A hotel bartender accepts a billionaire’s proposal to pretend to be his wife. Unbeknownst to her, his financial empire is a giant Ponzi scheme heading for inevitable collapse. That collapse will spiral outward, forever altering the lives of many, like the night manager at the hotel where the billionaire met the bartender, and the shipping executive also present in the bar for their meeting. They and the other investors will never got over the loss of their savings, nor will they ever recover from the knowledge that they fell for such an obviously too-good-to-be-true scam. The billionaire’s employees will also grapple with their involvement, and what it says about them that they were recruited to the task.
It’s an awful lot for a relatively short novel, and Mandel strains to connect these characters and give meaning to their story. The Glass Hotel is meant to be one of those novel about how amazingly interconnected we all are and how one life impacts so many others, but the resonance just isn’t there. None of Mandel’s characters is given enough depth or space to become fully realized to the audience, and thus the plot just becomes a lot of plate-spinning. Impressive in conception, but rather dull in execution.
The bartender, Vincent, is the closest thing this novel has to a protagonist, but she is maddeningly passive. She meets Jonathan Alkaitis one night and agrees to marry him seemingly just to escape her menial job. She does nothing with the money but shop and buy a video camera she uses to obsessively film five-minute non-narrative nature videos for no stated purpose. Is Vincent smart, or kind, or passionate about anything? Mandel seemingly never bothered to ask herself, and yet it seems like we are expected to care about Vincent.
Alkaitis is ostensibly the villain of the story, though Mandel resists characterizing him as such. It’s a choice that could be interesting if she had bothered characterizing him in any other way. There are hints of his life before money, with his drug-addict painter of an older brother, but not enough to hint as to his motivations.
It’s especially frustrating because Mandel is a talented writer. I especially enjoyed the scenes set at Alkaitis’s brokerage as the walls come crashing down and panic sets in. But her plotting leaves a lot to be desired. She’s good at connecting loose threads but not at giving the reader a reason to care about them in the first place.