The Glass Hotel Themes

The Glass Hotel consists of a series of initially disparate storylines. Yet as the novel progresses, narrative arcs converge, and the reader sees them as part of a larger, interconnected system. Through this interconnectedness, the novel illustrates the small and large ways in which characters are complicit in one another’s misfortunes. At the center of this complicity is the uber-rich Jonathan Alkaitis, whose Ponzi scheme robs his investors of their homes, savings, and lives. Alkaitis…

Ghosts and personal demons haunt the pages of The Glass Hotel. As Jonathan Alkaitis withers away in prison after he’s convicted for securities fraud, he is haunted by the ghosts of deceased investors whose lives were destroyed by his Ponzi scheme. At the same time, Paul is haunted by the ghost of Charlie Wu, the keyboardist in whose death he was complicit after he gave Charlie bad ecstasy at a Toronto night club…

Vicious cycles of greed and self-delusion are prevalent throughout The Glass Hotel and serve to illustrate the many ways people are willing to absolve themselves and others of morally dubious behaviors if it benefits their own self-interest. When Oskar Novak, one of Alkaitis’s staffers who knowingly participates in the Ponzi scheme, is interrogated in court over his involvement in the scheme, he defends his involvement on the grounds that “it’s possible to both…

Despite the fact that in The Glass Hotel many of the characters’ disparate narrative arcs eventually converge into a web of interconnected stories, feelings of alienation pervade almost every character, many of whom suffer from isolation of both a psychological and physical sort. Sentenced to 170 years in prison for orchestrating a massive Ponzi scheme, Jonathan Alkaitis is fated to spend the rest of his days behind the figurative and literal bars of incarceration. Paul…

There are very few characters in The Glass Hotel who feel satisfied with the trajectory of their lives. In her later years, Olivia Collins, a painter who is both a friend of Jonathan Alkaitis and an investor in his scheme, finds herself unable to make new art or recreate the moderate successes she achieved in the earlier decades of her career. Vincent achieves upward mobility when she agrees to pose as Alkaitis’s trophy wife…