The Glass Hotel

“The century was ending and he had some complaints.” 

Paul is disillusioned with the state of his life. He dedicates his collegiate studies to finance, but he finds the subject utterly devoid of meaning. It is 1999, and he feels toward his studies as he does toward the century’s finale—that it "should have felt like triumph but everything was wrong” (5). Paul’s discontent with pecuniary focus expresses one of the novel’s themes: The pursuit of wealth, at the exclusion of all else, entails a paradoxical, spiritual destitution.

“Sweep me up. Words scrawled in acid paste on one of the school’s north windows, the acid marker trembling a little in Vincent’s gloved hand.” 

Though Vincent must rely upon her reserves of self-determination, this phrase keeps coming up in association with her youthful heart’s desire. She is swept up by Alkaitis for a time, absolved of responsibility. She also “sweeps” herself off the deck of a ship in an act of self-annihilation. While never openly acknowledged in the novel, “Sweep me up” are the famously reputed last words of the Danish existential philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard.

“I don’t hate Vincent, he told himself, Vincent has never been the problem, I have never hated Vincent, I have only ever hated the idea of Vincent.” 

Paul is thematically Alkaitis’s poor cousin, aimlessly grasping at others to serve his own ill-defined purpose. In order to eventually steal Vincent’s work, like the billionaire, he must first transform her into an abstract concept, which he can then exploit.

“Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” 

The Glass Hotel is a world with very little sign of overt violence; rather, lives are ruined by intellectual concepts, social slights, and signed contracts. Consequently, the inclusion of this violent wording is at once shocking, but also made impotent by infrastructural conditions. For instance, the rescheduling of Alkaitis’s flight means he never gets the message, which is, in any case, easily obscured by the work of the hotel staff.

“The truth of the matter is, there is a certain demographic that will pay a great deal of money to escape temporarily from the modern world.” 

The irony of having a fortune is that it requires spending a fortune to escape from it. This is a luxury afforded to the rich; working people must still live within and serve the “kingdom of money” (57) but are offered no meaningful escape from it.

“In the kingdom of money, as she thought of it, there were enormous swaths of time to fill, and she had intimations of danger in letting herself drift, in allowing a day to pass without a schedule or a plan.” 

There is a dignity and sense of purpose to work that few of the characters in The Glass Hotel but Vincent know. The loss of that purpose leads to a dangerous spiritual and mental vacuum.

“In her hotel days, Vincent had always associated money with privacy [...] but in actuality, the deeper you go into the kingdom of money, the more crowded it gets, people around you in your home all the time, which is why Vincent only swam at night.” 

Wealth, as a condition, cannot be handled through sheer force of will. Vincent is surprised to learn that the maintenance of a rich lifestyle depends upon an uncomfortably large staff, and she must keep strange hours in order to protect her privacy and dignity.

“The problems of Vincent’s life were the same from one year to the next: she knew she was a reasonably intelligent person, but there’s a difference between being intelligent and knowing what to do with your life.” 

The difference between being smart and being purposeful is one of special importance to Vincent’s “millennial” generation. Yet Olivia, who is three times Vincent’s senior, has similar problems. This conflict, Mandel suggests, is common to anyone drawn towards mentally rewarding work that doesn’t pay very well.

“What I’m suggesting,” Caroline said softly, “is that the lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world’s just a little too much to bear.” 

The camera’s lens plays a definitive role in the telling of Vincent’s life. Often observed and displayed for her beauty, Vincent uses the camera to turn her gaze outward and to record her own human subjectivity in the world.

“Johnathan had a shadow.”

Before Vincent discovers Alkaitis’s misdoings, she notices an emptiness surrounding his life. Before any authorities unearth his Ponzi scheme, the shadow that haunts Alkaitis is his suppressed conscience.

“I don’t want to think of myself as a person to whom other people are invisible, but there it is.” 

At all hours, a team of servants surround Vincent and Mirella. These ubiquitous servants have become almost like furniture, their humanity all but erased. This unnatural depersonalization gradually becomes normal to Mirella, just as Vincent becomes accustomed to swimming at night.

“You know what I’ve learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”

A flattened, homogenous quality may attend the most affluent lifestyles. So far removed from the needs and lively idiosyncrasies of the working class, Mirella misses what is unique about the cultures she passes through with her wealthy husband. The novel suggests that wealth can produce a kind of estrangement from the world.

“What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money.” 

For Vincent, the power of wealth is not only that of acquisition but also of transformation. Her affluent life is of a wholly different, previously unimaginable condition. She does not need to think about money—whether it will be available to her, or indeed, how it is even procured for her.

“Not acting, exactly. More like a type of pragmatism, driven by willpower. She decided to be a certain type of person, and she achieved it.” 

This is one perspective on Vincent, particularly useful for the self-made image Alkaitis wants Vincent to project on his behalf. The flipside of this resilient pragmatism, for Vincent as for anybody, is a loss of identity. Vincent has adopted total malleability to her material conditions and to the will of those who control those conditions.

“There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.” 

Lightness is a theme running through the book, but the “exquisite” lightness with which Alkaitis lives his post-luxury life is quite different from the unmoored and desperate existence of his victims. His conscience is as untroubled as it was before his arrest, and his prison life is far more stable than the lives of the lost and evicted people he’s ruined.

“It was impossible not to think in that moment of the master bedroom suite in Jonathan’s house in Greenwich, the wasteful acres of carpeting and empty space. Luxury is a weakness.”

Vincent’s opinions about her world are as changeable as her material conditions. Once, wealth was a welcome respite from care. Now, in her cramped cabin on the Neptune Cumberland, it’s a weakness.

“It was true, Leon could see it for himself, a steadiness in that column of numbers that appealed to his deepest longing for order in the universe.” 

In retrospect, it’s easy to paint Alkaitis’s victims and accomplices as delusional victims of their own overreaching greed. Yet this quote universalizes the impulse toward risk-free and steady economic growth, linking it to a longing for rationality and order.

“Idea for a ghost story: there was once a man who remained under supervised release for three years following the end of his 170-year prison term.” 

The absurdity of Alkaitis’s sentence befits the scope and nature of his crime. His sentence is a condition which turns him into a ghost. At once, he inhabits his life and stands far outside of it in mute observation. When it appears in literature, this concept of contrapasso often alludes to the Divine Comedy, in which souls, damned to the Inferno, are given punishments resembling the very sins that incurred damnation. As such, the infernal punishment is not divine wrath, but rather a destiny fulfilled and chosen by the damned. Here, too, is the significance in Alkaitis’s likeness to a “ghost.”

“It’s possible to both know and not know something.” 

The journalist who writes Jonathan Alkaitis’s biography while he is in jail is interested, as she says, in the subject of “mass delusion.” Alkaitis is terrible counsel in this regard, compartmentalizing the reality of his crimes from the fantasy realm of fortune in which he once lived. He deludes himself more effectively than he does any of his victims.

“But they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss.”

The Glass Hotel frequently likens economic social class to a whole country unto itself. Exiled to the “shadow country” of American poverty, Leon’s experience echoes that of both Vincent and Mirella. Vincent describes wealthiness as a “kingdom” and a “previously unimaginable condition” (90). Similarly, Mirella laments, “That’s when I realized that money is its own country” (78). The metaphor of class as country presents diversely, but here, Leon’s anxiety is almost existential. Poverty is, for him, not only to exist differently, but to exist less: in shadows, “at the edge of an abyss” (247).

“We move through this world so lightly.” 

Marie Prevant is referring to her and Leon’s lives as nomadic workers, living in the “shadow country” of American poverty, but the same could be said of other characters in the book. No matter their social status, the demands of money can turn individuals hollow, making them strangers to their own lives.

“The smallness of the world never ceases to amaze me.” 

The author revels in coincidences and chance meetings. In this instance, Ella Kaspersky notes the coincidence of her meeting the half-brother of her nemesis’s wife in a city neither of them know. At the same time, such significance could be ascribed to a dozen other chance interactions in the book.

“It was as though the hotel were haunted, but in the most benign sense: the rooms still held an air of presence, a sense of occupation, as if at any moment the boat might pull in with new guests…” 

If the characters in the novel are ghosts, the titular hotel is the physical site of their haunting. The space connects each character by an invisible thread. Such spectral interconnection, however, strikes the tension of irony, for the characters are marked most essentially by their metaphysical isolation.