Worlds’ end

It isn’t that Mandel (no relation) doesn’t like her own work. It’s that Station Eleven, the 2014 breakout novel that catapulted her to fame, is about a new strain of the flu that wipes out 99% of the world’s population.

Some of us, however, couldn’t really take Mandel’s advice. Her much-anticipated new novel, The Glass Hotel, was published on March 24. It includes characters from Station Eleven, though it is not a sequel (or a prequel). And unlike Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel isn’t about the end of the world. It’s really about the end of individual worlds. And for that reason, Station Eleven might actually be more optimistic. The Glass Hotel has far less destruction, but its portrayal of the futility of modern life is harder to escape, perhaps, than even the Georgia flu.

The Glass Hotel features characters from Station Eleven, it becomes apparent, because the book is a sort of continuation — it’s a different version of roughly the same timeline. Vincent, who is, along with her half-brother Paul, our protagonist (she’s named after Edna St. Vincent Millay), finds herself “imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.”

That isn’t the only direct reference to Station Eleven. Shipping executive Leon Prevant and his assistant Miranda (who works her way up to executive level) are in both books. In Station Eleven, an Air Gradia plane lands at an airport during the outbreak and simply stays there with its passengers, an eerie sign of the way life just stops during a pandemic. In The Glass Hotel, the central villainous activity of the book, a Ponzi scheme, takes place in New York in the Gradia Building. In Station Eleven, Miranda dies from the flu on a beach in Malaysia, where a ghost fleet of container ships sits offshore. In a rare bit of optimism, Miranda muses about how the isolation has likely saved its crew. In The Glass Hotel, those ships are a problem to be solved because the financial crash of 2008 has curbed the demand for the goods they might otherwise have carried.

The characters begin The Glass Hotel partying through Y2K, hoping the world doesn’t end. It doesn’t. Vincent and Paul soon go to work at a hotel on a remote island in British Columbia accessible only by boat and without cellphone service. “The truth of the matter is,” the hotel’s general manager tells an interviewee, “there’s a certain demographic that will pay a great deal of money to escape temporarily from the modern world.”

Vincent escapes from one modern world to the next. A bartender at the hotel, she hits it off with the owner, Jonathan Alkaitis, who recently lost his wife. Alkaitis is a wealthy investment manager running a Ponzi scheme alongside a legitimate financial firm. Vincent decides to join him in “the kingdom of money.” She befriends Mirella, the girlfriend of a Saudi prince who invests with Alkaitis. Neither she nor Mirella comes from money. “You know what I’ve learned about money?” Mirella asks Vincent. “I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”

But Vincent can’t stay. Alkaitis reveals his scheme to her just as the feds are closing in, on the eve of the 2008 crash. He’s sentenced to spend many more years in prison than he has left in life; she goes to work as a cook on a container ship where nobody recognizes her. When she’s asked if she’ll ever settle down, she laughs and responds, “Maybe in the next life.”

Prevant is one of Alkaitis’s victims. He loses his retirement savings, and he and his wife abandon their house to live out their days working campgrounds and sleeping in an RV they bought when they still had money. They had become “citizens of a shadow country that in [Leon’s] previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss.” Miranda hires him for a brief consultancy back at the shipping company. Walking the shipping terminals again, Leon “had a strange sense of haunting a previous version of his life. He felt like an imposter here.”

Mandel’s characters are crisply drawn, all sharp lines and living color. Everyone in the book is witty; no one is particularly likable. But taken together, their overlapping stories are gripping, in part because we spend so much time in their heads we have to know how it all turns out and in part because they are all eventually honest with themselves, with the exception of Alkaitis. They all wish they were good people but don’t think they ever will be.

Mandel’s books are soulful and subtly philosophical, and I wondered why I felt so much more unsettled by The Glass House than Station Eleven. I think the answer is the implicit critique of complacency. Station Eleven’s most prominent narrator-survivors are part of a traveling orchestra, which also performs Shakespeare in the makeshift “towns” it encounters. Shakespeare comes highly requested. Why? “People want what was best about the world,” one character explains to another. Mandel seems to want us to ask ourselves: Why didn’t they want that before the world ended?

At one point in Station Eleven, two characters encounter a house that hasn’t been touched in some time. There is dust everywhere — except on a porcelain doll tea set in a nursery room. One character is transfixed; the other doesn’t want to think about it and rushes them out of the house. Later on, they discuss this lack of dust:

“Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”

“Of course not. Imagine how many there’d be.”

“Yes,” Kirsten said, “that’s exactly it.”

Those ghosts seem to be all over The Glass Hotel, sitting in silent judgment of people who survive disasters and yet keep deluding themselves about the nature of their own lives.

Seth Mandel is the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.