50 Time March 30, 2020
TimeOff Books
in 2008, emily ST. John mandel waS working
a day job at a cancer-research lab in New York
when she learned of Bernie Madoff ’s investment
scandal. “It got me thinking about how much I
liked my co-workers,” the novelist says, peering
down at the wet sidewalks of Manhattan’s financial
district from a restaurant lounge. “And how much
more intense our camaraderie would be if we all
showed up at work on Monday morning to perpet-
uate a massive crime.”
The story of Madoff ’s infamous Ponzi scheme
and the devastation it created looms over Mandel’s
latest book, The Glass Hotel, out March 24. But
Mandel, the 41-year-old author of four previous
novels including the acclaimed Station Eleven, spe-
cializes in fiction that weaves together seemingly
unrelated people, places and things. The Glass
Hotel, which blends the story of an investor whose
Ponzi scheme falls apart in 2008 with that of a
woman who disappears from a ship in 2018, is no
exception. “This book about a financial crime that
is also a ghost story about container shipping,” she
says. “Try crafting that elevator pitch.”
The kaleidoscopic novel jumps between per-
spectives and places, but everything ties back to
a single moment in 2005 on Vancouver Island—
where, at the secluded Hotel Caiette, a threat was
etched on the lobby’s pristine wall: why don’T you
Swallow broken glaSS. In tracing the ramifi-
cations of this offense, and so many others, Man-
del asks if anyone is capable of truly starting over.
There’s the hotel employee who wrote the message
and changes course after getting fired. There are the
financial advisers who committed high-stakes fraud
for years, suddenly facing consequences. And there
are the victims who lose everything. Mandel’s lat-
est novel dissects the surreal division between those
who are conscious of ongoing crimes and those who
are unwittingly brought into them. “Some people
are absolutely shattered,” she says. “And others get
a really interesting cocktail-party story for 20 years
from now.”
Mandel herself believes in reinvention,
the idea that someone can pick up and change
everything about their life completely—like a
friend she mentions who left her identity as a
New York publicist behind to become a jewelry
student in Italy. But there’s a downside: “You
do absolutely lose things you loved about your
previous life.”
That idea, explored in The Glass Hotel, is not
new to Mandel’s work. The hugely popular Station
Eleven, which has sold 1.5 million copies, captures
a world forced to fully reinvent after much of the
population is wiped out by a swine flu. Readers
have been reaching out to Mandel, many in anx-
ious Twitter missives, to comment on the eerie
similarities between the present-day COVID-19
outbreak and her novel, musing on what the future
will bring. “It was a bad week to start reading
Station Eleven,” Mandel says.
For the most part, she’s avoiding the discourse,
mitigating any risk that people might see her as
capitalizing on the moment to sell her book. She’s
as unsettled by the pandemic as anyone—when we
met, she’d just finished rearranging travel plans—
and is focused on remaining calm around her
4-year-old daughter, who has taken up lecturing
others on proper handwashing.
While writing Station Eleven, Mandel chan-
neled what has become a prescient anxiety. “Panic
is too strong a word, but I did have terrible aware-
ness of the fragility of civilization,” she says. The
Glass Hotel doesn’t depict the end of the world, but
it reinforces that idea; both books, in their ways,
examine how we respond to chaos after catastro-
phe. “All of this, we take for granted,” Mandel says,
gesturing to our surroundings. “It’s unsettling to
realize how quickly this falls apart.” □PROFILE
Reinventing
after chaos
By Annabel Gutterman
MANDEL: SARAH SHATZ
△
Mandel is writing
the pilot for a TV
adaptation of
The Glass Hotel