“If we are to be honest with ourselves,” said, “who among us has never made a mistake?” But this was an error, saw that immediately. . . . It’s possible to both know and not know something,” he said later he spoke for several of us, actually, several 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. It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative. Other characters are not so self-aware, and Mandel describes their predicaments with her typical crystalline prose:Ī revelation earned only in hindsight: beauty can have a corrosive effect on character.

(65) She may have miscalculated, but she was not naïve. At one point she thinks I’m paying a price for this life. (“or him coffee appearing out of thin air was so commonplace an occurrence it didn’t merit acknowledgement.” 70.)īut for Vincent no one ever becomes invisible, and she enters and exits the kingdom with a high degree of intentionality and clarity, even when her decisions may later prove wrong. In the kingdom of money, it becomes all too possible for the servants to become invisible. No spoilers, here, but the many characters glide into and out of “the kingdom of money,” in which the subjects carry themselves with “with the tedious confidence of all people with money, the breezy assumption that no serious harm could come” to them (44). There are more than a few musicians, artists and addicts. (Two characters even reappear from Station Eleven, though the two novels cannot quite share the same timeline.) These characters range from the owner and employees of the Hotel Caiette to the staff and executives of a Wall Street investment company to the executives and crew of a shipping concern. This time the fragile narrative winds through the lives of at least ten major and perhaps another thirty minor characters, but with fewer chronological jump-shifts. Mandel again weaves chronology and biography to form a pattern which does not become quite distinct until the last pages. Although The Glass Hotel is superficially different from the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, the two novels clearly come from the same pen.

John Mandel made our wait pay off, as she has matched her brilliant 2014 fourth novel with an equally brilliant 2020 followup. John Mandel, Station Eleven 106 (2014).Įmily St. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.Įmily St. No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are.

The glass hotel review