Emily St.
John Mandel’s 2015 Station
Eleven was a hit. Science
fiction by definition but more humanist in aim than the majority of
work that fits under that umbrella, Mandel earned herself a number of
fans on the “other side”, despite that her first three novels
didn’t ping the “squids in space” radar. Wisely taking a
five-year break to let the hype cool down, Mandel returns in 2020
with the novel The Glass Hotel.
While likewise technically genre (the reader can discover how),
again, Mandel has focused her energy on the people who populate her
story, and the layers that make them human.
Character
study in the era of corporate fraud, The
Glass Hotel is set primarily in
the early Oughts, and looks at a few branches of
relationships—family, friends, spouses, etc. living through a
major, Enron-esque corporate scandal. Foremost on the screen, but
only by a few frames, is a young woman named Vincent. Raised in
atypical circumstances on a remote British Columbia island accessible
to mainland only by boat, she reels, seemingly throughout her life,
from the unexpected death of her mother when she was a young teen.
Children to a broken marriage, her brother Paul relieves his
existential angst through narcotics.
A fragmented
narrative, The Glass Hotel
shifts in time. But not restlessly, distractingly. Chunks of story
are opened, filled, and resolved before Mandel shifts viewpoint to
another character/moment in time, giving the novel the flavor of
being gently tossed on the waves of time, not churned and frothed on
them. Mandel likewise effectively uses the approach to build tension
and suspense in various aspects of the characters’ lives. Some
events are revealed in the first few chapters, leaving the reader to
wonder how things shake out—the shaking out something Mandel does
slowly, steadily, and satisfactorily. Some events are kept to
hand—teased and hinted at, allowing suspense and tension to build
from the opposite direction, again, something that Mandel handles
very nicely. Based on these choices and the proper execution
thereof, the novel feels full bodied, and gratifyingly complete upon
turning the last page.
But there
seems an issue with The Glass
Hotel. Specifically, this is an
identity crisis. It doesn’t seem the novel knows what it wants to
be. On one hand, the novel would want to be literary, in this case
to use characters to zoom in on an aspect or aspects of the human
condition that present people grappling with the various exigencies
of existence. To a good degree, The
Glass Hotel accomplishes this.
The reader feels as though they intimately know Vincent, Jonathan,
and Paul by the end of the book, and feel their plights for better
and worse, virtues and vices. But at the same time, there are also a
handful of plot moments that are so coincidental as to put the reader
in the frame of mind reading a mainstream/bestseller-ish novel. I
won’t spoil those moments here, except to say they detract from the
very strong sense of realism Mandel otherwise builds.
Compounding
the identity crisis is that thematic focus seems too spread. On one
hand it’s clear Mandel would seek to humanize (and yet still
villainize) the CEOs and other corporate leaders who fail to take
accountability for their actions when the lives of hundreds if not
thousands are negatively impacted by their illegal, immoral behavior.
And nicely, subtly this is accomplished through realistic character
portrayals that extend into the lives of Jonatan’s subordinates who
helped him accomplish his unethical scheme. Mandel does not wield a
hammer of good vs evil or us vs them; Jonathan and the other guilty
parties exist in the full spectrum of relatable, even likable
humanity. However, almost independent of this thematic focus is the
personal plight of Vincent. The character readers get to know most
intimately, her life ebbs and flows through the corporate scandal,
but likewise ebbs and flows before and after it. In other words, it
is just a phase of life that informs her character and decisions
rather than defines them. While his sphere is not as large as
Vincent’s, Paul’s story likewise exists independent of the
scandal. And there the two faces of the novel exist, with minimal
connection between them: realistically portrayed corporate scandal,
including the delicate and appropriately handled “demonization”
of it, and the character studies of people whose lives are partially
shaped by the scandal, but only partially, their personal demons
spawning from several other areas of life.
But don’t
let this disconnection and cheaper moments of plot put you off from
reading The Glass Hotel.
Mandel has, theoretically, spent five years or more writing this
novel, and it’s clear a huge amount of love and care went into
crafting the fragmented time structure and the character of Vincent.
If the reader doesn’t come to understand the delicate undercurrents
of her soul by the end of the novel and feel
something, they are dead. The manner in which Jonathan and his
fellow conspirators are portrayed is likewise commendable. While in
casual conversation we describe the perpetrators of the Enron scandal
as heartless, soulless bastards who should have a special place in
hell (and rightfully so), they remain living, breathing humans,
subject to the same tides of situation and whim that we are. Despite
their entirely selfish behavior, they remain human.
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