brendan halpin

When I was in the 8th or 9th grade, I bought a copy of Relayer, an album by the band Yes, mostly because Spin hadn’t started yet and I didn’t know Maximum Rock and Roll existed and so I got all my music knowledge from the local rock station and Rolling Stone magazine, both of which had me convinced the Yes was A Band That Mattered.

I was excited for side 2, a 22-minute (!) song called “The Gates of Delirium.” Because, also due to my rock radio brainwashing, I equated length with quality. All the “masterpieces” that topped the station’s top 100 or 500 or whatever countdowns year after year were long. Stairway, Won’t Get Fooled Again, Hey Jude—you gotta go over the 5-minute mark if you want your song to be counted as a masterpiece.

And I tried. I mean, I really tried to like it. But it’s essentially unlistenable. So much so that my friend Kevin, who remains a fan of the band Yes to this very day (and who falsely accuses me of being a Hoobastank fan just because he can’t find a band I actually like that’s as bad as Yes) understands when I say this was the first Yes album I listened to and therefore the band is my enemy.

Now, let’s be clear—the guys from Yes were incredibly talented musicians. And, ultimately, this is what “Gates of Delirium” is about. It’s not a song so much as a flex. You want weird chord progressions? We can do that! Shifting time signatures! We can do that too! Virtuosic drum and guitar and keyboard and bass playing? Yep!

But what it isn’t is a song. Or, at least, it’s not a song that’s recognizable as part of the pop idiom. It’s a meandering mess whose entire purpose appears to be to demonstrate to the listeners that the band members are very skilled musicians. Noted! Probably didn’t need 22 minutes for that!

And here I am, 400 words deep into a book review and I haven’t even mentioned the book yet.

So let’s talk a bit about Hillary St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel. I’m thinking about Yes after listening to about 65% of this novel on audio because it reminded me of The Gates of Delirium. Which is to say it’s the work of an incredibly talented writer. (Way more talented than I am, just to state the obvious). You want breathtaking prose? She’s got you! You want characters so richly imagined that she can take you into the inner life of just about anyone who appears in the novel? She can do that!

And there are, as I always tell my creative writing students, many pleasures to be had in reading, and if what you want out of a novel is sumptuous descriptions, incisive insights into the human condition, and believable characters, you might really enjoy this book.

If you want a story, though...well, this seriously misses the mark. It’s more of a kaleidoscopic view of some events. Which, again, if that’s your jam, cool, but I want to be told a story.

I feel like this book is ultimately a failure of editing on the part of both author and editor. Because part of telling a story is deciding which story you want to tell. And so if you’re telling the story of the hot, class-hopping bartender/trophy wife/merchant seawoman, who is clearly the character you’re most interested in, then maybe you don’t include a chapter about every secondary character she encounters along the way. Because then there’s no thread to follow. It’s just a bunch of snapshots.

I kept waiting for it to cohere into a novel, and it just never did. I gave up at 65% because I didn’t care. And also because the too-frequent and often confusing time jumps mean there’s never any suspense because by the time you see something take place, you’ve already read about the aftermath.

The thing about a tour de force, (literally, tower of strength) is that you have to actually build a tower. This book is all strength, no tower. (Yes, I know that tour can also mean turn. I’m taking license, okay?)

And now, to finish with a few random complaints I couldn’t fit elsewhere.

She writes about acid pens like we’re supposed to know what the hell they are.

Not the hoary cliché of people thinking they see the dead person they miss/killed/feel responsible for the death of. Shakespeare did that 400 years ago and it has not gotten any fresher.

It's fun as a reader to fall in love with a beautiful or clever turn of phrase. But when the author falls in love with it, it gets annoying . “Kingdom of Money” felt wonderfully incisive the first time Vincent thought it. By the hundredth, I was like, let it go, Vince. Find another description.

There's a political critique of this book that is probably an entire essay, but let's just say this: pay attention to who does and does not matter in this book. One character is implicitly critiqued for saying that the staff has become invisible to her, but, in a book where everyone and their grandmother gets a chapter, the staff never does.

Did you know? Readers can often figure out themes without the author reminding them what they are in each chapter! True!