It feels like Ponzi and pyramid schemes are a thing of the past and no one could possibly be so uninformed as to fall for them anymore. But in a year of lost jobs, anti-maskers, and cancelled plans, when uneven fortunes are more apparent than ever, it asks the questions we’re all grappling with right now.Emily St. Vincent is “struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events.” Mandel’s characters can’t forget the people they used to be, the people they could have been, the people they might still be. But most of the haunting is self-inflicted. Affluent characters can’t seem to see the service workers toiling all around them. Like Alkaitis, some of the characters are followed by actual apparitions of the people they’ve hurt. Though, no matter where he is, he sees the ghosts of his victims. Alkaitis, in prison, disassociates-imagining a world where he’s still free, still rich. Vincent reinvents herself as a crew member on a shipping freighter. Leon Prevant, a shipping executive in Station Eleven, is here a retiree devastated by the loss of his savings, forced to live out of an RV with his wife in what he calls “the shadowlands” of the poor. One employee walks calmly out of the office and hops an international flight. When Alkaitis’ scheme crumbles, we watch Mandel’s characters respond in ways both practical and not. “If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.” “That’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money,” she reflects. Most importantly, it gives her a sort of economic freedom, entrance into what she calls the kingdom of money.

It’s the escape hatch she’s been waiting for, taking her away from her complicated relationship with her half-brother and the ghost of her mother, whose death may have been a suicide. We get to know Alkaitis’ victims as well as the staff members -in the form of an “Office Chorus”- who helped Alkaitis forge the fund’s documents.īut we spend most of the book with Vincent, who meets Alkaitis while bartending in a hotel he owns and quickly agrees to become his pretend trophy wife. They are mostly united by their participation in a Ponzi scheme run by Jonathan Alkaitis, a Bernie Madoff type who has made a lot of financial promises he can’t keep. The Glass Hotel jumps around in time, following multiple characters as their narratives intersect and overlap.

The glass hotel review