Hearing from Author Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel with Amber Sparks

I've been thinking a lot about Emily St. John Mandel since the coronavirus broke out. Not about Mandel per se, but about her "Station Eleven," a novel set in a time following a pandemic that wiped out most of the world's population. I was drawn to the dystopian story because it features the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and Shakespearean actors who move from enclave to enclave bringing the arts to survivors. But though it's one of my favorite books, it's not one I would recommend reading right now -- nor would Mandel. In a recent interview sponsored by Politics and Prose, Mandel said some people who recently read "Station Eleven" have expressed anger at her. Obviously, her envisioning of a pandemic didn't cause one to occur. Still, she kind of gets it. With that elephant in the room out of the way, Mandel was free to talk with fellow author Amber Sparks about her recently released "The Glass Hotel."

"The Glass Hotel" defies easy description. GoodReads calls it "a captivating novel of money, beauty, white collar crime, ghosts and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it." And it skips around in time.  Hmmm.

Mandel's interest in the Madoff scandal was the spark for the novel. Mandel said she's fascinated with the psychology of wrongdoing. How can you intellectually know you're guilty and caused the ruin of countless people and still believe you're an okay person?  Her research for the book included reading "The Wizard of Lies" by Diana B. Heriques, "Too Good to Be True" by Erin Arvedlund, court testimony and witness impact statements. As she wrote about the Ponzi scheme, Mandel envisioned the fund employees who helped facilitate the fraud as a sort of Greek chorus, or a group of people operating as a single unit. Having worked as an administrative assistant for 12 years, she could relate to their camaraderie and understand -- kinda, sorta -- the trust they were forced to feel for one another as mutually dependent wheels in the cog of the massive fraud.

Her interest in "counter-factual lives" is a theme that runs throughout the book. It's something we all contemplate from time to time. How would our lives have been different if we'd gone to a different school? Married someone else? Decided not to take that job? Mandel said she "likes this idea of a counterlife and being haunted by the choices one didn't make." And so her characters occasionally linger -- sometimes for an entire chapter -- on visions of what their lives could have been.

You aren't alone if you find this description of "The Glass Hotel" a bit off-putting. Mandel herself said, "It turned into a frankly weird book." (This on the heels of explaining that she writes without an outline.) Rest assured, though, that the novel is a terrific read. Take, for instance, a portion of the passage Mandel read during the talk about when the fund employees realize their world is about to shatter.

"We had crossed a line, that much was obvious, but it was difficult to say later exactly where that line had been. Or perhaps we'd all had different lines, or crossed the same line at different times..."

Oskar, specifically, considers this line -- and the idea of a counterlife -- a bit later in the same chapter. And then the Greek chorus jumps back in.

"'I realized there was fraud going on,' he imagined telling an admiring future employer, 'and that was the day I walked out. I never would have imagined walking off a job like that, but sometimes you just have to draw the line.' Although the line, for Oskar, had been crossed eleven years earlier, when he'd first been asked to backdate a transaction. 'It's possible to both know and not know something,' he said later, under cross-examination, and the state tore him to pieces over this but he spoke for several of us, actually, several of us who'd been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honorable and not being honorable, knowing you're not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad. We'd all die for the truth in our secret lives, or if not die exactly, then at least maybe make a couple of confidential phone calls and try to feign surprise when the authorities arrived, but in our actual lives we were being paid an exorbitant amount of money to keep our mouths shut, and you don't have to be an entirely terrible person, we told ourselves later, to turn a blind eye to certain things--even actively participate in certain other things--when it's not just you, because who among us is fully alone in the world? There are always other people in the picture. Our salaries and bonuses covered roofs over heads, crackers shaped like goldfish, tuition, retirement home expenses, the mortgage on Oskar's mother's apartment in Warsaw, etc.

And then there's the part of the equation that could somehow never be mentioned at trial but that seemed extremely relevant, which is that when you've worked with a given group of people for a while, calling the authorities means destroying the lives of your friends. Our lawyers asked us not to bring this up on the stand, but it's a real thing, this aversion to sending your colleagues to prison. We'd worked together for a very long time."

Later, Joelle talks with Oskar about how they came to be part of the scheme. "You ever think about why we were chosen?" Joelle asked...."I mean, here's the question, and I'd be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts: How did he know we'd do it? Would anyone do something like this, given enough money, or is there something special about us? Did he look at me one day and just think, That woman seems conveniently lacking in a moral center, that person seems well suited to participate in a ---".  Food for thought.

Politics and Prose uses crowdcast for its online talks,
a platform that allows viewers to ask questions of the author. 

While the Ponzi scheme is a fascinating part of the book, it's just that -- a part. There's so much more. And while the plotlines are disparate, they are brought loosely together through the character of Vincent, a woman who's a bit of a chameleon. It's her brother Paul whose night out goes desperately wrong at the top of the novel.  Later, Vincent works as a bartender at the Glass Hotel, where she meets the charming and extremely morally dubious fund manager Jonathan Alkaitis. Later still, she works on a cargo ship from which she disappears. A discussion of her character alone would provide ample fodder for a book club discussion.

Thanks to Politics and Prose for making its author talks available online during this strange time. Click here to see what's coming up. You can also check out their YouTube channel to view past author talks, including the interview with Mandel. (Click on "Videos" to see what's available.)  And don't forget to support your favorite indie bookstore!