"She'd never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You."
Emily St. John Mandel's writing has a very lyrical flow to it, rendering it almost musical in the consideration. Her "Station Eleven" was a runner-up Scooties of the Year nominee back in 2015, so I've long been a fan of her work.
"The Glass Hotel" features her prose at its very best, beautiful in its simplicity and complex in its cadence.
"I don't hate Vincent, he told himself silently, I've only ever hated Vincent's incredible good fortune at being Vincent instead of being me, I only hate that Vincent can drop out of high school and move to a terrible neighborhood and still somehow miraculously be perfectly fine, like the laws of gravity and misfortune don't apply to her."
Some of the shifts in perspective in this novel can be jarring, but her surface-level depiction of minor characters works well to create layers to the narrative. It's fair to ask whether any of the characters are actually likeable, but, to me, that only makes the work more realistic.
"He can't escape the dread. Once he was proud of himself for evading his fate, but more and more lately he feels it moving toward him, his fate approaching from a long way off. He is always waiting for a slow car with dark windows, a tap on the shoulder, a knock on the door."
The author focuses a lot on the use of appearance to trade up in life, calling into question the role of morality in assessing your station. On some level, it feels like each character in the book is struggling with balancing morality and greed, merit and value.
"The century was ending and he had some complaints."
"'Do you find yourself sort of secretly hoping that civilization collapses,' Melissa said, 'just so that something will happen?'"
Her characters' motivations and ambitions are largely unknowable, despite the time spent on consideration of the balances above. This fact only serves to further make "The Glass Hotel" a weighty mirror held up to a material society.
"Give me quiet, he thought, give me forests and ocean and no roads. Give me the walk to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again."
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