18 Oct / The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
“Begin at the end,” Emily St. John Mandel’s (Station Eleven, 2014) highly anticipated latest opens. Relative-newbie narrator Dylan Moore, a Julliard-trained actor, instantly becomes Vincent as she is “plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s dark wildness.” She’s notably named by her poet mother for Edna St. Vincent Millay, who “raised herself into a new life by sheer force of will,” her mother told a tween Vincent. Although Vincent doesn’t quite make it to 30, she repeatedly claims her own “new lives,” from teenage runaway to remote hotel bartender to faux trophy wife to seafaring assistant cook.
Interspersed with Vincent’s incarnations, Moore superbly, seamlessly switches genders, ages, to invoke Vincent’s two main co-stars: she’s disconnected and lost as Vincent’s addict composer older half-brother, Paul; she’s both eager-to-please and arrogantly distanced as Vincent’s temporary sorta-spouse mega-financier Jonathan Alkaitis.
The sizable supporting cast is mostly connected via Alkaitis’ Ponzi-esque scheme that, for a time, funded his “kingdom of money,” until reality shatters the illusive glass houses he scammed, stole, and eventually destroys, leaving him to wander the haunted halls of prison. Moore’s standout voices include Alkaitis’ scathing first wife, Suzanne; his ungrounded business associate, Leon; and isolated loner Walter, who teaches himself to play piano on an abandoned Steinway. Bystanders, accomplices, victims – Moore’s got ’em covered.
Review: “Media,” Booklist, September 1, 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 2020