The Golden Gate: A Novel

The Claremont Hotel is the novel’s central symbol, representing the glamorous, shimmering façade of high society that conceals deep-seated corruption, violence, and moral decay. Described as an “alabaster palace,” the hotel seems to float above the grit and poverty of the Berkeley flatlands, a world unto itself reserved for the privileged. For characters like Al Sullivan, who grew up in the “unsightly spots” across the bay, the hotel embodies the social and racial “suspicion line” that he must cross to succeed (97). 

However, the novel reveals that the world inside the Claremont is far more rotten than the one outside. It is a place where wealth and status provide a cover for the darkest human impulses. The narrative underscores that the economic devastation of the Depression was not an “equal opportunity wrecking ball,” as the California rich “packed into luxurious hotels like the shimmering white Claremont, hobnobbing with Barrymore and Garbo, dancing to Count Basie’s orchestra and Louis Armstrong’s trumpet” (10). This image of a lavish escape is sharply contrasted with the brutal realities that the hotel conceals: Sadie’s adulterous affair with Wilkinson, the violent death of their daughter Iris, and Wilkinson’s own gruesome murder 14 years later. The novel reveals that the hotel’s gleaming white exterior is a lie. It is a carefully constructed illusion of purity and order that hides the tragic, messy secrets of the families, like the Bainbridges, who treat it as their playground.