We meet Walter, the manager of the Caiette, who loves its glass the way other people love their families but goes broke after a fatal meeting with Alkaitis in its bar. Though Vincent is the center, stories spiral outward through the lives of her acquaintances. The explosion reverberates backward and forward throughout the novel’s many timelines, affecting each character along serpentine threads of interconnection. This portrait of a creative but haunted soul transforms into a banking drama w hen Vincent’s boyfriend’s fortune turns out to be the fruit of an enormous Ponzi scheme. He keeps her in unspeakable luxury, and Vincent transcends into what she calls “the Kingdom of the Rich.” She reaches a peak of nihilistic alienation, shopping for expensive shoes and bored of it. There she attracts the notice of an extremely wealthy older man named Jonathan Alkaitis, who turns out to own the place and in time becomes her boyfriend. Having dropped out of high school, Vincent gets a job as a bartender at the hotel of the novel’s title, a gorgeous spectacle of a building in blond wood and glass walls called the Caiette. In her spare time, Vincent films the surface of the ocean for hours. Water remains a strong theme throughout The Glass Hotel, equally a force of unsympathetic chaos and beauty. Traumatized by her mother’s death, Vincent is disturbed by the “goddamn haunted inlet” of water her mother drowned in.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |