Yet another book recommendation
It’s hard to describe what The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel is about. Her previous novel, Station Eleven, didn’t have that problem, because it was about the post-apocalyptic world after a global pandemic. I loved it, and I definitely would have re-read it at the beginning of all this, except that I had already re-read it just a few months before. The Glass Hotel came out in early quarantine, when all I wanted to do was re-read, so I put it on a wishlist and kind of forgot about it. I’m glad I waited until late quarantine to pick it up, because its themes are only more resonant now.
In the broadest sense of “about,” The Glass Hotel is about an isolated town, a devastating Ponzi scheme, and the mundane but still completely staggering truth that time only moves forward. It’s about how your past selves are inevitably strangers to your present self; the rare and painful moments when you know right then, and not just afterward, that you’re crossing a threshold that you can’t uncross; the sense that the ghost versions of your life are so palpable you could almost step into them, even as they remain forever out of reach; the feeling of selves and lives and ghost lives bouncing off each other at random; how that randomness alchemically coheres into who you are. The book roughly follows the life of Vincent, a woman whose past, present, and future selves are so distinct as to seem mutually exclusive, except that they are also all the same person.
It’s hard to approach questions like “what is a self?,” “how am I always me?,” and “time: why?” without sounding like you’re getting high in a dorm room somewhere. Or maybe we’ve relegated them to the category of stoner philosophy because they are too scary to let into our real lives. Personally, after a year of quarantine, all I want to think about is “time: why?” The Glass Hotel was right there with me.
Programming note: If you’re wondering if you missed my newsletter last week, you didn’t. I didn’t send one, in my first unplanned break of this whole endeavor. I’ll be taking more. Breaks! Rest! They are good!