"Eighty rooms nibbled by rats" - and a new manager learning how
to fill the holes in his life
Welcome to the Hotel Honolulu, the somewhat seedy Hawaiian
getaway where vacationers come to shed their identities and locals come to watch
them. Under its roof, stories unfold and intertwine—a stream of
happiness and misery and love and death as unceasing as the sun
and the surf. Here is Hawaii like we've seldom seen it: more than
a tourist trap, the emerald islands are a place of great sorrow
and great beauty. Paul Theroux's latest novel is a mixture of
zaniness, authentic local color, tragedy, and contemplation that
only a writer with his gifts could devise.
As his many fans already know, Paul Theroux is the celebrated author
of numerous novels, including
The Mosquito Coast, Saint Jack,
The Family Arsenal, My
Other Life, and
Kowloon
Tong. With travel books like
Riding the Iron Rooster,
The Great Railway Bazaar, The
Old Patagonian Express, and
Fresh
Air Fiend, he virtually reinvented travel writing and,
as the London
Observer wrote, "brought fresh intelligence
and energy to a genre in sore need of inspiration."
Theroux's skill as a travel writer certainly informs
Hotel Honolulu,
with its Pidgin-speaking characters and powerful sense of place.
The hotel setting, with its large and varied cast, is the perfect
foil for him. Theroux masterfully sweeps over a large breadth
of human experience while also achieving powerful intimacy with
his characters. As the unnamed narrator remarks: "The idea
of rented bedrooms attracted me. Shared by so many dreaming strangers,
every room was vibrant with their secrets, like furious dust in
a sunbeam . . . The hotel bedroom is more than a symbol of intimacy;
it is intimacy's very shrine, scattered with the essential paraphernalia
and familiar fetish objects of its rituals. Assigning people to
such rooms, I believed I was able to influence their lives."
When the hotel's owner, a boozy, wisecracking free spirit named Buddy
Hamstra, hires the narrator, a writer in flight from his life,
to manage the place, he accepts partly in order to indulge his
voyeurism, the natural vice of a writer. He's come to Hawaii to
put writing behind him, to read a lot, observe his surroundings,
and, with any luck, start over again. But it isn't long before
the colorful clientele draw him away from books and he falls headlong
into their lives.
He meets his future wife, a beautiful local woman and hotel maid
named Sweetie, who turns out to have a strange connection to the
Kennedys. Other hotel residents have a peculiar allure as well,
from the carpenter whose late-night sawing the narrator initially
mistakes for sex play, to Madam Ma, a woman who writes a gossip
column in the local tabloid and whose odd relationship with her
son eventually leads to a bizarre crime.
When Buddy's carousing ways and declining health catch up with him
and his scheming new wife, Pinky, threatens to bring new order
to the hotel, the narrator is forced to decide his future. As
Booklist writes, "Theroux's cultural castaway finds
a path back to his true passion and discovers the paradise he
believed was lost." He realizes that by observing the lives
of others he has renewed an old habit: seeing his own life as
something worth remembering.
