A Bernie Madoff Ghost Story

Title: The Glass Hotel

Rating: 4 Stars

On the surface, this is a fairly simple story. Broadly, it’s the story of Jonathon Alkaitis. He’s a fictional representation of Bernie Madoff, the fraudulent investor that ran a Ponzi scheme for years, sucking in both prominent and small investors into his scheme. He posted glowing returns until the 2008 downturn. Unable to service all of the requested fund withdrawals, his house of cards collapsed. People lost billions. Many died from shock or suicide. Sentenced to 150 years, Madoff just recently died in prison.

The Glass Hotel tells the story of the immediate years before the collapse, the collapse, and then the years after.

However, it’s so much more than that. In fact, Alkaitis is one of a slew of characters that feature prominently.

There’s Vincent (a woman, named after the poet Edna St Vincent Millay), a young bartender that catches the fairly recently widowed Alkaitis’ eye. Previously knowing only poverty, Alkaitis sweeps her away and, for a number of years,  Vincent lives the life of the very rich and glamorous. Vincent’s brother Paul, with a fledgling drug addiction, generally seems lost. Leon Prevant, a successful shipping executive, makes the critical mistake of befriending Alkaitis one night. He invests his entire life savings with Alkaitis, and when it fails, he must suffer the ignominy of spending his retirement years as a nomad in an RV with his wife. There are the Alkaitis co-workers, complicit all, dreading the day that they all secretly knew was going to come.

One central theme that I see in this novel is deceit. Obviously, Alkaitis’ fraud looms large. It does not stop there. All of the characters have secrets. Vincent’s mom disappeared canoeing one day. There’s no evidence of foul play, but she was a strong swimmer. Could it be that she committed suicide? Vincent must live with that uncertainty.

To deal with her grief in the aftermath of her mom’s disappearance, Vincent made a series of five minute long videos. Paul, a composer, finds those videos and proceeds to choreograph them to music without Vincent’s permission. Doing so launches his career. His success is based upon the appropriation of his sister’s grief.

Vincent herself seems to easily shed her outer skin. She flawlessly moves from low income bartender to high society maven. She is always conscious of the falseness of her act. Once Alkaitis is exposed, she immediately sheds that skin and begins a new life as a cook on ocean going freighters.

Even Prevant is not immune. Because of the Great Recession, he is fired from the career that he’s loved at the same time that he’s also lost his entire life savings. He does manage to pick himself up and, if not lead a fulfilling life, he and his wife do manage moments of tranquility in their travels. Asked to perform an investigation, the previously upright Prevant allows himself to be corrupted with the whisper of a promise to regain some small portion of his lost life.

Another theme is visitation by spirits. Alkaitis, while serving his 170 year sentence, is visited by the spirits of those people who are dead indirectly because of his actions (from suicide and shock). At first we are led to believe that this is a condition unique to Alkaitis. His creeping age and his habits of living in fantasy is causing him to blur the lines between dreaming and reality. As the novel progresses, at various times, other characters also have experiences with ghostly figures. There’s a sense that this tragic event has somehow caused those lives affected to become linked.

Perhaps this idea of linkage is the central theme here. After all, financial investments, good or bad, are available globally at the click of a button. Shipping, Prevant’s passion, creates a nearly unimaginably complex network of goods that traverses the world. Whether we know it or not, no one can live truly in isolation any longer.

The Glass Hotel is a beautifully told story with interesting and engaging characters.