The first line of Mandel’s The Glass Hotel indicates that the story will “begin at the end,” foregrounding the fluid nature of time as it is portrayed throughout the novel. The events recounted by various narrators are interspersed with memories, delusions, hallucinations, and bouts of wishful thinking, mimicking the way that human minds often blend the past, present, and future—whether real or imaginary.

By nature, glass has the ability to refract light. The idea of refraction thus stands as a motif that represents the way certain characters seem to become temporarily untethered from the present reality. Vincent’s fragmented first-person narration of her own drowning, in particular, depicts the untethering of her consciousness as various memories “unspool” around her. She constantly shifts between the freezing water, her experiences of the past, and what seem to be present accounts of visitations she pays to others, both alive and dead. Throughout it all, it is as though she is being refracted through time and space, both figuratively and literally reflecting off of the people and places she interacted with in life.

The notion of refraction also plays into the idea of parallel worlds or realities, such as the one Vincent envisions while living in the “kingdom of money.” Life has become so surreal and dream-like to her that she imagines that there must be different versions of herself living completely different lives. Alkaitis experiences a similar phenomenon while in prison, as he sinks deeper into the “counterlife.” He notes that many of the prisoners seem to engage in the same sort of illusory thinking, projecting their conscious minds into happier times where they can once again be free.

The fragmentation of time is in many ways embodied by the eponymous glass hotel. The Hotel Caiette is described as a “surreal” setting, its modern design contrasting with the wilderness surrounding it to create a place that feels almost suspended in time. Indeed, the people who are the most fond of the hotel—such as Walter and Alkaitis—are those who seem the most interested in escaping from the world and its consequences. However, for all that the hotel is an escape for some people, it is a catalyst of ruin for others. Leon Prevant, Ella Kaspersky, and numerous other investors in Alkaitis’s scheme were lured in by the sense of security they felt while speaking to Alkaitis beneath a roof that he owned. Vincent also has her fateful encounter with Alkaitis at the hotel, precipitating her entrance into the kingdom of money and her eventual fall into the “space between countries.”

Another surreal quality of the novel is the recurrence of short, lyrical refrains. These refrains often serve as foreshadowing: When Vincent writes “sweep me up” on the window at thirteen, her words presage the way she will be swept away by currents after falling overboard decades later. When Paul hears Annika sing “I always come to you” for the first time, his words subtly point to a conversation with Ella Kaspersky years later in which he admits that all of his songs sound like Baltica. Time is a fluid, nonlinear phenomenon throughout The Glass Hotel, and it sometimes seems as though a character’s future has the ability to reach back into the past.

Sometimes these refrains also echo into the future: Suzanne Alkaitis’s biting words to Ella Kaspersky set into motion a series of unpredictable events when a bitter and intoxicated Ella asks Paul to graffiti them on the window of the hotel. The words—“why don’t you swallow broken glass?”—miss their intended target of Jonathan Alkaitis, but they find several new ones. Vincent,...