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Chapter 4: A Fairy Tale
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
Olivia, a painter, stands on the street in Soho as Vincent and Mirella pass by. Olivia came here because it’s the site of a doorway she once passed through in the late 1950s, when Jonathan’s brother was looking for models. Now, in 2008, Olivia takes shelter from the impending rain under an awning.
The appearance of Olivia introduces a new character whose life will converge with the existing storylines: Olivia becomes connected with Vincent and Mirella as they pass by on their walk through Soho, and she apparently has connections to Alkaitis as well, since she knew of Alkaitis’s brother in the 1950s.
Themes
The narrative flashes back to 1958, when Olivia is a young artist living in Manhattan. Olivia buzzes her way into Lucas’s studio by simply saying “it’s me,” into the buzzer. Lucas Alkaitis is an artist “on the run from the suburbs,” like so many other people his age. Still, Olivia has met lots of “fake painters” and knows Lucas to be the real thing. Currently, Lucas is working on a series of nudes—of men and women sitting on a sofa. Though Olivia finds the paintings to be “ravishing,” she finds Lucas himself to be rather cliched in appearance and mannerisms.
Olivia knows that there’s a lot of pretense and artifice in the art world, but she recognizes Lucas to be legitimately talented. That Olivia observes a distinct difference between Lucas and his paintings suggests that Lucas feels freer to be himself in his work; in contrast, the way he presents himself in person is contrived and stiff. The fraudulent experience of existing versus the liberating honesty of art may be seen in Vincent’s video recordings as well: she’s poised and practiced when she’s in society, but she’s more honest when she’s alone with her camera.
Themes
When Olivia arrives at Lucas’s studio, she tells him she’d like to model for him. Lucas is pleased and offers to pay Olivia, but she offers her own proposition: he can paint her if she can paint him. Olivia is an artist with mild success and gallery representation and is working on a portrait series of her own. Lucas humors the proposition for a moment before declining.
The transactional nature of Olivia’s proposal is a blunt example of the way people use others for personal gain, though the arrangement she outlines for Lucas is at least mutually beneficial.
Themes
Sometime later, Olivia is in her studio painting her friend, Renata, who makes up ghost stories to pass the time. Suddenly, Lucas arrives at the studio, apparently having changed his mind about posing. Olivia finishes with Renata as Lucas investigates Olivia’s paintings. Renata leaves to pick up her kid and Lucas reluctantly takes off his clothing to pose. Beneath his clothing, he is “skinny and unpleasantly pale.” Olivia asks Lucas to reposition his arm, but Lucas just smiles and does nothing, and Olivia catches a glimpse of the bruised veins that stretch across his inner elbow. She proceeds to paint the bruises.
The novel uses ghosts to symbolize guilt and haunting. Olivia and Renata’s propensity for telling ghost stories seems more playful, but perhaps it foreshadows guilt that will plague one or both of them in the future. Lucas’s bruised veins imply that he suffers from intravenous drug abuse. His unwillingness to show these marks to Olivia suggests that he feels guilty or ashamed of his addiction and tries to hide it from the world.
Themes
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Five months later, at the opening of Olivia’s show, Lucas corners her, irate, and calls her a “liar,” though, in only 10 months, he will overdose behind a restaurant. Olivia remembers going to one of his shows right before he died and telling him she liked one of his paintings. She saw Jonathan Alkaitis at that show, looking very suburban and out of place. Lucas introduces them, and Jonathan calls out Olivia for lying about liking Lucas’s paintings. Inwardly, Olivia admits that the paintings are unoriginal and on the nose. She says she was just trying to be polite.
Olivia betrays Lucas’s trust by painting and putting on display the drug addiction he has tried desperately to conceal from the world. It’s unclear whether Olivia’s decision to paint Lucas’s bruised veins stemmed from a desire for honesty, or perhaps from her belief that such a painting would be provocative and attract a lot of attention. If the latter is true, Olivia has used Lucas’s pain for personal gain. That the young Jonathan Alkaitis calls out Olivia for lying about liking Lucas’s paintings suggests that Olivia isn’t fully committed to artistic integrity and authenticity—that she is just as prone to dishonesty and moral compromise as anyone else.
Themes
Lucas’s funeral was small, in Greenburgh, where his family lived. Olivia hadn’t known about his death until a month after it happened. Her life was chaotic then, and she was often poor, behind on rent, and needing to call her sister, Monica, for help. In the midst of these troubles, 40 years later, one of her paintings, Lucas with Shadows, sold at an auction for $200,000.
That Olivia earns $200,000 from her painting of Lucas means that she has benefited financially from exploiting him and his substance abuse problem. This is morally problematic, regardless of whether her original intentions behind painting Lucas were honest and purely artistically motivated.
Themes
In the aftermath of this good fortune, Olivia rents an old house in Monticello, New York. She sits there with Monica, who suggests that she invest the money. By some strange fateful connection, the man with whom Monica invests her savings is Jonathan Alkaitis, Lucas’s brother. Olivia tells Jonathan who she is when she calls him, and, to her surprise, he remembers that night at the gallery. Olivia invites him to lunch, which he accepts, and they continue to see each other a few times over the following years. Jonathan likes talking about Lucas, whom he didn’t know that well because of their age difference. In another meeting, Jonathan discloses to Olivia that he bought her painting of Lucas, having hunted it down from the first buyer, and that it’s now hanging in his apartment in the city. Olivia is immensely moved.
This is another odd coincidence in the novel that leads to the unlikely intersection of seemingly disparate narratives: Olivia benefits financially from the money she made by exploiting Lucas, and then, by chance, the man to whom she’s referred to invest her newfound wealth is Lucas’s brother. It’s an unlikely coincidence and probably wouldn’t happen in real life, but the novel uses it to show how interconnected people are to each other, and how every action has a corresponding consequence that has the ability to affect others. Interestingly, though Olivia and Jonathan do form something of a friendship with each other, the friendship seems to appeal to both parties for self-serving reasons: Jonathan uses Olivia to hear stories about his deceased brother, and Olivia might choose to tell Jonathan these stories because she feels bad for doing wrong by Lucas so many years ago and wants to absolve herself of her guilt.
Themes
Olivia continues to recall memories with Jonathan. In 2003, when they meet for dinner, Jonathan is no longer wearing a wedding ring, and Olivia takes this to mean that Suzanne, whom she’s never met, is dead. It’s a sad moment.
Despite Olivia’s and Jonathan’s possibly self-serving reasons for being friends, the fact that Jonathan feels comfortable enough around Olivia to tell her about Suzanne’s death suggests that they’ve developed an authentic, close bond.
Themes
Three months before his arrest, Jonathan invites Olivia on a yacht trip with him and his second wife, Vincent. Olivia compliments Jonathan on Vincent, calling her lovely and praising her ability to make cocktails. Jonathan says that Vincent would be good at anything she did, and Olivia wonders what it would be like to be good at everything; lately, she’s doubted even her ability to paint.
Olivia’s self-doubt shows how the identity she presents to the world (painter, artist, creative) doesn’t necessarily align with or guarantee the prolonged existence of a matching, internalized identity. Sometimes the things a person proclaims themself to be is a deluded attempt to impose order and structure on a chaotic world.
Themes
Jonathan and Olivia continue to talk about Vincent. Jonathan observes that Vincent’s talent is that “she sees what a given situation requires, and she adapts herself accordingly.” The comment makes Olivia uneasy, as it seems as though Jonathan is describing “a disappearing act,” one in which Vincent and her real personality are dissolved into Jonathan’s life. Olivia pretends to be interested in what Jonathan has to say about Vincent, though she inwardly decides that Vincent is not “a serious person.”
Olivia’s reservations about Vincent’s ability to mold herself to fit Jonathan’s expectations parallel Vincent’s own reservations about the restrictions her new life imposes on her. The ability to “adapt[]” that Jonathan so admires in Vincent is only possible if Vincent performs “a disappearing act,” denying herself the choice to live authentically. Still, Olivia’s reservations imply that it’s possible for a person to live authentically: that being a successful member of society doesn’t require everyone to “see[] what a given situation requires,” and “[adapt]” themselves to those requirements, even though life repeatedly pressures people to lie, be polite, or make moral compromises in order to ingratiate themselves to others, be liked, and survive.
Themes
