(He is modeled on Bernie Madoff.) But his financial fraud didn’t seem like a metaphor for anything else and there are no echoes of it in other people’s actions or values: it just is what it is, and has the consequences it inevitably does when it is uncovered. The biggest story the novel tells, a story which exerts a kind of gravitational pull on its other somewhat disparate people and elements, is that of Jonathan Alkaitis, a charismatic money man whose Ponzi scheme ultimately affects nearly everyone we meet. It’s possible that there isn’t meant to be one: perhaps the novel’s unity lies in its emotions, for instance, which did seem to be painted with a common palette of uncertainty, loneliness, and fear, with just the occasional highlight of hope or tenderness.

The best explanation I can give is that by the end of it, I wasn’t 100% sure why all of its specific ingredients belonged together in this particular novel: I couldn’t quite discern the underlying thematic unity, the meaning of it all. Since I finished reading The Glass Hotel this morning, I’ve been puzzling over why, for all that, it still seemed to be missing something.

None of this is meant as faint praise: plenty of novels do not manage nearly so much! It is well constructed, in that its different parts, interwoven effectively throughout, tie up in a satisfying way at the end it is well crafted, by which I mean that it effectively conveys its people, its settings, and its moods in sentences and sections that always kept my attention and sometimes were eloquent, beautiful, or memorable. I was completely gripped by The Glass Hotel and yet I find myself at a loss when it comes to writing about it, not because it was difficult or confusing but because something about it was (for me, anyway) elusive. A lonely bartender looks up from her work and the message on the window makes her want to flee, because the bartender’s mother disappeared while canoeing and she’s told everyone all her life that it was an accident but there is absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true, and how could anyone who’s aware of this uncertainty … write a suggestion to commit suicide on a window with that water shimmering on the other side, but what’s driving the bartender to despair isn’t actually the graffiti, it’s the fact that when she leaves this place it will only be to go to another bar, and another after that, and another, and another, and anyway that’s the moment when the man, the opportunity, extends his hand.

An opportunity walks into a bar and meets a bartender. A lonely man walks into a bar and sees an opportunity.

Novel the glass hotel