can spin the ending in a semi-satisfying way if you try hard enough, but I felt like it was a bit of a miss in tone from the rest of the book.

I did enjoy my time with this book though, and if you like her writing style from Station Eleven, there's a lot to like from The Glass Hotel. Just don't go into it looking for Station Eleven 2.

This book was way too confusing to be worth it. Lots of characters and storylines that didn't do much to contribute to the story. The revelation about the Ponzi scheme or its consequences were underwhelming to say the least. The plot summary on the back cover pretty much gives out all the details and the book itself doesn't offer much in addition to it. I gave this a 3-star rating first because the writing style was good and reminiscent of Station Eleven but the story itself was so bad that I think giving 2-stars is also too much. How did this even get on the Goodreads Awards list! Such a waste of time.

This kind of snuck up on me; didn't think I cared about the characters but I was crying by the end. Left me absolutely devastated.

I feel like the synopsis makes this novel seem way more thrilling than it actually is. I was expecting a mystery story (oh, look, it is in the mystery category, wonder why), something that would make me turn page after page and inhale every single word, but what I got instead was five days (not even exaggerating) of struggling to get over with it already.

It isn't... bad, it's just really uninteresting. I did like the writing, I loved how the characters connected to one another, but I was also slightly confused. There are a lot of characters and I'm not exactly sure what their purpose was in this, apart from being there. In the second part, at some point someone narrates in 1st person and I still don't know who that is. Someone who worked for Alkaitis, I gathered as much, but I have no clue who they are.

At first I thought Paul will be more involved in the plot and I am mildly curious about what ever happened to him. Okay, I know what happened to him in broad lines, but the situation at the start of the book didn't get a resolve, I wanted to know more.

I do appreciate that everyone got some sort of conclusion. Well, not everyone, I have no idea what came of Melissa. Or why she was even there, but yes, most of the characters got some sort of conclusion so we weren't left hanging. I also appreciate that the novel is circular, that was a really nice touch. And this is about all the praise I have for it.

I don't know on what basis I could recommend this to anyone. Maybe if you really like vague books, with a lot of themes put one on top of the other, and slightly dull. I can't say I'm sorry I read this, but it required more effort than it should have.

An air of mystery runs throughout the book, and I was always observing the characters rather than feeling a part of them. It was well-written but I never really connected with it.

Definitely a letdown after Station Eleven but still fairly interesting. The similarities are all there: a quiet book without a strong plot, flashbacks, different POVs, atmospheric, ... Ultimately, it just didn't do much for me. It essentially felt like Bernie Madoff's biography turned up to 11 in the Mandel way.

Started strong but then it just kind of mellowed out.

Not what I hoped for (I loved Station Eleven and wanted more), but still a compelling read, although it drags on a bit towards the end, wanting to wrap up the story of every one of the many characters.

The story felt poignant to me, because I spent some time in the company of people who were running a very similar scheme. “It's possible to both know and not know something”, absolutely. I also spent a lot of time in my youth in BC, and some time in Toronto, so those locations felt very real.

If I promised you a book about Ponzi schemes and ghosts and murder mysteries; about the little things that happen to us in a life that haunt us forever, you'd be psyched, right? You'd think: this book could not possibly be boring. And similarly: I see what St. John Mandel is doing here. I respect what she's trying to do. I love the idea of exploring the things that haunt us throughout our lives; the themes we cannot help but return to. I like the idea of personifying that with magical realism ghosts and graffiti that is disturbing out of proportion to the real world. There's a lot of potential here.

But it's SO boring. Unbelievably boring. Is it me? I can't tell. But all of these characters are so flat, I couldn't care about them at all. I found small snippets I liked: the themes, the descriptions of shipping. But these were buried within ~400 pages of mundane details about mundane characters. Dozens of pages about how tedious shopping is that nevertheless bore details of everything that Vincent bought. Interchangeable characters named Melissa, Miranda, Mirella, Monica and Marie that I had to keep referencing back to the dust jacket to see which one went with which substory.

A close friend accused St. John Mandel of being too pretentious to be willing to write speculative fiction. Once seen it couldn't be unseen: this is overwritten, too shy to lean into its interesting themes. It does not arrive at ghosts, nor Ponzi schemes, nor the ocean, for over 200 pages, instead leaning into day-in-the-life written to the teeth. It felt interchangeable with hundreds of other books trying and failing to be The Modern American Novel

Clever handling of so many interesting characters.

This book should go swallow broken glass, oh wait that would be too interesting.

4.5 “actually, several of us who???d been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honorable and not being honorable, knowing you???re not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad.”i finished this yesterday afternoon and i think i'm going to be processing it for a long time. the glass hotel feels like the kind of book you immediately want to read again because you know there is so much in there that you haven't gotten out of it yet. and there's a Lot in this book. it's about wilderness vs stylised life, about private vs public, about what ifs, about the restriction of poverty and the restriction of richness, it's about what we imagine our lives to be like and how things never turn out the way we thought, it's about invisible barriers between people and places and classes, it's about where you belong and what you long for, it's about illusion and delusion, it's about the ambiguity of humanity. it's about looking at the world from a distance, and looking from up close, and figuring out what the difference is. i don't know how to review this book, really. it was good. really good. i love emily st. john mandel's writing style. it's so clean, and economic, and yet so rich. i like that she likes to write about disaster as if it's not disastrous. the disaster in this book is, it's true, disaster on a relatively smaller scale than in station eleven, but it's disaster nonetheless. it's destructive in many ways. it makes for a before and after. but it's like st. john mandel can process all of that, and stay calm at the same time. it's almost gentle, the way she leads you through it. she knows not everything needs to be spelled out. it leaves you with a very open world to explore and interpret. last thing: i kinda love subtle references to characters from other novels like this. it's really only there if you've read other work, and it's fine if you miss it, but i think it's just a nice touch to give some readers that glimpse of recognition.

Made me feel the way I did when I read Mrs Dalloway or The World According to Garp for the first time. This is the real thing.

Sweep me up.

Hmmmm can't decide what to rate this... it was a little hard to follow and maybe too many characters/POVs? I don't know. The writing was really good. But I LOVED Station Eleven and I just didn't love this one.

The Glass Hotel is an atmospheric, people-centered glimpse into a Ponzi scheme and how it affects everyone involved. A series of character threads, from the woman who marries the man in charge of the scheme to the naive investor who loses everything, all eventually connect back in some way to a small luxury hotel in the Canadian wilderness. Spanning decades, this work of literary fiction is primarily a tale of the things people do to survive and how they rationalize their actions to themselves and others. While this novel didn't really grab me, and at times was a bit confusing in terms of timelines, it was still a fairly engaging story that will likely interest fans of character-driven fiction.

I think I fall into the category of people who wished they were reading Station Eleven instead.

Some parts of this book I thought were really great, descriptions of the Hotel Caiette, glimpses of ghosts you're never really sure are there, Leon's moments of happiness with his wife in their RV, Vincent's remembrances of her mother. But these moments felt really short, and then we'd be back to the Ponzi scheme that seemed to take over the plot about a third of the way through the novel. I don't know, if you're really interested in rehashing Bernie Madoff and the financial crisis of 2008, give this one a try. There's a moment near the end where another character describes Vincent by saying something like “You know how rare it is to meet someone who really loves their life? She would work 8 months and then spend the rest of the year traveling the world.” And I found myself thinking, wow, I really wish that had been part of the book, instead of mentioned in passing by a character who is only around for two pages.

The Nerdette Podcast had a really great discussion about this novel. It was nice to hear that the guest reviewer shared my “meh” opinion, though the host herself did really enjoy the book.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book and was drawn into the story and characters. The second half just seemed to drag and by the end, I had lost interest. The author used her writing technique of jumping from one timeline to another and from character to character as she did in Station Eleven. In this case, the story just wasn't as interesting.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a digital review copy.