The Glass Hotel

While The Glass Hotel lacks neither the narrative pace of The Lola Quartet nor the dystopian vision of Station Eleven, it may be St. John Mandel's best work yet. Such a claim would be justifiable simply owing to the completeness of the author's (storytelling) vision, producing a work that is immersive and in which the reader is immersed. I found myself intrigued by St. John Mandel's notion of the “counter-life” and returned to it regularly in non-reading moments. The immortal question posed in The Glass Hotel is: how can we know what is real, be it love, money, place, or memory? Only then (and maybe only in retrospect or counter-life) can we begin to value it. If there is a second point to The Glass Hotel, then it is the debate about whether one can ever escape the past — what you have done and that which it has done to you. To find fault with the depiction of the elaborate Ponzi scheme that lies at the heart of many characters' unravelling felt somewhat dated and overfamiliar. Rather more emphasis on the mysterious and remote hotel — the novel's eponym — would have rendered the work even stronger: 9.5 out of 10.

By Emily St. John Mandel