The Glass Hotel

In early December of 1999, Vincent’s half-brother Paul, a self-described musical composer studying finance at the University of Toronto, plans a night out. At the age of 23, Paul has been in and out of rehab programs and appears older than he is. Disinterested in finance, he struggles in his classes.

Paul has declined a classmate’s invitation to see Baltica, a local Toronto band. Alienated and alone, however, Paul decides at the last minute to go. The concert takes place at a goth club. The band sounds strange and atonal, but he is intrigued by the lead singer and violinist, a beautiful girl named Annika who sings “I always come to you” (7) again and again. Later, in an unsuccessful bid to flirt, Paul chats with the band and finds out they often frequent a bar called System Sound on weeknights.

Going to System Sound on Tuesday, Paul does not find Annika. He purchases what he thinks are a handful of ecstasy pills from a dealer and, rationalizing that “E wasn’t heroin and didn’t count” against his rehab program, he takes one (10). The pill has a powerful and unexpected effect, and Paul blacks out. He goes home demoralized and self-hating. Twenty years later, Paul will recount this episode in rehab therapy.

Two weeks later, in the interim between Christmas and New Year’s, Paul returns to System Sound, only remembering when he gets there that he still has the pills in his pocket. Baltica is there. Newly enamored with Annika, he musters the courage to ask her out, but he is flatly rejected. He then offers everyone in Baltica the bad ecstasy in his pocket. They accept the pills, and Annika says she thinks she recognizes the pills by their color. In therapy 20 years in the future, Paul uses this recognition to rationalize the evening’s events. Later that night, Baltica’s keyboardist, Charlie Wu, dies of a heart attack while on the drug.

On New Year’s Eve, during the apex of Y2K hysteria, Paul escapes Toronto and the raw emotion caused by Charlie’s death by traveling to Vancouver under the pretext of wanting to visit his half-sister Vincent. Vincent’s mother, Paul’s stepmother, drowned in an accident when she was very young. Paul remembers an event from five years earlier, when they were both in high school on Vancouver Island: He saw Vincent scrawl the words “Sweep me up” (17) using an acid marker on a window of their school. “They were just some words I liked,” Vincent said later (19). From that point, responsibility for her care was delegated between Paul and their aunt; this responsibility has been complicated by Vincent’s fierce independent streak, and by the two teenagers’ immediate understanding of one another’s weaknesses, particularly Paul’s weakness for hard drugs. During this time, their parents mention that they live near the place in the Pacific Ocean where Vincent’s mother drowned, and that across the island there is a large hotel being built.

In recent months leading up to 1999, Vincent has been staying with an aunt on her birth mother’s side, and that is how Paul learns that she has escaped her aunt’s care and has been staying with friends in a rented apartment in a run-down neighborhood in downtown Vancouver. Paul arrives, and feels a tinge of jealousy on seeing Vincent’s beauty and self-possession. Their reunion is awkward. Celebrating New Year’s Eve at a club that night, Paul imagines he sees Charlie Wu among the dancing crowd. Later, he will tell his therapist that this was the first of many hallucinatory sightings. They leave the club and celebrate the new year in relative silence.

In spring 2005, a shipping executive named Leon Prevant, a guest in Vancouver’s Hotel Caiette, sits in the hotel bar at 2:30 in the morning. He reads a violent message scrawled in acid paste on one of the hotel’s large outside windows: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass” (32). Two hotel employees named Walter and Larry attempt to cover the message with sheets of paper and a potted plant as the bartender, Vincent, looks on. Leon is shaken by the message, and Walter goes to write an incident report.

Later, Walter recounts in his report that the large glass-and-cedar fronted hotel is in a remote location on the north of Vancouver Island accessible only by boat. He considers that it’s an odd place to put a five-star luxury hotel; in his job interview, he noted the hotel’s strange remoteness as a feature. Like the hotel’s clientele, Walter was looking for an escape from the modern world when he took up employment in the hotel. Reviewing the report with his supervisor, Walter recounts that there is no useful surveillance footage of the vandalism, just a formless figure with a hoodie. Nevertheless, timing, clues, and circumstance lead Walter to speculate that the culprit is Vincent’s brother Paul, who performs cleaning work for the hotel. The chief clue is that Paul seems distressed when he learns that a multi-millionaire named Johnathan Alkaitis, whose flight to the hotel had been delayed, had not seen the graffiti.

Immediately following the incident with the graffiti, the narrative perspective shifts backwards between Leon’s and Walter’s point of view. The staff hides the graffiti. Jonathan Alkaitis shows up late. Alkaitis is a regular guest to the hotel, and Walter recalls that his wife had recently died. A disturbed Leon continues drinking; he is meant to be spending his anniversary with his wife, but instead he is restlessly thinking about his money problems, and about a disruptive upcoming merger at his company. During that evening, Prevant and Alkaitis strike up a conversation about their respective work lives, and Alkaitis leads Prevant towards an investment opportunity. Later that evening, Walter recalls seeing Alkaitis and bartender Vincent strike up an intimate conversation long into the morning hours.

Later, Walter fires a nervous and unconvincing Paul, giving him the opportunity to leave on his own without the intrusion of local authorities. Paul leaves on the next morning boat. To Walter's surprise, Vincent also leaves, necessitating a few last-minute personnel changes.

A year later, a guest named Anna Kaspersky checks into the hotel. Walter recalls that he is prohibited from booking Alkaitis and Kaspersky on the same days due to a heated rivalry. Curious that Alkaitis hasn’t checked into the hotel in a year, he does an internet search for him. Walter is surprised to find that Alkaitis has been remarried to Vincent. He considers that nothing much has changed in his own life in the past year, and for that he gives thanks.

Vincent immediately becomes accustomed to life with Johnathan Alkaitis. Their relationship is explicitly loveless but amicable; they present themselves to the world as a married couple but are not married in fact. She lives in his mansion in Connecticut. Her usual routine involves waking early, taking the train into Manhattan, shopping and visiting cafés and museums, returning in the evenings to have dinner with her partner, and taking laps in a luxurious private pool at night. She fears having unstructured days, and understands that none of the wealth that surrounds her belongs to her. Alkaitis is 34 years older than Vincent. She is available to him at all times, both emotionally and sexually, but spends much of her time alone. Compared to her life before, her life now feels like a strange dream. She once thought of being rich as a private experience, but she is now surrounded by crowds of servants and advisors.

Vincent contends with a polite but distant staff and Alkaitis’s resentful daughter Claire, who is professionally involved in her father’s business. Vincent reveals to Claire that she was named after the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like her mother, Millay was a poet with an independent temperament who chafed under the restrictions of marriage. Privately, Vincent considers it strange that Alkaitis has allowed his daughter to believe that he had remarried.

She understands very little about Johnathan’s business, which is connected to high-end financial investment. She often dines with Alkaitis’s investors, and presents herself as a graceful and beautiful companion, though she must lie about their marital status. He talks very little about his first wife, Suzanne. As she fills her days, she lets her imagination drift to alternate realities, sometimes getting uncomfortably swept away by her thoughts. She purchases a high-end video camera, and continues to develop her practice; when she was a teenager, she began taking precise, five-minute videos of seemingly random subjects.

Vincent becomes vaguely aware of a “shadow” following Alkaitis, personified by a reporter named Ella Kaspersky, who claims that his financial products do not bear close legal scrutiny. He dismisses the reporter as being “unhinged,” though he frets that “the appearance of scandal would be almost as bad as an actual scandal” (71). When the reporter meets Alkaitis’s employees, all but the asset management team are cordial and sociable.

Vincent befriends a woman of her own age named Mirella, who is married to a client of Alkaitis’s, a Saudi prince named Faisal. Like Vincent, Mirella married into money, and the two share similar impressions of the strangeness of their newfound wealthy world. As they come to know one another better, Vincent reveals many of her own secrets—including her mother’s death, her relationship with her estranged brother, and her strange, transactional first meeting with Alkaitis at the hotel in which he tipped her a $100 bill. In contrast to her affinity with Mirella, Vincent hates some whom she meets in this world, such as arrogant, sexist music producer Lenny Xavier (coincidentally a former manager of Annika, the lead singer of Baltica known to her brother Paul). With Mirella, Vincent feels she can be herself. Both women understand that the freedom given by wealth, for those not born into it, is “the previously unimaginable freedom of not having to think about money” (90).

In 1958, painter Olivia Collins comes to Lucas Alkaitis’s New York studio in response to an ad in search of models. She is impressed by his paintings, but finds his personality and appearance pretentious. She proposes an exchange with the fellow painter; she will model for him if he promises to model for her. He refuses at first, but will later agree to the exchange. Years later, in 2008, Olivia stands across from this same flat recalling this encounter, noting (but not recognizing) Vincent and Mirella as they pass by.

In 1958, when Lucas comes to model for her, Olivia makes him wait while she finishes a portrait of a woman. A serious painter herself, Olivia is preoccupied with making a good impression on Lucas, whom she considers a serious talent. When he removes his shirt, she notes that he is thin and pale. He attempts to hide the signs of heroin addiction showing on his bruised arms, but Olivia catches sight of them, and decides to include the track marks in her final version of the portrait, entitled Lucas with Shadows. When the painting is first publicly displayed, Lucas is furious. Trailing his little 13-year-old brother Johnathan behind him, he secretly berates Olivia for exposing his addiction. In 10 months, says the narrator, “he would OD behind a restaurant on Delancey Street” (97).

Forty years later, after a lifetime of poverty and professional struggle, Olivia makes a surprise sale of Lucas with Shadows for 200,000 dollars. Coincidentally, while seeking investment advice, she is steered toward Jonathan Alkaitis, the brother of her painting’s subject. They get along very well. After investing her money, they plan several lunches together in which Johnathan asks Olivia for stories about his estranged brother. He reveals that it was he who bought Lucas with Shadows.

Their friendship deepens over the years. She is there when his wife Suzanne dies, and for his “re-marriage” to Vincent. Soon, this friendship will end with Johnathan’s arrest for investment fraud.