Review of The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Traditional storytelling advice challenges writers to focus on one character and take that character on a journey of ever-increasing obstacles that leads the character to a critical internal change and a climactic moment in which the character uses this newfound realization to overcome the story's primary conflict. It would seem that the more characters a writer adds to the story, the more complicated the story becomes because it's no longer one character's story.

The challenge of telling multiple stories in one novel is that all the stories need to have equal weight on a reader's interest level. For example, and I may be in the minority here, when I began reading George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, which switches point-of-view characters multiple times throughout the novel, I found myself more interested in one character's story over the others, and I ended up stopping after 150 pages because the multiple storylines didn't equally draw my interest. I've read plot-driven stories my entire life, so a story with multiple storylines across multiple timelines shouldn't work, if traditional storytelling wisdom is correct.

But then there's The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, the writer of the groundbreaking post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. The Glass Hotel could never be an example of the traditional plot-driven story, but it works so well, and it is the perfect example that there are multiple ways to tell an intriguing story.

It's actually a little difficult to pin down exactly what The Glass Hotel is about because it defies the typical synopsis you read on the inside cover of a new hardcover novel, and the actual synopsis of the novel itself doesn't quite do it justice. But like Station Eleven before it, The Glass Hotel is driven by multiple compelling characters and the unlikely connections they all share. There's no real main character because all of the characters are explored in detail, and unlike A Game of Thrones, when I moved on to a different point-of-view character, though I did want to get back to the POV character I'd just finished reading about, I was so caught up in the next POV character's story that I didn't want to skip ahead to get back to the story I found most interesting.

If there was a main character, it would be Vincent, a woman whose life is explored over the course of many years. We see her get wrapped up in a life of wealth and prestige as the wife of a man named Jonathan Alkaitis, whose orchestration of a massive Ponzi scheme provides the event that anchors the entire story. And we see the aftermath of Vincent's life after Alkaitis is arrested and imprisoned. All the way to the story's core mystery, which is, what happened to Vincent when she disappeared from a large shipping freighter out on the ocean?

What I love about Emily St. John Mandel's brand of storytelling is that she focuses on a character, but from multiple characters' perspectives, while also fleshing out those characters as well. Vincent may very well be the main character of the story, but so are all the other characters Mandel fleshes out in exploration of Vincent's life. The structure of the novel is very similar to the structure she used in Station Eleven by exploring the life of actor Arthur Leander from multiple character perspectives and timelines.

Speaking of timelines, Mandel is a master of the non-linear plot. The story jumps forward and backward multiple times, but not in a jarring way. It's all very compelling, and the way she presents the events of the story help to shape the reader perspective in a way that there are some very satisfying payoffs when she shifts to earlier or later times in character's life in the story.

Mandel has referred to The Glass Hotel as a ghost story, but not the traditional ghost story most readers are familiar with. There are, as I heard her say in an interview, multiple ways for a person to be haunted, and this story explores those ways beautifully.

The Glass Hotel was the kind of story I didn't want to end because Mandel's prose and voice are so addictive. I only wish I could craft the kind of story that would impact a reader the way Mandel's last two novels have impacted me.

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

A Review of Anyone by Charles Soule

She was searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s. What she discovered, however, was a new technology with the potential to change the world and everyone’s place within it. Gabrielle White is a scientist and the mother of an 11-month-old little girl she and her husband lovingly refer to as “the Kat” when she accidentally thrusts her consciousness into her husband’s body, becoming him and yet still herself. She calls her discovery “the flash,” and with it, she’ll be able to provide her daughter a future she once could only dream of, as long as she controls how her new technology is introduced into the world.

Flash-forward twenty years, and the world has been revolutionized. Gone are the days of paying hundreds of dollars to travel across the world in an airplane. Instead, traveling to anyplace in the world is as easy as sending your consciousness into the host body of someone already there. With the flash, you can experience things people never dreamed possible, and the opportunities are endless. This is the promise of Anyone, the large company behind flash technology. “Be anyone with anyone” is their motto.

But a world with the flash isn’t the world the flash’s creator envisioned, and a desperate woman named Annami finds herself in a dangerous fight for her life in the seedy underbelly of a world driven by flash technology, an illegal operation known as the Dark Share. Annami doesn’t know what the people do who flash into her body when she Dark Shares, but she knows she needs the money it provides. And she needs a lot of it because Annami knows something about Anyone that no one else knows, something that will once again change everything, and she’ll risk anything to expose it.

Anyone, the second novel by lawyer-turned-writer Charles Soule, grabbed my attention on the very first page and didn’t let go until the surprising conclusion on the last page. It’s the kind of story that keeps you up at night for just a few minutes longer when you should be going to sleep because you have to go to work early the next morning, which makes it the best kind of novel.

I discovered Charles Soule when he began writing the Star Wars: Darth Vader comic book for Marvel Comics. I’ve loved Star Wars since I was a child, and I had high hopes for the story of Anakin Skywalker’s early experiences as the Dark Lord of the Sith, and Soule’s treatment of Vader was truly groundbreaking. After that, I read some of Soule’s other Star Wars comics before reading his first novel Oracle Year.

Oracle Year was fantastic, but the premise of Anyone didn’t actually appeal to me at first. However, I’ve come to enjoy Soule’s style of writing, so I decided to try it out. I wasn’t expecting to be caught up in not just one, but two stories that are both gut-wrenchingly tragic and intricately plotted.

I’ve been a fan of non-linear stories ever since LOST, and Anyone’s non-linear plot reminded me a lot of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which is one of my favorite novels of all time. The story shifts between Gabrielle White’s discovery and fight to develop the flash technology and Annami’s tragic story in a world revolutionized by two decades of the flash. Non-linear stories that focus on two different characters run the risk of losing reader interest after shifting to a different story. Shifts in point-of-view are why I was never able to get beyond a hundred pages or so of A Game of Thrones. I just found some character’s scenes nowhere near as interesting as others, so I’d struggle to read through one character’s story when I was desperate to get back to a story I enjoyed more.

Anyone wasn’t like that. Whenever the story would shift from Annami’s story back to Gabrielle’s story, I was ready to get back to Annami’s story, but I was also caught up in the progression of Gabrielle’s story, and vice versa. And Soule did a masterful job of weaving the two stories together, dropping subtle hints of how the two stories are connected throughout.

I won’t give away the end of the story, but my hope is that it’s not over and that Soule has an idea for a sequel. I’m often struck by a sense of bittersweet when I finish a novel I love because I hate that it’s over. I’ve spent so much time with these characters that they don’t feel like imagined people on a page, and the end of a novel means that time spent is over. Finishing Anyone was like that, which is why I can’t wait to read whatever Soule puts out next.