The Glass Hotel: Chapter 11: Winter Summary & Analysis

It’s the day after the holiday party. Oskar sits at his desk at work, still unsure of whether he should stick around or flee the country. He walks by Harvey’s office and sees him writing frantically at his desk. Joelle is by the photocopy machine, staring into space. Oskar goes to the 18th floor to use the photocopier there. Although Oskar wishes he could be happy for the “legitimate” workers who reside on the 18th floor, he’s “resentful.” When Oskar arrives on the upper floor, Alkaitis is not in his office. In his place are two men in suits looking around through his things. Simone silently watches the men work before informing Oskar that Alkaitis was arrested this morning.

Simone’s phone rings continuously, with angry people on the other end demanding to know what’s going on. Oskar urges her not to answer any more calls, stating that she “doesn’t deserve this,” before heading back to Seventeen. After grabbing his jacket, he continues down, nearly tripping on Joelle, who’s sitting on the 12th floor landing, anguishing over what her husband will think when he hears that Alkaitis has been arrested. She knows she’ll either have to lie to him about how much she knows or come clean about her involvement. She asks Oskar if he’s ever considered “why [they] were chosen” to work on the illegitimate side of the business—how did Alkaitis know they’d comply?  

When Oskar reaches the lobby, he’s suddenly surrounded by a swarm of panicked, upset investors and the security guards who won’t let them through to Alkaitis’s offices. Oskar passes by Olivia Collins on his way out, though she doesn’t recognize him.

That morning, Olivia awoke to a phone call from a sobbing Monica, who broke the news to her about Jonathan’s security fraud. When Monica’s phone call came through, Olivia was sitting in the apartment she rented with the proceeds from her investment with Jonathan and had a hard time comprehending what Monica was saying. She told Monica she would go to the office and see what she could find out.

The lobby is in chaos when Olivia arrives, full of angry, confused people and overwhelmed security guards. Olivia tells a guard that she’s a personal friend of Alkaitis’s, and he tells her to call someone in the offices to come get her. She calls Alkaitis multiple times, but no one picks up. Eventually the chaos of the lobby becomes too much for her, and she returns to her apartment, dejected and trying to make sense of her new world. She calculates how many more months she can afford to stay in her apartment. 

Though it’s dark in New York, it’s only 3:00 p.m. in Las Vegas, where Leon Prevant is in the middle of a conference. Since being laid off a few years ago, Leon works as a consultant. Leon’s phone buzzes, and he excuses himself from the conference, though when he sees the call is from his accountant, he lets it go to voicemail. Leon returns to the meeting, in which shipping executives discuss their current “significant overcapacity problem.” Leon chimes in to tell of a friend at CMA who said they have ships anchored and not making any routes in Malaysia, “just sitting there,” as Miranda, Leon’s junior colleague, puts it. D’Ambrosio, Leon’s boss, reasons that this probably isn’t a bad option. Another colleague describes the unused ships as a “ghost fleet” and wonders whether they should just scrap them. Everyone debates this strategy some more, and the meeting ends.

After the meeting, Leon finds Miranda sitting on a couch in the atrium. She compliments his idea about parking unused ships in Malaysia, and he insists that they steer the subject away from “the economic downturn.” Miranda concurs that “there’s something almost tedious about disaster.” At first it’s chaotic, but then the economy just continues to collapse. Leon agrees, noting that it’s everyone’s “surprise” at the downturn of the shipping industry that bothers him: shouldn’t everyone have expected economic collapse to be followed by a decrease in people buying goods?

Leon excuses himself to return his accountant’s call. Sounding “deeply shaken,” she tells him about Alkaitis’s arrest and the fraud. She informs him that his money wasn’t actually invested—it was stolen, and now it’s all gone. Leon can’t believe how stupid he was to have believed in the too-good-to-be-true returns. He hangs up the phone and leaves the conference center, trying to convince himself that he can recover from this.

Leon thinks back to the day so long ago when Alkaitis had explained his work to him, had made him feel that the returns made sense and could be trusted. He walks down the Las Vegas Strip back to his hotel and passes by men and women wearing shirts that read “GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM IN 20 MINUTES.” He imagines the mundane, depressing existence of these girls as he tries to make a plan for his future. Near the hotel entrance, he calls Marie, who already knows.

That evening, Ella Kaspersky is on CNN. Olivia and Leon watch, in New York and Las Vegas, respectively, and Oskar and Joelle watch at a bar in Midtown. Ella talks about how the “nearly perfect” angle of Alkaitis’s returns was what tipped her off to the fraud. She relays her history with Alkaitis to the CNN interviewer, explaining how, after being approached by Alkaitis in the lobby, she did the math, realized the returns were impossible, and contacted the SEC, who were unhelpful. Ever since then, she’s tried to reveal the truth about Alkaitis. Joelle observes that Ella “couldn’t be happier” about being right.

The investors return to the Gradia Building the next morning. Harvey tries to avoid making eye contact with them, but Olivia recognizes and confronts him, asking if he knew about the fraud. Harvey brushes her off and goes upstairs. When he arrives on Seventeen, he finds the police there and, rather than flee, he introduces himself to them. Joelle doesn’t go into work that day, choosing to take her kids for a day out instead, though she sporadically bursts into tears. On the way home, she tells them they’ll remember this day forever.

After spending the day feigning confusion, Oskar is the last to leave the office. On his way out, he runs into Simone, who is carrying some things from Claire's office, one of which is a photo of Claire and her kids. Oskar postulates that “in the ghost version of his life,” in which he’d gone to the authorities so many years ago, Claire and her kids are spared all this turmoil. Oskar invites Simone to get a drink, but she immediately turns him down, which irritates Oskar. Simone exits the Gradia Building and meets Claire in the back of an idling SUV.

Claire, who seems almost sedated, quietly thanks Simone for retrieving her things before ordering the driver to take Simone home to East Williamsburg. It begins to snow outside. Simone asks Claire how many people knew about the fraud. Claire thinks that everyone in asset management knew what was going on, though probably nobody on Eighteen. Before dropping off Simone at her apartment, Claire tells her that she’s lucky: for the rest of her life, Simone will be “a person with a really excellent cocktail story.”

Meanwhile, downtown, Oskar has just left work. The snowfall grows heavier. Two detectives flash their badges at him almost immediately after he exits the Gradia Building. In another world, he imagines himself running from the detectives. In his real life, however, he stays and allows himself to be arrested and handcuffed by the FBI agents.

It’s six months later, at the sentencing hearing. Alkaitis’s lawyer begs the judge for mercy, reasoning that everybody makes mistakes. The judge looks amazed at this understatement of the century, and Olivia, who is attending the hearing, wonders if the lawyer recognizes his error. The lawyer, Veer Sethi, presses on with his story, attempting to humanize Jonathan. He speaks of a modest family, Jonathan, Claire, and Suzanne, living in a small, suburban house, taking modest vacations close to home, and visiting parents over holidays. Claire goes to college and takes a job at Jonathan’s legitimate brokerage company, and then Suzanne is diagnosed with cancer. Without making excuses for Alkaitis’s behavior, Sethi reasons that Alkaitis’s grief can explain why and how the fraud began during this time.

Sethi continues, painting the fraud as “something that happened” to Alkaitis and his investors rather than something Alkaitis did himself. He explains how Alkaitis had invested in dot-com companies, how he’d been caught off-guard by their failure, and how all this led up to his grave mistake of using a new investor’s money to cover his losses. Ultimately, Sethi claims that Alkaitis made this mistake out of fear. He had lost so much already—his wife, his money—that all that remained for him was his work, which he was so terrified of losing that he would do anything to stay afloat.

Sethi continues, claiming that while Alkaitis might be “deeply flawed,” he’s not “an evil man.” As Sethi finishes making his case, the state’s lawyers smirk before making their own case, in which they argue that the Ponzi scheme began well before the dot-com crash, in the 1970s. In the end, Alkaitis is sentenced to 170 years in prison.

Olivia ruminates on the judge making the obligatory plans for Jonathan’s supervised release, as futile as those plans might be. As Olivia emerges from the subway outside her sister’s home, she thinks of two ideas for ghost stories: one, of a man who is granted supervised release after a 170-year prison sentence, and the other of “a woman who drift[s] unseen through the city of New York until she fade[s] into the crowds and the heat.”