A Book Review - The Glass Hotel Novel by Emily St. John Mandel

Not quite halfway through “The Glass Hotel,” a new novel by Emily St. John Mandel, a woman named Vincent takes stock of her existence. “She felt that by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life,” Mandel writes. I read these words in self-quarantine, while watching my boyfriend remove five varieties of pasta from a grocery bag. Join the club, I thought. The coronavirus may have heightened our sense of living in an “extraordinary” moment, but current events—climate change, the President—have been stoking it for some time. It is possible, then, to tear through Mandel’s fiction in a delirium of recognition. (Her previous novel, “Station Eleven,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award, in 2014, follows the survivors of a flu that wipes out ninety-nine per cent of humanity.) Mandel’s gift is to weave realism out of extremity. She plants her flag where the ordinary and the astonishing meet, where everyday people pause to wonder how, exactly, it came to this. She is our bard of waking up in the wrong time line.