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Chapter 6: The Counterlife
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 Neptune Cumberland: Vincent sets sail on the Neptune Cumberland, a container ship, off of Port Newark in August 2013. Geoffrey Bell and Felix Mendoza, the ship’s third mate and steward, welcome her aboard. Tonight, Vincent will start working as the ship’s assistant cook. Mendoza leaves Vincent to unpack. Vincent’s room is plain and small. Everything in it is nailed to the floor or fastened to the wall. As Vincent unpacks her things, including her camera, she thinks about Geoffrey. Although she doesn’t believe in “love at first sight,” she’ll allow for “recognition at first sight” and believes that Geoffrey will play some critical role in her life.
Since the earlier chapter “A Fairy Tale” (outlining the years Vincent spent as Jonathan’s wife) took place from 2005-2008, it’s reasonable to assume that Vincent goes to sea in the aftermath of her breakup with Jonathan and Jonathan’s arrest. Since the novel uses water to represent isolation and self-contemplation, one might interpret Vincent’s decision to go to sea as an intentional act of reinvention and self-discovery in the aftermath of what was likely a chaotic break-up with her criminal ex.
Themes
It took a lot of work and preparation for Vincent to go to sea, and she can hardly believe she’s here. Her first night on the job is so hectic that she barely realizes that the ship has left the harbor until she smells the intoxicating smell of the sea. As Vincent peers out across the Atlantic Ocean, she decides she “never want[s] to live on land again.”
In the wide, endless sea, Vincent seems to achieve a sort of clarity and calm that were impossible for her when she was preoccupied by the artifice and attention to detail required of her to perform the role of Jonathan Alkaitis’s wife. Vincent considers the sea the antithesis of the land and seems to think that the farther she travels from shore, the farther she’ll travel from her personal troubles.
Themes
The first time they talk, around a week into the voyage, Geoffrey Bell asks Vincent why she wanted to go to sea. Geoffrey invites Vincent to walk with him to a corner of the C level deck, which he likes because it doesn’t have security cameras, and he finds that life at sea is often so devoid of privacy. Answering Geoffrey’s earlier question, Vincent offers a vague explanation of being with a man and the relationship ending badly. Inwardly, she considers going into more detail but settles on being mysterious, revealing only that she “left land because she kept running into the wrong people.”
It's possible that Vincent is vague with Geoffrey because she doesn’t want to bear the negative stigma of having been associated with the likely now-imprisoned Jonathan Alkaitis. After all, being Jonathan’s wife might lead some people to believe that she was complicit in (or at least aware of) the crimes Jonathan was committing.
Themes
Last Evenings on Land: The narrative flashes back to the immediate aftermath of the Ponzi scheme’s unraveling. Vincent wakes up alone in the apartment in Manhattan, well aware of the fate that is in store for Jonathan. She packs some gowns she thought she could sell, $5,000, and some jewelry. She examines her face in the mirror as she passes by the bathroom. Vincent is almost 28, and she appears noticeably older and tired. She realizes that in all the years of her fake marriage to Jonathan, she has never once not worn makeup.
Knowing that Jonathan will likely be convicted of serious crimes, Vincent goes into survival mode and begins to assemble items to sell. Though she might have grown to like Jonathan over the years, the choices she makes now show that Vincent’s biggest priority has always been self-preservation. Vincent’s realization about always wearing makeup reveals the falsity of her life over the past three years: in this moment of crisis, she sees how much she’s compromised in order to keep her position in Jonathan’s world of material excess and financial stability.
Themes
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Given the current situation with Jonathan, Vincent decides it could be beneficial not to look like herself. She finds a pair of scissors and cuts off all her hair. Later, she purchases a pair of reading glasses. With the new hair, glasses, and lack of makeup, she looks like an entirely different person. Later that week, she finds a place to live outside the city, in a room above a garage. She finds a job bartending in Chelsea, but it’s not fulltime, so she also works as a kitchen trainee at a restaurant, which she prefers, since “bartending is a performance.” She lives in constant fear that she’ll run into former investors.
It's ironic, after years of donning a disguise of makeup and exquisite clothing to perform her role as Jonathan’s wife, that Vincent now must don a new disguise. That Vincent believes she looks like a new person after she cuts her hair and removes her makeup underscores the extent to which being with Jonathan forced her to assume an entirely different identity. Years of living this way have made Vincent keenly aware of how out of touch she’s become, which is why she’s glad not to have to undergo the “performance” of bartending fulltime. Vincent’s fear of running into investors might stem from the guilt she feels about not being able to prevent them from falling victim to Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme.
Themes
Vincent sees Mirella once, a year and a half after everything blew up. She’s bartending in Chelsea when Mirella enters the bar with some friends. She’s dressed in an outfit that initially looks “casual,” but the more one investigates it, one sees a series of “coded signals,” of intentionally ripped designer jeans, expensive sweatshirt, etc. Ned, an MFA student and Vincent’s coworker, explains that they’re regulars. Vincent has tried to contact Mirella after Jonathan’s arrest and later on, when she learned of Faisal’s death, but Mirella wouldn’t take her calls. Vincent excuses herself to smoke, and when she returns, Mirella and a friend are sitting at the bar. Vincent thinks about what she’s wanted to say to Mirella after all this time: that no words can convey her regret, that she hadn’t known what Jonathan was up to, and that if she had she would have called the FBI.
Mirella’s outfit is a useful illustration of constructed identity: though her clothing looks casual, each element is intricately designed and stylized, a series of “coded signals” that were crafted with attention and care. Though her exterior might look effortless, it is the product of a great deal of effort and precision meant to convey wealth. Mirella’s refusal to speak to Vincent in the aftermath of Alkaitis’s arrest suggests that she thinks Vincent knew about his fraud and failed to inform Mirella and Faisal. It’s not clear how Faisal died, but Mirella’s cold behavior toward Vincent suggests the death might be tied to the Alkaitis scandal—it’s possible Faisal killed himself after being defrauded by Alkaitis. Vincent’s insistence that she knew nothing of Alkaitis’s illegal activities might be sincere, but it seems unlikely that she didn’t suspect anything fishy was going on, given the surplus of hints she should have witnessed over the years—such as Kaspersky’s accusations and Alkaitis’s strange behavior in response to Lenny Xavier’s comment about knowing how the business operated.
Themes
Mirella smiles at Vincent and asks for bar snacks, though she fails to address Vincent personally. Vincent addresses Mirella by name, which Mirella ignores. Vincent wonders if Mirella, who used to be her best friend, really doesn’t recognize her, or if she’s only pretending. She wonders if Mirella is disguised like Vincent, only Mirella’s disguise also involves pretending not to know the people from her old life.
Mirella’s behavior is like her outfit: though it might appear casual and incidental on the surface, this appearance is the result of careful, premeditated planning. Mirella wears a disguise, and she acts in a way that disguises her inner hurt and anger. Given Vincent’s own efforts to conceal her past, it’s interesting that she initially seems unable to respect the steps Mirella has taken to conceal her own. Perhaps Vincent is in denial about the extent to which she hides herself from the world.
Themes
Distraught, Vincent walks off the job and heads to the Russian Café in lower Manhattan, a place she’d gone to often with Alkaitis. Her favorite manager, Ilieva, is working. Vincent tells Ilieva about quitting her job, and Ilieva offers her a glass of wine on the house. That night, Vincent decides to take on more hours at her kitchen job to gain the experience to go to sea, which was something her mother did in her early 20s. When Vincent was younger, she’d always tried to get her mother to tell her stories from when she was a child, but Vincent’s mother had always been secretive about her “miserable childhood in a small town in the Prairies,” though she did reveal that “she got a job as a steward on a Canadian Coast Guard vessel that maintained navigational aids in the shipping lanes.”
The background information that Vincent reveals about her mother positions the mystery of Vincent’s mother’s death as the culmination of a life dominated by secrecy. Vincent seems to have inherited this secretive, protective shield from her mother, as she, too, conceals much of herself from the world.
Themes
Vincent’s mother would serve two rotations on the boat before driving across the country with a boyfriend, then living and writing poetry in Caiette before falling in love with a married man, Vincent’s father, all before she was 24 years old. But of all these stories, Vincent was most interested in her mother’s life at sea: of the icebergs, of the northern lights, of the “dark gray sea.” She tried to picture her mother then, as a young person, but “her mother was stranded forever at [36],” the age she was when she died. She remembers her mother coming to her room to say goodbye—the last time she saw her before she died.
The trajectory of Vincent’s life also mirrors her mother’s: they both live precarious, transient lives before meeting older married men and settling for unsatisfying but stable lives of domesticity. Given the similarities of their lives, Vincent might believe that going to sea, like her mother had so many years before, will make her feel closer to her mother and ultimately, perhaps, find peace in relation to her mother’s uncertain cause of death. The sea so appeals to Vincent because in its vast emptiness, she might gain the mental clarity she needs to find these answers and confront her personal demons. To Vincent, the sea is the opposite of the domestic sphere she and her mother found so stifling and oppressive.
Themes
The day after Vincent sees Mirella at the bar, she takes a southbound train to stand on a white-sand beach and films the waves. A container ship passes by. She thinks back to when she first met Jonathan at the Hotel Caiette, when another guest staying at the hotel with his wife had mentioned being in the shipping industry. The moment stood out to her because it was obvious that the man loved his job. Standing on the beach, recording the waves, and remembering the man who worked in shipping, Vincent resolves to get a job at sea.
That seeing the container ship plays such a pivotal role in Vincent’s decision to go to sea intertwines Vincent’s story with Leon Prevant’s, which is another example of the novel’s strategy of bringing together previously disparate storylines to show how people’s actions directly and indirectly affect others.
Themes
Geoffrey: The narrative returns to Vincent’s time onboard the Neptune Cumberland in 2013. Vincent has just explained to Geoffrey that she’s going to Thailand when it’s time for her leave. It’s been three months since Vincent first went to sea: three months of rising in the middle of the night to shower and start cooking breakfast, of engaging in a sexual relationship with Geoffrey, of routes that have taken her all around the world. Most of the men who work on the ship work for six months and then take three off, and she’s decided to do the same.
Vincent’s desire to go to Thailand during her time off reflects her larger desire not to return to her old life. Geographically, Thailand is located on a peninsula, too, which suggests that even when she’s not working at sea, Vincent has a desire to be near or nearly surrounded by water. Water is clarifying to Vincent and seems to make her feel closer to her mother.
Themes
Vincent and Geoffrey sit in his room making decorative paper cranes, as the room could use some cheering up. He asks her if she read the book he got her for her birthday, a book of narratives written by the crew of the Columbia Rediviva, a trading ship that travelled during the end of the 1700s. Vincent says she did and that she loved it. Geoffrey tells Vincent that his father dreamed of being a pilot but became a coal miner instead, so Geoffrey went to sea so he wouldn’t have any regrets. Vincent says she’s never been so happy as she is at sea.
Like most other characters in the novel, Geoffrey can’t escape the burden of regret and remorse over a life unlived. His father’s disappointments motivate his decision to follow his dreams of going to sea. This is similar to Vincent’s desire to run away from the stifling oppression of domesticity—something her mother’s early death prevented her from doing for herself.
Themes
