The Glass Hotel

The Hotel Caiette—the secluded, glass-walled, luxury hotel of the novel’s title—is a multifaceted symbol. As an image of 21st-century wealth, it both speaks to the characters' unattainable desires, and represents a purposeful narrative obfuscation.

As for unattainable desires, the hotel gives an illusory promise. So often, the wealthy aspire to separate themselves from the messy realities of modern life, and this glass hotel would seem to provide them that opportunity. It is a location to which the characters return continually, either physically or mentally.

Part of the hotel’s symbolic character, however, lies in its most salient aesthetic features. Some of the wealthiest early 20th-century architecture celebrated expansive, opaque surfaces, employing gothic ornament and substantive materials like marble and iron. Such a style may partly comprise the novel’s setting, with its stately, multi-generational stories of wealthy families. In contrast, the architectural earmark of wealth in the 21st century is the appearance of transparence—whether by glass skyscrapers or tech-firm campuses secluded in wilderness retreats. The Hotel Caiette, too, is secluded in the deep wilderness, accessible only by rarified transportation and formed using large sheets of glass that reflect its surroundings. As a “glass hotel” itself, the novel is composed of shifting perspectives and transparent overlays, constantly diverting the viewer from a fixed point of view. Deflection is a principal action of the novel's protean narration, thwarting the reader’s witness to root causes for the central characters’ unhappiness.