'The Glass Hotel' weaves together stories of a hotel worker and an ultra-wealthy con man — in a novel that captures how precarious life can be, in a way that feels particularly resonant now, our critic writes.
I've heard versions of that sentence on the phone, in person , on email, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, on Zoom and Skype and all the other devices and online platforms we're using to stay connected with each other these days.So recommending a book can seem, well, out-of-touch. Unless, that is, the recommendation is for a novel that's so absorbing, so fully realized that it draws you out of your own constricted situation and expands your sense of possibilities.
Late one night when Vincent is on duty behind the bar, a message etched in acid appears on the glass wall of the hotel lounge. The message reads:Vincent, for reasons we readers won't totally grasp 'till the end of the novel, is so deeply shaken by this message that she seizes her first opportunity, in the form of a wealthy man who walks into the bar, and escapes the hotel into what she will later call"the kingdom of money.
The second major narrative focuses on that very same wealthy man, whose name is Jonathan Alkaitis and who's closely modeled onJonathan is an exquisite con artist whose Ponzi scheme, when it eventually collapses, causes a lot of collateral damage.
One of Jonathan's Ponzi scheme victims — an older man named Leon — finds himself scraping by in his golden years, driving a broken down RV from one temporary job to another at big box stores and fairgrounds across the country. At a truck stop, Leon becomes aware of the young girls who are working as prostitutes. We're told that:
Leon knew that he and [his wife] were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money to survive, but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they'd all been cut loose, they'd slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.reaches its eerie sea change of an ending.
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