My Amazon and Goodreads review of The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (Rating 3) – All Surface. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel is promoted as a “Bernie Madoff” novel, the story of a Ponzi scheme that robbed investors of their life savings. In fact, only the last third of the book focuses on the crime and its fallout, while even those pages are a missed opportunity to probe the mind of an individual who blithely sustains such a fraud for decades. Other than a few paragraphs in which we hear the lame, and patently untrue, justification concocted by his sleek lawyer, the criminal remains a cipher to us. So do the rest of the characters: the poor but beautiful quasi-trophy wife who remains willfully unaware so she can relish the perks of wealth; the various enablers; and the victims. Mandel is a good observer of details, but her portraits are all surface. This hotel’s glass is a one-way mirror, reflecting outward and denying entry. As a reader and fiction writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I believe it’s that entry into the human mind that makes a book worth checking into.
