"The Glass Hotel may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post A New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Bustle, Buzzfeed, GoodReads, Houston Chronicle, Writer's Digest, Medium, Washington ...

There was a diversity of views on Glass Hotel, but almost everyone was near the middle on this one, acknowledging that the book had very good points but also major flaws. The praise for the book largely came from the way the book explored wrongdoing and guilt, particularly the way people can deny responsibility to themselves for the things they done wrong. The center of the book is a Bernie Maddoff style pyramid scene and Jonathan Alkaitis, the man who commited it. The collapse of the scheme is probably the strongest moment of the story, as a number of characters who have been committing the con come to terms with what they've done and what awaits them. The book is organized around a central metaphor of a luxury glass hotel in the deep wilderness of Vancouver, and that metaphor shines. The setting is believable and powerful, and as a metaphor for how wealth works -- that people see wealth and think it's transparent, but can't come in unless invited, and it's not a home -- it holds up well. The issues with the novel came out of the plot elements that Mandel chose to drive the story. The most controversial was the Alkaitis himself. We see him in several scenes in prison, and NUBClub differed sharply on how we felt about those moments. Some of us saw his shallowness and descent into madness as more commentary on the denial of wrongdoing at the heart of the other characters, but others didn't understand why would spend so much time with a character that had no insight or complexity or growth. Given that this was a lot of the content of the book, following Alkaitis through his wealthy life with Vincent (our protagonist and his lover) and then in his delusional experience in prison, if you didn't think it was interesting to be in his head, the book loses a lot of its power. On top of that, there were just a number of weird and often unbelievable things in the story. Would people really get THAT upset about a vague death threat carved into a window at the hotel? Is the mystery of who wrote that graffiti really a strong plot to hinge the story on (we thought no)? And what is going on with the ship? Why does Vincent go there? Why is it interesting to see her die there, and why is there is big mystery around her death? We argued that it seemed to be there to set up a plot for Leon about whether he would lie to get more work, but that plot is undermined by how ridiculous the boat investigation scenes were and how little Leon's character matter to us. And why were there all these ancillary characters anyway? I guess we had to see some of the con's victims, but their stories were really compelling or valuable in themselves. And Paul is completely underutilized. Why does he lead the story? Is he forgiven at the end, and if so, does that deny the entire theme of guilt in the work? There are so many of these weird loose ends that just don't belong in the story -- and this isn't even talking about the stupid ghost plots in the last fourth of the book, the less said about them, the better. Ultimately, those of us who didn't like the book were left wondering why we had any of that stuff and why it couldn't be a book about this dark scammy couple that no one ever got to see inside -- a beautiful scene where Vincent confronts one of the women who got scammed shows just how well Mandel could have handled much more ambiguity and secrecy in this novel. The people who liked the book stood by it, saying that they weren't phased by the odd spiritual elements or the somewhat pat plot. The theme was strong and the good writing carried the rest. We think your mileage will vary on this one, but it will mostly come down to how much you need all the elements to tie up nicely and believably, or whether a few very strong scenes and metaphors can make a novel for you.