Paul screws up royally in the first proper chapter of the novel, and then ends up working with Vincent, briefly, at the hotel. We don’t get any insight on why Jonathan would run this scam, and defraud hundreds of clients, many of whom lose their life savings because they put it all in his fund for its impossibly high (and consistent) rates of return. Jonathan is widowed and makes Vincent an offer for her to serve as, for lack of a better term, a kept woman, appearing in public as his wife but not so in legal terms, which she accepts and seems to enjoy until his arrest and her return to a life of self-reliance.Īlthough the downfall of the Ponzi scheme has its appeal – I love a good story about con men or other frauds – the stories of Paul and especially Vincent are just more interesting, because their characters are more interesting.

The novel begins with the half-siblings Paul and Vincent he’s a would-be musician and a bit of a ne’er-do-well, she’s a high school student who later bartends at the hotel, where she meets Jonathan, a financier several decades her senior who happens to be running a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. John Mandel has a harder time with the resolution, with an ending that felt far less satisfying no matter how I chose to interpret it.Īs in Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel lacks a clear, single protagonist, instead giving us a wider array of characters who’ll flit in and out of the story as she moves around in time.

Once again, the prose is beautiful, and the characters well-developed, but this time St. Her long-awaited follow-up novel, The Glass Hotel, appeared this spring, and it’s far more grounded in the mundane realities of our world now, revolving around a Ponzi scheme run by a Bernie Madoff proxy character and a remote hotel he owns in British Columbia. John Mandel’s 2014 post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven is one of my favorite books of this century, a gorgeous, lyrical story about a global pandemic (!) that leads to an improbably swift societal collapse, and small graces of humanity that survive it.

The glass hotel