80 MARCH 2020
Culture & CriticsHow many
reinventions
are possible
for any given
person?KNOPFTHE GLASS
HOTELEmily St. John
MandelA finalist for a National Book Award, Station
Eleven is one of the most imaginatively coherent
novels I have read in recent years, skipping among
characters and time periods with complete authorial
control as it builds its own fully realized universe. For
this reason, I was initially astonished, several chapters
into The Glass Hotel, to recognize a minor character
from that novel: Leon Prevant, the shipping executive
who employs as his assistant the young Miranda, an
artist who spends her downtime in the office draw-
ing the graphic novel about a castaway in outer space
that gives Station Eleven its title. Later he is joined by
Miranda herself, whom Mandel’s readers will remem-
ber last encountering on a beach in Malaysia, suc-
cumbing to the delirium of the Georgia Flu. Yet here
she is, alive and well, her destiny altered but all her
other characteristics intact. What are they doing in
this new novel? The answer, it emerges, is essential
to Mandel’s fictional project, which The Glass Hotel
expands in surprising and powerful ways.
If Station Eleven is a mosaic—we see the out-
lines of the picture nearly at once, but precisely how
the pieces fit together appears later—The Glass Hotel
is a jigsaw puzzle missing its box. At the book’s start,
what exactly it is about or even who the major figures
are is unclear. The novel opens with a mysterious, frag-
mented monologue dated 2018 and titled “Vincent
in the Ocean,” spoken by someone of in determinate
gender who could be either dreaming or drowning;
the first line is “Begin at the end.” That section breaks
off abruptly and the next jumps nearly two decades
earlier, to late December 1999, with the focus on Vin-
cent’s half brother, Paul. At age 23, he’s finally made
it to the University of Toronto after years of trouble
with drugs, but he’s on the cusp of flunking out in
his first semester. One night at a club, he accidentally
slips an acquaintance a bad pill, and the boy dies on
the dance floor, sending Paul into free fall.
Five years later, Paul seems to have his life back
together. He and Vincent are on the night staff of a
luxury hotel newly constructed on a remote British
Columbia island where they spent their early child-
hood—a traumatic interlude, in different ways, for
both of them. (We learn that Vincent, the product
of an affair that ruptured the marriage of Paul’s par-
ents, is female—she was named after Edna St. Vincent
Millay— and was sent away at age 13, after her mother
disappeared one afternoon while canoeing, either by
accident or by suicide.) Now, after the half-siblings
have been reunited, someone scrawls a threatening
message late one night on one of the hotel’s huge
glass windows with an acid marker. That the culprit
is Paul is immediately obvious, both to the others at
the hotel and to the reader. But the meaning of the
message Paul wrote, and the reason he wrote it, will
remain obscure until nearly the novel’s end.
How many second chances, how many reinven-
tions, how many transformations are possible for any
given person? What are the forces that keep us moving
along our current path and not a different one? In
Station Eleven, in which the course of everyone’s life
is altered by the disaster, a violinist with the Travel-
ing Symphony contemplates the idea that an infinite
number of parallel universes could exist, including
ones in which the pandemic was less fatal or never
took place, and in which he might have grown up
to be a physicist, as he had planned. In The Glass
Hotel, the forces that catapult characters from one
possible life into another are the more usual ones:
crime, tragedy, marriage. Sometimes we choose to
plunge into a different world; sometimes a different
world chooses us.
The night Paul defaces the window, Vincent meets
the hotel’s owner, Jonathan Alkaitis—an obscenely
rich financier, recently widowed—and the once rebel-
lious teenager slips into a new life with him almost
as easily as putting on a new pair of shoes. She thinks
of the world he inhabits as “the kingdom of money,”
and the two chapters chronicling her relationship with
Alkaitis are titled “A Fairy Tale.” But all fairy tales
come to an end. Vincent’s stay in the kingdom will
be temporary. (Alkaitis works in the Gradia Building,
a name that readers of Station Eleven will recognize as
a sign that something terrible is taking place inside.)
Leon Prevant, the shipping executive from Station
Eleven, will find his circumstances utterly altered by
the loss of his life savings. Instead of retiring in con-
tentment to Florida, he and his wife abandon their
home and take to the road in an RV, joining a “shadow
country” inhabited by transients like themselves.
And Alkaitis, after committing crimes that earn
him a lifetime prison sentence and the contempt of
everyone he was once close to, finds respite from
his daily existence in elaborate fantasies about how
things might have gone differently—fantasies that
occupy more and more of his waking hours and
ultimately threaten his grip on reality. He comes to
view the line between memory and imagination as
a “permeable border”; he can exist simultaneously
in one world and another. Other characters similarly
wrestle with the notion that two contradictory ideas
can coexist, if uncomfortably. Oskar, one of Alkaitis’s
employees, will testify in court that “it’s possible to
both know and not know something.” As a defense
for what Alkaitis did, that is inadequate, but in some
ways it is also true.In contrast to the elegiac mood of Station Eleven,
with its longing for a never-to-be-recovered past,