"Eighty rooms nibbled by rats" - and a new manager learning how
to fill the holes in his life
Q) To what extent did your own experiences as a newcomer
to Hawaii influence this book?
A) To an enormous extent, because the Hawaii I had always
read about does not really exist. It is both better and worse
than it appears, a small-town USA (high school proms, school sports
but no professional sports teams) with all the gossip, friendliness,
old-boy networks, inbreeding and rivalries, as well as community
spirit. I had thought it was hula dances, luaus, and hymn singing.
But of course it is that, too. After eleven years living here
I'm still making discoveries. Most of all, I am continually reminded
that this is Polynesia, islands settled by some of the world's
greatest navigators at a time when Europeans were too frightened
to venture beyond the Mediterranean. Hawaiian culture is ancient,
subtle, and, until the late eighteenth century, it was self-sufficient
and coherent. The arrival of the Europeans was devastating, and
yet at a deep level Hawaiian culture -- the real thing -- persists.
Q) Hotel Honolulu is a collage of many interwoven stories.
Why did you decide to use this structure?
A) I have often thought that every chapter in a novel should
be as riveting as a short story. The book, with its eighty episodes,
is a bit like the
Decameron, but also a bit like
Seinfeld.
I was able to write about everything without being a slave to
the traditional novel form. I imagined this narrative to be like
an edifice, a tall building with many rooms -- in fact, like a
hotel. Henry James said, "The house of fiction has many windows."
I like that.
Q) The narrator is able to resume his own life only by living through
other people's stories. In a sense, other people's misery becomes
his salvation. Why does it affect him in this way?
A) The narrator sees himself as uninteresting but sees
everyone else as having a great story to tell, not just misery
but also splendor. And a story doesn't have a real ending -- like
life, there are sequels and postscripts. This novel reflects that.
You think one episode is over, but you read on and see there is
more.
Q) There is clearly an overlap in this novel between fiction and
travel writing. After not writing fiction for a while, was this
a necessary transition for you?
A) A novel, to me, needs a strong sense of place and time.
This is also true of a travel book. I started this book when my
friendship with V. S. Naipaul had begun to unravel, and I needed
to write about that. When
Sir Vidia's Shadow
was finished, I resumed work on
Hotel Honolulu, so it has been
in the works for three or four years.
Q) Can you shed light on what the narrator means when he says, "The
things we write are letters to the dead"?
A) I'm not sure I can shed light on it, but it always seems
that a serious writer in his or her work is addressing the past
-- issues long buried, our own pasts, our younger selves.
Q) Did it take you, like the narrator, a while to come to terms with
living in Hawaii and dealing, for instance, with the lack of a
literary community?
A) I quite like the privacy of living in a place where
no one has the slightest idea of who I am or what I do. I felt
this way in Africa, being a writer in a fundamentally illiterate
culture. The oral tradition of storytelling and yarn spinning
is strong in Hawaii, which is a complex place. Perhaps there is
a literary community, but I am unaware of it. I live in the country,
forty miles from Honolulu, and when I'm not writing I am a commercial
beekeeper.
Q) Hawaii has a tragic history, particularly since the arrival of
whites. Is Hotel Honolulu the story of Hawaii, or is the
book's tragedy of a more universal nature?
A) I intended the novel to be about both the pleasures
and the miseries of Honolulu and the way they reflect the rest
of America. Hawaii is a red, white and blue American state with
the feel of an American colony. Until recently, it was profoundly
agricultural, its economy dependent on pineapples and sugar cane
and coffee. In many ways Hawaii is paradise, but we also have
terrible traffic and hookers and cars rusting by the side of the
road. You can think of it as the Garden of Eden: after Adam and
Eve sinned, they weren't expelled but kept on living there, telling
themselves, "Okay, we're sinners, but this is a nice place to
live."
Q) The narrator's experience of running a hotel comes to change him
almost entirely. How has living in Hawaii changed you?
A) I arrived as the plantations were on the wane. This
was amazing to behold -- pineapple fields turned into hillsides
of new houses and condos, with a resulting change in demographics.
Q) Presumably Hotel Honolulu contains autobiographical elements.
You are known to be rather prolific and not someone who suffers
from writer's block. Did you, like the narrator, ever encounter
a prolonged period of time when it was impossible to write, and
if so, how did you deal with it?
A) Believe it or not, I am a very slow writer, but because
I have lots of time I manage to plod along. This makes me look
prolific. Actually I have been writing books for forty years and
publishing them for thirty-five. A long time. In the periods when
I have found it difficult to write -- there have been many --
I have felt very unhappy and purposeless.
Q) The narrator says that hotel rooms excite his imagination, particularly
his sexual imagination. So being a hotel manager is a sort of
orgy of the imagination for him. Did the subject matter create
a similar experience for you?
A) A hotel is a treasure house. Everything happens in hotels!
When you consider it, a hotel is like the definition of a novel,
an edifice containing all of human life: where people eat, sleep,
make love, live, and die -- in compartments. I have also been
impressed by how well hotel staffers understand what is going
on. They know each guest's movements, each guest's story, but
they smile and keep these stories to themselves. I am blabbing
them in the book. That is a writer's mission.
Q) One senses that you had a lot of fun creating the colorful characters
in Hotel Honolulu. What was the best part of writing this
novel?
A) The best part of writing
Hotel Honolulu was the
best part of writing any satisfying novel: the sense that I was
writing something that had not been written before, that I was
doing something new, that I was giving some sort of life to a
place that had not been depicted before. To be any good, writing
has to live and be truthful and say something new. This is what
is meant by the word "wit."
