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Chapter 5: Olivia
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
The words “no star burns forever” are carved into the wall next to Alkaitis’s bunk. His cellmate, Hazelton, explains that Roberts, a man who was there before Alkaitis, wrote them. Alkaitis was arrested in December of 2008 and sent to a medium-security prison in Florence, South Carolina. There’s a maximum-security prison there, as well as a hospital, which frightens Alkaitis, as “it’s the place where old men disappear.” He gets letters from journalists who ask him what it’s like to be sentenced to 170 years in prison. He doesn’t answer them but inwardly decides “it feels like delirium,” likening it to a time in his 20s when he had a bad fever.
Alkaitis probably relates to the words carved on his cell wall: he was a “star” for a prolonged length of time before he was arrested, convicted, and extinguished. The hospital Alkaitis fears is likely somewhere old men go when they’re too sick to live among the prison’s general population any longer. Alkaitis’s fear of the hospital reflects his broader fear of mortality. His comment that being sentenced to 170 years in prison “feels like delirium” suggests the unreality of his situation: it’s too extreme for him to wrap his mind around.
Themes
FCI Florence Medium isn’t all that bad: nobody has tried to kill Alkaitis, and he’s taken up jogging and weightlifting and has never been in better shape in his life. He didn’t have time to read in the outside world, but now he’s joined a book club led by a visiting professor, and he reads and discusses the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Alkaitis sleeps better in prison, no longer awake late into the night being anxious about being arrested.
Ironically, imprisonment gives Alkaitis more mental freedom and clarity, since before he was arrested, he was perpetually haunted by the fear of one day being arrested. The outer world was full of anxieties and distractions, and here his main task is to sit and reckon with himself. Alkaitis’s newfound free time mirrors Vincent’s entry into the so-called kingdom of money: both characters are thrust into a new, unstructured, and unreal world onto which they are tasked with imposing order and meaning. Just as Vincent had to learn how to fill the many hours in her day as a wealthy, unemployed woman, Jonathan must learn to structure the remainder of his days in prison.
Themes
During one visit with Julie Freeman, a journalist who is writing a book about Alkaitis, Freeman asks Alkaitis why he never bothered to flee the country if he was afraid of being arrested. He reveals that the thought never occurred to him, though he has other regrets: he wishes he had more friends as an adult, though he did enjoy the company of several of his investors, like Olivia and Faisal, though Faisal is now dead. The people with whom he associates these days are not people he respects, though he recognizes the hypocrisy of this stance. He recalls a conversation he had with a convicted bank robber named Nemirovsky over breakfast, in which Nemirovsky described money as a “game,” a stance with which Alkaitis agrees: money is a game, and it’s one “he knew how to play.”
It's possible Alkaitis never thought to flee the country because he hadn’t imagined a reality in which he was caught and punished for his crimes: he made the choice to move through life believing he would never be caught because to do otherwise would mean giving in to the constant, haunting presence of anxiety and paranoia. Alkaitis deluded himself into believing he was invincible in order to not crumple under the psychological strain of fear. Alkaitis’s comments about money seem to confirm that his crime involves money/finances—perhaps Kaspersky’s accusations about the illegitimacy of his firm were correct all along. Alkaitis’s agreement with Nemirovsky that money is a “game” suggests a detachment from reality: believing that money is a game in which he is a player absolves him of having any moral responsibilities. If money is a game, it’s detached from reality; and if it’s detached from reality, it means he can’t wrong anybody by defrauding them—not really.
Themes
Thinking about Julie Freeman’s question about fleeing the country, Alkaitis reflects on his habit of daydreaming about his “counterlife,” of a world in which things had panned out differently for him. Maybe he fled to the United Arab Emirates, a place he so enjoyed. Maybe he pretends not to know what Claire is talking about when she confronts him the day after the office holiday party. Maybe, early the next morning, pretending everything is normal, he gives himself a buzz cut, wears a hat and sunglasses, and gets a ride down to the street with a window washer, whom he bribes with money. Maybe then he might board a flight to Dubai and escape his old life.
Alkaitis’s “counterlife” is completely detached from reality. It functions more as an escapist fantasy than an outline of the different, more morally upstanding choices Alkaitis might have made to avoid being arrested. The alternate reality that Alkaitis constructs in this counterlife illustrates the regret he feels at being arrested, but not any remorse about committing crimes in the first place. It’s not an examination of wrongdoing, but an expression of frustration with his current imprisonment. As a result, Alkaitis denies himself the opportunity to reflect on his moral failings.
Themes
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In their second meeting, Julie Freeman asks Alkaitis about Vincent, and he admits that he doesn’t know what became of her. Freeman tries to ask Alkaitis about Claire, but Alkaitis refuses. Inwardly, he reveals that it was Claire who called the FBI, and that she never visits him in prison. He wrote to her when he was first incarcerated, but she responded only with pages of transcripts from the trial, in which he admitted his guilt.
It's painful for Alkaitis to acknowledge that it was Claire who turned him in to the authorities, but his internal lament also fails to account for the fact that he’s actually guilty of the crimes for which Claire reported him. Alkaitis deludes himself into thinking he’s a victim of a ruthless daughter, not the instigator of a crime himself.
Themes
