Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

I’m visiting from the ocean, I almost say, but I’m distracted just then because I think I just saw Faisal walk by the window with a woman who looks vaguely familiar—is that Yvette Bertolli?—and in any event the ocean isn’t exactly where I am, or if I’m there I am also somewhere else—

Some time has passed. I’ve been drifting through memories. I visit a street in some distant city where my brother sits in a doorway, because I heard him talking to me, but when he looks up and sees me he has nothing to say; I move for a while through Vancouver, walking the neighborhood where I lived when I was seventeen, although walking isn’t quite the word for the way I travel now; I search for Mirella and find her sitting alone and pensive in some beautiful interior, a loft of some kind, staring at her phone, she looks up and frowns but doesn’t seem to see me there—

In memory I’m back at Le Veau d’Or, in the interior of gold and red, listening to my least favorite of Jonathan’s investors talk about a singer. No, not a singer, a Ponzi scheme. “Couldn’t recognize an opportunity,” Lenny Xavier said, talking about the singer. “Whereas me, when I met your husband? When I figured out how his fund worked? That right there was an opportunity, and I seized it.”

I watched Jonathan’s look of alarm, the way he leaned forward as he spoke, his obvious desperation to stop Lenny from talking—“Let’s not bore our lovely wives with investment talk”—and Lenny’s smirk as he raised his glass: “All I’m saying is, my investment performed better than I could’ve imagined.” He knew, but of course I knew too, if not the details of the scheme than the fact that there was a scheme, because I’d been pretending to be Jonathan’s wife for months by then, it was just that I’d chosen not to understand—

I look for Paul again and find him in the desert, outside a low white building that seems to shine in the twilight. He just stepped out of the door, and he’s lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. He looks up and sees me, drops the cigarette and then retrieves it.

“You,” he says. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re really there?”

“I don’t know how to answer either of those questions,” I tell him.

“I was just talking about you,” he says, “in my session just now. I was just telling my counselor all the things I’ve never told anyone.” I can’t see his face clearly in the fading light, but he sounds like he’s been crying. “Vincent, before you go again, can I just tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for all of it.”

“I was a thief too,” I tell him, “we both got corrupted,” and I can tell he doesn’t understand but I don’t want to stay here and explain it to him, there’s somewhere else I’d rather be, so I move away from the desert and away from Paul, all the way to Caiette.

I’m on the beach, not far from the pier where the mail boat comes in, and my mother is here. She’s sitting some distance away, on a driftwood log, hands folded on her lap, with an air of waiting calmly for an appointment. Her hair is still braided, she’s still thirty-six years old, still in the red cardigan she was wearing the day she disappeared. It was an accident, of course it was, she would never have left me on purpose. She has waited so long for me. She was always here. This was always home. She’s gazing at the ocean, at the waves on the shore, and she looks up in amazement when I say her name.

I would like to thank the kind people at Lloyd’s List for granting me a trial subscription to read more about shipping, and would also like to thank Rose George for her fascinating book on the industry, Ninety Percent of Everything. While all of the characters in this book are entirely fictional, the financial crime in the narrative is modeled on Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, which collapsed in December 2008. I am indebted to two excellent books on the subject: Erin Arvedlund’s Too Good to Be True and Diana B. Henriques’s The Wizard of Lies.

With thanks to my wonderful agent, Katherine Fausset, and her colleagues at Curtis Brown in New York; my editors—Jennifer Jackson, Sophie Jonathan, and Jennifer Lambert—and their colleagues at Knopf in New York, Picador in London, and HarperCollins Canada in Toronto; Anna Weber and her colleagues at United Agents in the U.K.; Lauren Cerand and Kevin Mandel for reading early drafts of the manuscript; and Michelle Jones, my daughter’s former nanny, for taking excellent care of my daughter during the time I spent writing this book.

Emily St. John Mandel’s four previous novels include Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and has been translated into thirty-three languages. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Last Night in Montreal

The Singer’s Gun

The Lola Quartet

Station Eleven

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2020 by Emily St. John Mandel

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

A few paragraphs of this narrative appeared, in a different but possibly recognizable form, as “Mr. Thursday,” a short story published by Slate (in partnership with Arizona State University) in 2017. “Mr. Thursday” was loosely based on a very early draft of this novel.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mandel, Emily St. John, [date] author.

Title: The glass hotel : a novel / Emily St. John Mandel.

Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019023840 | ISBN 9780525521143 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525521150 (ebk) | ISBN 9781524711764 (open market)

Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

Classification: LCC PR9199.4.M3347 G53 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019023840

Ebook ISBN 9780525521150

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover photograph by Lawrence Sawyer/E+/Getty Images

Cover design by Abby Weintraub

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