Indeed, the fate of the story’s heroine appears in a brief, impressionistic preface, but you won’t fully appreciate that opening until you finish the whole novel and begin obsessively reading it again. Mandel is always casually revealing future turns of success or demise in ways that only pique our curiosity. It remains freshly mysterious despite its self-spoiling plot. may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker. Who among us hasn’t wished to look through the same viewfinder? Read Full Review >

Simply, from time to time, her camera lifts and shows us another place and time involving one or more of the same people. To her credit, these encounters don’t feel contrived, and certainly never for plot reasons. Mandel’s interest seems to lie more in pointing out the ways random lives intersect rather than deriving anything enlightening from the fact that they do. Too often, theirs is written dialogue, not spoken.) I wasn’t sure whether Mandel wants us to think that the wealthy are more interesting than we think, or just as lame as the caricatures have it, but if it was the former, she doesn’t succeed in showing us how, and the latter is not a very stirring premise for a novel.

(The novel suffers from the fact that almost everyone in it sounds indistinguishable and is, unfortunately, as smart as the author. Mandel doesn’t offer particular insight into either side of the Alkaitis/Madoff scheme-in flat prose, she describes both the perpetrators and victims at substantial and dutiful length, but they mostly remain opaque or generic. The jumping around is eventful, and feels formally daring, so that it takes a while to ask yourself whether it adds anything to the story. Like Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel is a hash of temporal crosscutting. Mandel’s affirmation that a somewhat old-fashioned fictional model is not only relevant to our alarming new world but also deeply appropriate for it manages, remarkably, to feel both consoling and revolutionary. Despite the initial disorientation of its kaleidoscopic form, The Glass Hotel is ultimately as immersive a reading experience as its predecessor, finding all the necessary imaginative depth within the more realistic confines of its world. But for the most part Mandel’s language is understated, fading almost invisibly to serve the familiar pleasures of character and plot.

The structure of The Glass Hotel is virtuosic, as the fragments of the story coalesce by the end of the narrative into a richly satisfying shape. If Station Eleven is a mosaic-we see the outlines of the picture nearly at once, but precisely how the pieces fit together appears later- The Glass Hotel is a jigsaw puzzle missing its box. deeply imagined, philosophically profound reckonings with life in an age of disaster.

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