The Glass Hotel, written by Emily St. John Mandel, is about the global economy and the role of the individual living within, and displaced by, the ever-changing nature of contemporary capitalism. The life and death of a young woman named Vincent is at the heart of the novel, which follows the important points of her life and through to her mysterious disappearance from an international shipping vessel in 2018. Along the way, the book explores an international Ponzi scheme (modeled closely after the real-life Bernie Madoff scheme exposed in 2008), the international art market, and the heights and depths of economic social status in America. It examines the ways in which individual people are made to feel immaterial by the powerful material forces surrounding them. This summary refers to the Vintage Paperback edition, published in 2020.

Plot Summary

Exploring the central mystery of a 37-year-old Vincent’s disappearance on the high seas in 2018, The Glass Hotel begins in 1994, when the protagonist is just 13. She and her half-brother Paul are raised on Vancouver Island by her biological parents. Vincent’s mother disappears in a boating accident just before her 13th birthday. Scarred by the experience, resentful of authority, and at odds with her self-centered half-brother Paul, Vincent is caught scrawling graffiti on a school window. She is sent to live with her aunt in Vancouver soon after this vandalism.

Five years later, on New Year’s Eve of 1999, Paul, who is in recovery from drug addiction, comes to see Vincent in Vancouver. Paul is leaving Toronto because of his role in another young man’s drug-related death. His relationship with his self-possessed and independent young sister continues under strain, and he is haunted by his misdoings.

Six years later, Vincent and Paul work at The Hotel Caiette, close to their childhood home on Vancouver Island. It is a remote hotel, designed for rich guests longing for a retreat from the modern world. One spring day, Paul takes a bribe from a journalist to write a nasty graffito on one of the hotel’s large, pristine windows, such that a successful financier named Jonathan Alkaitis is likely to see it. Alkaitis’s arrival is delayed, however, and Paul is fired from his job. That evening, Alkaitis meets Vincent, and the two become a couple in a materially rewarding but loveless mock marriage.

Vincent’s marriage to Alkaitis takes her from the demands of material concern, but fills her with a rootlessness she finds unsettling. She records five-minute home-movies to fight off a feeling of restlessness. In the meantime, Jonathan’s financial investment empire is a sham, fleecing late investors with a falsely advertised product to feed returns to a few early investors. Among the most vulnerable to Alkaitis’s scheme is one of his oldest friends, a painter named Olivia who knew his now-deceased brother in the late 1950’s. Alkaitis and his criminal associates conduct their business with equal parts cunning and self-delusion, believing the façade of legal propriety can be spun out forever. The scheme is exposed in the financial crash of 2008, and Alkaitis and many of his associates go to prison.

In the aftermath of these events, victims like Olivia struggle to make ends meet. Alkaitis, serving a 170-year sentence in prison, retreats into an imaginary “counterlife” of his own making, oblivious to the world around him. Paul becomes a notable but drug-addicted composer, making his reputation in part by scoring his work to five-minute home-movies stolen from Vincent’s collection. Vincent, estranged from the friends she made in her life of affluence, takes up work as a semi-anonymous cook on a floating shipping container, where she spends nine months out of the year at sea. She finds happiness in her independence and anonymity.

When Vincent disappears at sea, a man named Leon Prevant, another victim of Alkaitis’s scheme, is hired to investigate the disappearance, but comes no closer to finding the truth than when he started. In fact, she slipped off the container ship while recklessly attempting to film the waves during a storm. As she slips under the waves, she sees her life flash before her eyes, and sees present-day apparitions of many of the people whose lives she’s touched, including her mother’s.