The connection between these figures is initially unclear, until Mandel slowly reveals they are all united by a common calamity: a collapsed Ponzi scheme. In the hotel, we encounter most of the novel’s primary players, including Paul, Vincent’s troubled half-brother Walter, the hotel’s night manager Leon Prevant, a shipping executive Jonathan Alkaitis, the hotel’s owner and a wealthy financier and Vincent herself, in a much younger form. The year is 2018, but Vincent is both literally and figuratively “out of time.” She is drifting across lyrical fragments of her life, moving “between memories like walking from one room to the next.” After this enigmatic opening, Mandel shifts into a roving third-person point of view, through which we are introduced to the titular glass hotel, also known as Hotel Caiette. It urges us to “begin at the end,” where we find our first-person narrator, Vincent, plummeting into the sea. The Glass Hotel, Mandel’s follow-up, addresses a different, more fractured kind of disaster. Although Mandel’s fictional virus-a particularly nasty strain of swine flu-far outstrips the human toll of the coronavirus, it offers potent parallels to our time, and how we respond to the consequences of disaster. The attention was, and still is, earned the prose is clean and understated, and the book moves ably across time and points of view. The synopsis was a perfect fit for the moment: A theatre troupe reckons with the fallout from a deadly pandemic.

John Mandel’s acclaimed fourth novel, Station Eleven, was a fixture in these pieces. The articles reflected this idea they were cheeky little pieces, often in the form of search-optimized lists, with winking references to bunkers and claustrophobia.

In those hazy early days, we lived under the delusion that the virus would not be with us for long. Back in early 2020, when the novel coronavirus still felt, well, novel, the internet was inundated with articles about how to pass the time in quarantine.

Review the glass hotel