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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Glass Hotel, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Complicity and Interconnectedness
Guilt and Responsibility
Fraud and Constructed Identity
Greed, Delusion, and Self Interest
Alienation and Self-Knowledge
Regret and Disillusionment
Summary
Analysis
It’s 2029, and Simone is at a cocktail party in Atlanta, where she lives with her family. Exuberantly, she tells her colleagues about the time in 2008 when she worked as Jonathan Alkaitis’s secretary. Her much younger assistant, Keisha, doesn’t recognize the name (much to Simone’s annoyance), but an older colleague recalls how Alkaitis “stole” all her grandpa’s retirement money and turned him into a bitter, broken man. Over the past couple decades, Simone has “honed the story” and “made it sharper and more entertaining,” though she can’t think of Claire’s broken, sedated figure in the backseat of the SUV that day, or she feels too guilty.
Claire’s earlier prediction that Simone will use her experience working at Alkaitis’s office as fodder for a cheesy cocktail party story comes true. The exaggerated, “entertaining” way Simone tells her story is rather gross, given the magnitude of suffering and tragedy that lies at the core of Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme. Simone is essentially exploiting this suffering to impress her colleagues.
Themes
The narrative switches to a first-person perspective and gives an overview of the trajectory of Alkaitis’s employees’ lives after his arrest. Simone is now in her 40s, by which point everyone who was convicted has served their sentences. Because of his cooperation with the state, Harvey is sentenced to time served and has since moved to New Jersey to live in his sister’s basement. Though Ron isn’t convicted, he’s now divorced and lives with his parents in Rochester. After her release from prison, Joelle moves in with her sister in North Carolina, without her children. Oskar was released but later reincarcerated on drug charges. Enrico is still free and living in Mexico, now married and with two daughters, though he lives every day in fear of the day authorities will finally find him.
The novel presents Alkaitis’s former employees in a sympathetic light. Though they were all complicit in the Ponzi scheme that destroyed many lives and livelihoods, they are people, too, and their own lives are characterized by suffering and disappointment following the scheme’s collapse.
Themes
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