The Art of Second Chances

How many second chances, how many reinventions, how many transformations are possible for any given person? What are the forces that keep us moving along our current path and not a different one? In Station Eleven, in which the course of everyone’s life is altered by the disaster, a violinist with the Traveling Symphony contemplates the idea that an infinite number of parallel universes could exist, including ones in which the pandemic was less fatal or never took place, and in which he might have grown up to be a physicist, as he had planned. In The Glass Hotel, the forces that catapult characters from one possible life into another are the more usual ones: crime, tragedy, marriage. Sometimes we choose to plunge into a different world; sometimes a different world chooses us.

The night Paul defaces the window, Vincent meets the hotel’s owner, Jonathan Alkaitis—an obscenely rich financier, recently widowed—and the once rebellious teenager slips into a new life with him almost as easily as putting on a new pair of shoes. She thinks of the world he inhabits as “the kingdom of money,” and the two chapters chronicling her relationship with Alkaitis are titled “A Fairy Tale.” But all fairy tales come to an end. Vincent’s stay in the kingdom will be temporary. (Alkaitis works in the Gradia Building, a name that readers of Station Eleven will recognize as a sign that something terrible is taking place inside.) Leon Prevant, the shipping executive from Station Eleven, will find his circumstances utterly altered by the loss of his life savings. Instead of retiring in contentment to Florida, he and his wife abandon their home and take to the road in an RV, joining a “shadow country” inhabited by transients like themselves.

From April 2019: Amy Hempel is the master of the minimalist short story

And Alkaitis, after committing crimes that earn him a lifetime prison sentence and the contempt of everyone he was once close to, finds respite from his daily existence in elaborate fantasies about how things might have gone differently—fantasies that occupy more and more of his waking hours and ultimately threaten his grip on reality. He comes to view the line between memory and imagination as a “permeable border”; he can exist simultaneously in one world and another. Other characters similarly wrestle with the notion that two contradictory ideas can coexist, if uncomfortably. Oskar, one of Alkaitis’s employees, will testify in court that “it’s possible to both know and not know something.” As a defense for what Alkaitis did, that is inadequate, but in some ways it is also true.

In contrast to the elegiac mood of Station Eleven, with its longing for a never-to-be-recovered past, The Glass Hotel moves forward propulsively, its characters continually on the run. Still, the harder they try to escape their histories, the more persistently they are pulled back, often by visions of the people they’ve wronged. These ghosts are not emissaries come to do malice or wreak vengeance, as we usually imagine them to be; they are physical manifestations of guilty consciences. (Station Eleven dealt almost humorously with the idea of a spirit world: “Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?” one character says. “Of course not. Imagine how many there’d be” is the response.) They are also an anchor to the past, however unwanted that may be, especially for those who have left behind a life they would be happier forgetting.