I liked Station Eleven, but I didn’t love it, so I wasn’t particularly excited about Emily St. John Mandel’s latest book and I probably would have skipped it if Nerdette hadn’t chosen it for her book club. I would say that, for me, this book is about on par with Station Eleven: I liked it, but I didn’t love it.
By the way, I listened to this one on audiobook, which is narrated by Dylan Moore, and she does a pretty good job as a narrator.
I found it hard to get into this book at first, largely because it starts from the POV of a character I just didn’t care about. Then we don’t even see him for much of the book, so I’m not sure why Mandel chose to start the story with him. It seemed like a way to introduce Paul’s sister, Vincent, who then goes on to take a more central role in the story, but why we couldn’t just start with her is beyond me.
We meet Paul as a college dropout when he’s visiting his sister, Vincent, who’s a high school dropout, but the story doesn’t really start until a few years later when they’re both working at the titular glass hotel in a remote area of British Columbia. It’s a luxury hotel designed to cater to rich people who want to experience the beauty of nature without having to do any of the work involved. The glass hotel has a name, I just can’t remember what it is.
Vincent is working as a bartender and Paul is working as the janitor or something, but he gets fired for writing, “Why don’t you eat broken glass?” on the glass wall of the hotel lobby. He was paid to do so in order to send a message to Jonathan Alkaitis, the hotel’s owner, but he confuses Alkaitis with another guest and no one except management sees it anyway, so he lost is job over nothing. It’s fine, the person who paid him to do it was drunk and later regretted it and Paul grows up to be an incredibly successful composer, albeit one with a drug problem.
Vincent, on the other hand, strikes up a conversation with Alkaitis and ends up going home with him. He’s a billionaire, but he’s been a bit lonely since his wife died of cancer a few years ago, so when he strikes up a conversation with a beautiful young bartender who’s also smart and capable of holding up her end of a conversation, he thinks, why not? Why can’t I have this?
Yes, he actually says “have”, as though Vincent is a possession. He offers to keep her in comfort and buy her whatever she wants if she pretends to be his wife. He buys her a ring and they have this whole story lined up to tell his friends, but they’re never legally married, and I can’t get over the Ick Factor of a rich man spotting a pretty girl and going, “She looks nice. I think I’ll buy her.” Admittedly, it’s not like Vincent didn’t have a say in the matter, but it still feels way too close to slavery for my comfort.
I also had a hard time relating to Vincent. She’s smart, but “doesn’t know what she wants to do”, so she just drifts aimlessly from one dead-end job to another until Alkaitis makes her an offer she can’t refuse. Then, when she has unlimited resources and can do almost anything she wants, she still doesn’t do anything except shop and swim. Admittedly, there are some constraints when you’re living off someone else’s paycheck, but that still leaves a lot of opportunities open to her, but she doesn’t even consider any of them, much less take advantage of them.
Meanwhile, Alkaitis’s very lucrative business is running a Ponzi scheme. He’s a Bernie Madoff-type character whose scheme gets revealed right before Christmas of 2008. He warns Vincent, so she has time to disappear before the Feds come for him. Come for him they do, and he pleads guilty to all the charges laid against him, although he insists he acted alone and that none of his colleagues knew what he was doing, even though several of them were also convicted of fraud and theft.
Several of the chapters are told from Alkaitis’s perspective and I just felt like the book made him way too sympathetic. We’re talking about someone who stole people’s life savings, including people he knew personally. He ruined their lives financially and the idea that he felt absolutely no remorse over it as at least as appalling as the fact that he did it in the first place.
Anyway, he goes to jail and Vincent works as a cook on a freight ship. Bother her parents are dead and Paul is her only sibling and he stole from her, disappeared from her life, and used the theft to make himself famous without giving her any credit for her artistic contributions. The end result is that she’s not tied down, so when she’s on leave from her duties on the ship, she travels the world and has a great time. She even strikes up a relationship with one of her crew mates, who is later accused of killing her when she tumbles overboard during a storm from part of the ship’s deck that’s in the blind spot of the security cameras.
For the record, he did not kill her, but you don’t learn that for sure until the very end, and up until that point, the evidence that comes to light in the investigation definitely has to make you wonder. But, no, she was just an idiot who went out on deck in heavy weather after being explicitly told multiple times not to do so. But she just had to get the shot she wanted (she became something of a videographer in her spare time), which of course included leaning over the guardrail, and that was the end of that moron.
This story has kind of a ghost-story element to it: Vincent sees her dead mother as she’s tumbling over the side of the ship (her mother also drowned in a boating accident); Paul sees Vincent at the moment of her death (not that he knows that, at least not until later); and Alkaitis keeps seeing multiple people from his past life while he’s in prison, but they all seem to be people who have already died – he has no way of knowing Vincent is dead when she starts appearing in and around the jailhouse, but the reader knows it.
One other thing that bothered me about this book was the fact that almost every character had alternate timelines, or alternate realities. Alkaitis thinks about where he would be if he had left the country when he knew the Feds were coming for him. Vincent plays a game with herself when she’s the bored little rich girl, wondering what the world would look like if various world events had played out differently. One of Alkaitis’s colleagues fantasizes about how things would be different if he had gone to the Feds when he first realized his job wasn’t legit.
Having one character imagine alternate timelines or alternate realities is character development, but having multiple characters do it just felt lazy – like she hadn’t bothered to fully develop her characters.