The Glass Hotel Characters
The main characters in The Glass Hotel are Vincent, Paul, and Jonathan Alkaitis.
- Vincent is arguably the main character. Her arc takes her from being a rebellious teenager struggling with her mother’s death to a woman living a life of luxury to a sailor aboard a tanker.
- Paul is Vincent’s half-brother. Throughout the novel, he struggles with addiction, guilt over a death he accidentally causes, and feelings of resentment towards Vincent.
- Jonathan Alkaitis is an investor whose Ponzi scheme crashes down around him, resulting in a life sentence in prison. He feels both responsible for and victimized by his fate.
Characters
Vincent
Vincent is arguably the novel’s central character, and it is her first-person narration of her death by drowning that both opens and closes the novel. Drowning represents an eerily self-fulfilling prophecy in Vincent’s life, as her mother’s disappearance in the remote waters of Northern Vancouver has haunted her since she was thirteen years old. This event—sometimes speculated to be a suicide and at other times thought to be an accident—completely derails the young Vincent’s life, transforming her from a promising student into a rebellious and angry teenager.
Years later, Vincent’s life is once again transformed when she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy and successful New York investment manager. She is thrust into the “kingdom of money,” lured into a life of complacency and excess by the tantalizing prospect of not having to contend with financial insecurity. However, this sense of living a fairy-tale life is fleeting; after discovering that Alkaitis is running a Ponzi scheme, Vincent leaves Alkaitis and asserts that “luxury is a weakness.”
In the aftermath of the Alkaitis scandal, Vincent becomes a chef on a container ship, inspired by her mother’s stories about the Coast Guard. She is both literally and metaphorically adrift, and the only tether that binds the different periods of Vincent’s life together seems to be the short videos she shoots of various bodies of water, a coping mechanism she took up in the wake of her mother’s death. It is during one of her filming sessions, however, that she falls overboard to her death.
Mandel paints an almost gentle picture of death, as a dying Vincent sees her “thoughts and [her] memories unspooling into a narrative” before her. The mystery of her mother’s death, which has haunted her for decades, is finally solved—an accident, the dying Vincent states, as her mother would not have left her on purpose. It is as though death has untethered Vincent from the constraints of reality, enabling her to find the closure she could not obtain in life.
Paul
Paul is Vincent’s half-brother and an aspiring composer. Paul takes up drug use at a young age, and he is already a heroin addict by the start of the novel. His early efforts to get his life back on track by attending university are derailed when he accidentally kills Charlie Wu, a member of the band Baltica, with a bad dose of ecstasy. An apparition of Charlie haunts Paul as a constant reminder of his guilt.
Paul’s father left him and his mother after falling in love with Vincent’s mother. As a result, Paul cannot help but resent Vincent for—at least in his mind—stealing the life he should have had. This puts a strain on the half-siblings’ relationship throughout their lives, with Paul feeling as though Vincent owes him something. This sense of entitlement is actualized when Paul steals Vincent’s old videography projects and uses them to launch his career as a relatively successful composer.
When Vincent discovers the theft while attending Paul’s show in New York City, it causes a permanent rift, and Vincent walks out of the show without ever confronting Paul. However, Paul seems haunted by the wrong he perpetrated against Vincent, and—just as he often sees Charlie Wu’s ghost—he frequently hallucinates conversations with her as a manifestation of his guilt.
Jonathan Alkaitis
Jonathan Alkaitis is a wealthy investment manager who is later revealed to have been running an illegal and fraudulent Ponzi scheme behind the scenes. He meets Vincent while at the Hotel Caiette and proposes a deal to her: She will become his second wife in return for a life of luxury. Notably,...
(This entire section contains 1447 words.)
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Alkaitis refuses to actually legally marry Vincent, using his first wife’s early death from cancer as an excuse.
After Alkaitis is sentenced to 170 years in prison, he spends his days daydreaming about what he calls the “counterlife.” In the counterlife, Alkaitis dreams that he was never caught, and he visits people and places from his past. However, the state of unreality that he finds himself in also has drawbacks, as he begins seeing the ghosts of those he wronged in life, including Faisal and Olivia. Alkaitis is emblematic of one of the novel’s central premises: Human beings cannot be so neatly divided into categories of awful and admirable. He is not an unrepentant villain, nor did he set out with the intention of causing harm; instead, he finds himself in the position of being lucid enough to acknowledge his own wrongs while also selfishly believing that his punishment is somehow unjust.
Leon Prevant
Leon Prevant is a former executive for a shipping company. After meeting Alkaitis at the Hotel Caiette, Leon invests his life savings with Alkaitis, only to lose everything when the Ponzi scheme is discovered. Leon and his wife, Marie, end up traveling the country in an RV. Leon provides a great deal of insight into what he calls the “shadow country” inhabited by those who have fallen through the metaphorical socioeconomic cracks. While he and Marie are relatively lucky to have their RV and a loving marriage, they are still functionally homeless and adrift, denied a comfortable retirement.
Olivia Collins
Olivia Collins is a retired painter and one of Jonathan Alkaitis’s investors. In her youth, she knew Alkaitis’s older brother, Lucas, who died of a heroin overdose. Alkaitis retains an affection for Olivia because of this association, paying $200,000 for a painting Olivia had made of Lucas. She is one of the ghosts that begins haunting Alkaitis while he is in prison.
Ella Kaspersky
Ella Kaspersky discovered Alkaitis’s fraudulent practices in 1999 after researching his company. She reported her findings to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, but the ensuing investigation was handled poorly and Alkaitis was cleared. Ella’s personal and professional reputation suffered, but she maintained her conviction that Alkaitis was guilty.
Oskar Novak
Oskar is one of Alkaitis’s employees involved in the Ponzi scheme. His initial reaction is to research methods of fleeing the country, but he ultimately does not go through with it. Like Alkaitis, Oskar often dreams of a sort of “counterlife” in which he made different decisions when faced with moral dilemmas.
Joelle
Joelle is one of Alkaitis’s employees involved in the Ponzi scheme. Her approach to learning that the fraud has been discovered is willful ignorance, and she halfheartedly convinces herself that everything will work out.
Harvey Alexander
Harvey Alexander is one of Alkaitis’s employees involved in the Ponzi scheme. Alexander gleefully admits to everything he is accused of as well as to other crimes the prosecution was not even aware of. He describes honesty as the ultimate form of freedom.
Enrico
Enrico is one of Alkaitis’s employees involved in the Ponzi scheme. He travels to Mexico to avoid the legal repercussions of his involvement, but he later finds that fleeing from the consequences has only prolonged his guilt and fear.
Walter
Walter is the night manager and eventual caretaker of the Hotel Caiette. He falls in love with the remote beauty of the hotel, and even after it closes down, Walter makes arrangements to stay on as the caretaker.
Mirella
Mirella is Vincent’s first and only real friend in the “kingdom of money.” Like Vincent, Mirella was not born into money, and she empathizes with Vincent’s struggle to adapt to the vapid lifestyle of the wealthy. Mirella is deeply in love with one of Alkaitis’s clients, Faisal, who commits suicide in the aftermath of the scandal. When Mirella encounters Vincent at a bar after their respective misfortunes, she ignores her completely.
Faisal
Faisal is a Saudi prince and one of Alkaitis’s investors. When the Ponzi scheme is revealed, he commits suicide out of shame. He appears to an imprisoned Alkaitis as a ghost, revealing the human cost of the fraudulent investment schemes.
Geoffrey Bell
Geoffrey Bell is the third mate of the Neptune Cumberland. He and Vincent enjoy an affair over the course of her employment on the ship, and he is eventually suspected of throwing her overboard during a storm.
Suzanne Alkaitis
Suzanne is Jonathan Alkaitis’s first—and legally speaking, only—wife. She died from cancer prior to the events of the novel. While imprisoned, Jonathan Alkaitis reflects on his relationship with her. Suzanne was Alkaitis’s coconspirator, and the two shared an honest and loving relationship. By contrast, Alkaitis and Vincent’s pseudo-marriage is depicted as shallow and frivolous, with Alkaitis remarking that it was “the wrong woman” standing by his side when his Ponzi scheme finally fell apart.
