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 isn’t the only person who is complicit in the downfall of others, though: Vincent, Alkaitis’s self-proclaimed trophy wife, turns a blind eye to Alkaitis’s fraudulent firm and, through her willful ignorance, allows Faisal, the romantic partner of her close friend Mirella, to continue to invest with Alkaitis. When the scheme finally implodes, the novel insinuates that Faisal commits suicide out of shame; in this way, Vincent becomes indirectly complicit in Faisal’s demise. The novel uses these interconnected narratives to suggest that, despite the anonymity that modern society—with all its travel and opportunities to reinvent oneself—can grant a person, people’s very participation in larger social and economic systems renders them complicit in others’ misfortunes.
The novel’s focus on the ways that exploitation leads to further exploitation is evident in the relationship between Olivia Collins and the Alkaitis family. In a series of unlikely coincidences, Olivia invests—and loses—all her money with Jonathan Alkaitis, the man whose deceased brother Lucas was the cause of Olivia earning her fortune in the first place. Olivia first encounters Lucas Alkaitis, Jonathan’s older brother, when they are both struggling painters in 1950s New York City and agree to pose for each other. Olivia’s painting of Lucas showcases his bruised arm (evidence of his substance abuse problem), which isn’t something Lucas wanted displayed publicly to the world, nor is it something Olivia asked permission to do. Forty years after Olivia first displays this exploitative painting of Lucas, the painting sells for a large sum of money at a retrospective exhibit. As a result, Olivia benefits financially from her exploitation of Lucas, albeit many years into the future, and after decades of financial struggles. Olivia’s sister Monica insists that Olivia invest her newfound wealth and, by the oddest of coincidences, refers her to Jonathan Alkaitis to do so. Olivia realizes who Alkaitis is and considers it to be a “message[] from the universe” that she’s been directed to invest her money with the brother of the very man to whom she owes that wealth. When, years later, Olivia loses all her money to Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme, it’s almost as though balance has been restored: Olivia wronged Jonathan and his family by profiting off of her exploitation of Lucas and his substance abuse problem, and now Jonathan has indirectly made things even by defrauding her of that morally dubious profit. The coincidental ways in which Olivia and Jonathan are connected—a series of economic and personal acts of exploitation, a blurring of the lines between what is right and what is wrong—shows how people can hurt and exploit each other across many degrees and years of separation simply by existing within a shared world and participating in its economic markets.
Meanwhile, the interweaving narratives that bind Lenny Xavier, Paul, and Annika together irrevocably alter the directions their lives take and illustrate how the consequences of one’s actions are larger and more widespread than is immediately apparent. Lenny Xavier, a Los Angeles music producer and Jonathan Alkaitis’s most important investor, becomes a link between Annika, who plays violin and sings with the Canadian band Baltica, and Paul, who ends up playing a critical role in the band’s future when he gives them some ecstasy, which turns out to be bead. Lenny and Paul never meet, but they’re connected through their mutual ties to Annika. At one point in time, Lenny served as a producer for Annika when she was on track to become a popstar. When Annika felt that Lenny and his team were pulling her away from her “artistic integrity,” she returned to Canada, where she began to make music in a way that was truer to her artistic vision, with Baltica. Had Annika not met Lenny and subsequently reinvented herself, she might not have begun to make music with Baltica (the electronica trio consisting of Annika, Theo, and Charlie Wu). Had Annika not made music with Baltica, she might not have met and garnered the admiration of Paul at a Toronto club one night. Had this interaction not occurred, Paul might not have offered Annika and Charlie Wu bad drugs, and Charlie might not have died of an overdose. So, in a hugely indirect and coincidental way, had Lenny Xavier not met and clashed with Annika, Charlie Wu might still be alive. Such logical connections are tenuous and largely speculative, but in a novel built upon such complicated ties between characters they come to illustrate the systems and series of coincidences that inextricably tie individuals to other people.
It’s tempting to see fortune and misfortune as random occurrences—as the rewards and casualties of an indifferent universe, as completely irrelevant to how a person behaves and the way they treat others. The Glass Hotel challenges this idea, however, and uses interconnected narratives and series of unlikely coincidences and connections to propose that, by virtue of one’s participation in a social system, every choice a person makes matters in some way, even if the consequences of that choice are made invisible by degrees of separation or the passage of time.
Complicity and Interconnectedness ThemeTracker
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Complicity and Interconnectedness Quotes in The Glass Hotel
But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself. Just because you used your stepmother's presumed death to start over doesn’t mean that you're not also doing something good, being there for your sister or whatever.
I don’t hate Vincent, he told himself, Vincent has never been the problem, I have never hated Vincent, I have only ever hated the idea of Vincent.
It was a new century. If he could survive the ghost of Charlie Wu, he could survive anything. It had rained at some point in the night and the sidewalks were gleaming, water reflecting the morning’s first light.
Alkaitis was interesting only in retrospect. He’d come to the Hotel Caiette with his wife, now deceased. He and his wife had fallen in love with the place, so when it’d come up for sale he’d bought the property, which he leased to the hotel’s management company. He lived in New York City and came to the hotel three or four times a year. He carried himself with the tedious confidence of all people with money, that breezy assumption that no serious harm could come to him. He was generically well dressed, tanned in the manner of people who spend time in tropical settings in the wintertime, reasonably but not spectacularly fit, unremarkable in every way. Nothing about him, in other words, suggested that he would die in prison.
Ghosts of Vincent’s earlier selves flocked around the table and stared at the beautiful clothes she was wearing.
He doesn’t tell Julie Freeman this, but now that it’s much too late to flee, Alkaitis finds himself thinking about flight all the time. He likes to indulge in daydreams of a parallel version of events—a counterlife, if you will—in which he fled to the United Arab Emirates. Why not? He loves the UAE and Dubai in particular, the way it’s possible to live an entire life without going outdoors except to step into smooth cars, floating from beautiful interior to beautiful interior with expert drivers in between.
She had a significant financial stake in maintaining the appearance of happiness.
In the counterlife, Claire visits him in Dubai. She is happy to see him. She disapproves of his actions, but they can laugh about it. Their conversations are effortless. In the counterlife, Claire isn’t the one who called the FBI.
“The thing with Paul,” her mother said, while they were waiting for the water taxi on the pier at Grace Harbour, “is he’s always seemed to think that you owe him something.” Vincent remembered looking up at her mother, startled by the idea. “You don’t,” her mother said. “Nothing that happened to him is your fault.”
“It’s possible to both know and not know something.”
“I mean, here’s the question,” Joelle said, “and I’d be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts: How did he know we’d do it? Would anyone do something like this, given enough money, or is there something special about us? Did he look at me one day and just think, That woman seems conveniently lacking in a moral center, that person seems well suited to participate in a—"
One of our signature flaws as a species: will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.
“You know what’s permanent? You’re a person with a really excellent cocktail story. Ten, twenty years from now, at a cocktail party, you’ll be holding a martini in a circle of people, and you’ll be like, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I worked for Jonathan Alkaitis?’ […] You get to walk away untarnished.”
You can know that you’re guilty of an enormous crime, that you stole an immense amount of money from multiple people and that this caused destitution for some of them and suicide for others, you can know all this and yet still somehow feel you’ve been wronged when your judgment arrives.
“Well, look at it this way. I believe we’re in agreement that it should have been obvious to any sophisticated investor that you were running a fraudulent scheme. […] So in order for your scheme to succeed for as long as it did, a great many people had to believe in a story that didn’t actually make sense. But everyone was making money, so no one cared, except Ella Kaspersky.”
But they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss. He’d been aware of the shadowland forever, of course. He’d seen its more obvious outposts: shelters fashioned from cardboard under overpasses, tents glimpsed in the bushes alongside expressways, houses with boarded-up doors but a light shining in an upstairs window. He’d always been vaguely aware of its citizens, people who’d slipped beneath the surface of society, into a territory without comfort or room for error; they hitchhiked on roads with their worldly belongings in backpacks, they collected cans on the streets of cities, they stood on the Strip in Las Vegas wearing T-shirts that said GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM IN 20 MINUTES, they were the girls in the room. He’d seen the shadow country, its outskirts and signs, he’d just never thought he’d have anything to do with it.
It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent.
There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for all of it.,”
“I was a thief too,” I tell him, “we both got corrupted.”