Belonging and taking are two aspects of human existence that have a particular resonance now, but not only now. They have always been important. Ways in which various characters seek belonging and either take or have things they treasure taken are central to a novel filled with hard times and grace notes.
Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel traces the lives of several characters that cross each other's paths and dip in and out of each other's lives. Paul has lived on both sides of the great Canadian country, from an isolated village at the tip of Vancouver Island to Toronto. As a teenager, he is sent back to his father, stepmother and half-sister to live in Caiette. He sees his sister scrawl graffiti with acid pen on a window. His sister, Vincent, is suspended from school for a short spell. Her beloved mother soon disappears one day while out in her own little boat.
Paul goes back to Toronto, pretends to study at university while as deep as ever in his drug addictions. He is enthralled by a musician and her band. When a death occurs that he is responsible for, he runs back to the west coast. His sister, now grown, is tending bar at a hotel at that island which is more suited to fantasy than reality, with giant glass windows that show the beautiful wilderness while not requiring the rich patrons to engage with it.
Vincent enchants a rich investment fund owner who has purchased the hotel and is soon accompanying him around the world. She feels a fraud, even though she is fond of him. But Jonathan Alkaitis is a taker as well. He has orchestrated a Madoff-size Ponzi scheme for decades and doesn't even marry Vincent, paying her handsomely instead. When he is arrested, it is easy for her to disappear.
The night that Vincent meets Jonathan, a hooded figure inscribes the phrase "Why don't you swallow broken glass?" on one of the hotel lobby's windows with an acid pen, the same instrument Vincent used once as a teenager. Paul thinks the man who has been sitting in the lobby is Alkaitis, but it is another man who will be affected by him. Decades later, this man will be hired as a consultant by his former firm to investigate the disappearance of a female cook from a shipping vessel.
Going back in time, one day while Vincent is shopping in Manhattan, she and her acquaintance are spotted by a former artist who, it turns out, once painted Alkaitis's late brother. Lucas also was a painter and was idolized by his younger brother. The former artist becomes one of Alkaitis’s favorite clients.
These are the bare bones of what happens in the novel. But they don't convey the rich way in which lives intersect and the way people affect each other. Vincent is the center of this particular narrative, but other novels could have been centered on any of them.
The intersections and the interactions are the heart of the book, and bring to mind the richness of a similar storytelling method used just as successfully as Kate Atkinson. The way each character seeks to belong, and the grace notes for those who succeed, are brilliant. Each character also is a taker. Some take more than others, some do it knowingly and without shame. All of them are affected by the taking.
The search to belong and the taking are conveyed not only in the lives and souls of the individual characters. They also are present in the parts of the novel that personalize issues happening to this day. The story of an older couple who lose everything financially, except for a rickety RV, and travel the country working in warehouses and campgrounds, is a reality.
The Glass Hotel, befitting a setting as out of the drear reality as this structure is, also shifts with dimensions. One character spends more and more interior time in locations once visited. More than one character sees other characters after their deaths. Are they really there? Or are they projections of wishes and guilty feelings? Denizens of The Great Northern in Twin Peaks would feel kinship within these passages.
The concluding episodes bring resolution to many of the characters, and a feeling of peace. One of the best belongs to a character who worked at the hotel, and reflects on 10 years of being its sole caretaker in the times that follow its heyday. The sense of calm feels earned and deserved; it is not something this character took but which was sought as a way to belong in the world.
"Sweep me up" is what Vincent wrote on the window as a teen. Life does sweep her up, and so does the sense of what matters most at the end of the novel. It was a lovely way to say goodbye, and hello.
P.S. I did finish the book in last week’s diary, The Mercies, and was disappointed. The story set-up had great potential as historical fiction in which women carry on after the men in the village die in a fishing accident. But the story, based on a 1620 incident, descended into witch trial porn and an unconvincing romance.