Hotel Honolulu

Paul Theroux writing on autopilot is still better than many other authors at the top of their form. His well-known ability to describe a place or person in just a few perfect words, his creation of believable characters with clear motivations, his ironic detachment as these same characters mess up their lives, and his depiction of a writer's battle with the demons of his craft are among his many brilliant qualities, all on vibrant display here. Ultimately, however, this novel was a disappointment to me. Set in a 3rd-rate hotel in Honolulu, it has the characters and setting of a novel (and is called a novel on the cover), but it is so lacking in any sort of unifying plot, that it's not even possible to write a plot summary. The huge cast of characters has only one thing in common--they all live and/or work at the Hotel Honolulu. While some characters are complete enough that they could have been worked into a wonderful collection of short stories, others are seen only in tiny, three- or four-page vignettes and add nothing significant. Like the author, the narrator is a writer who has had a failed marriage and difficult divorce in England and who has come to Hawaii hoping to escape his bad memories and the pressures of the writing life. He likes Hawaii "because it [is] a void"--almost no one recognizes his name, and those who do have not read his books. He works as the manager of the Hotel Honolulu. Unfortunately, this fragmented book is shockingly mean-spirited in tone, going way beyond good-humored satire, and demeaning almost every aspect of Hawaii, its people, and its culture, while also taking pokes at some American icons. Virtually every woman in the book either is or has been a prostitute. All are dimwits. Even the narrator's wife is the product of a one-night stand between a Honolulu prostitute and John F. Kennedy, a man she supposedly never recognized in this most Democratic state. Hawaiian/Filipino girls are depicted as fair game, sexually, for their fathers, uncles, brothers, and other relatives. Hawaiians who speak pidgin among themselves are mocked and their language derided. When he uses Hawaiian words, Theroux sometimes deliberately misspells them. Fellow-author Stephen King also takes a hit here, Theroux saying, "it takes only a modest talent to write about misery." In a particularly low blow, he comments on King's near-fatal accident by saying, "Gross reality [the accident] overwhelms his puerile and implausible fantasies." This novel may have its virtues, but modesty, tolerance, and good taste are not among them. Mary Whipple

There's a great premise for this novel by Paul Theroux. The narrator is an unnamed middle-aged writer who takes a job as a manager of a small seedy hotel in Honolulu. What follows is a book full of overlapping stories about the constant parade of guests and locals and a fresh look at what Hawaii is like by the New England-born author who now makes Hawaii his part-time home.There's a wide variety of characters and a loose non-conventional plot. Most memorable of all is the larger-than-life figure of millionaire and hotel owner Buddy Hamstra, a big man who over-indulges his appetites in life. There's the writer's wife and daughter as well as permanent and temporary hotel guests and employees. It's a collection of vignettes interwoven with reoccurring themes and finely developed people. It's big and sprawling and full of pathos and humor, small portraits of human nature focusing on the themes of love and death.I found myself drawn into it, enjoying the author's sharp observations and finding myself wanting to laugh out loud. How each character views this world is fascinating and the writer dares to ridicule it all. There's a power in the book that kept me reading in spite of the meandering pace. It's sad and funny and very human all at the same time as it willingly explores such topics such as ethnic tensions and physical disabilities. It might not always be a flattering picture of a place we sometimes think of as paradise, but it sure does seem real, as the characters grope and blunder along in their lives below a constantly shining Hawaiian sun. I just loved the experience of reading this book. Definitely recommended.

With his first novels of Africa and England written more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux remains the best American storyteller around, constantly seeking new ways to explore psychological terrain (when he's not writing his best-selling travel books). Hotel Honolulu is his latest experiment and is wildly inventive, devastatingly funny, sad and perceptive all at the same time. I must warn that some readers will be offended by his bleak sexual imagery (I was), but the overall effect is too great an accomplishment to ignore. One of its many messages is clear: life is about change. Only Theroux could have the audacity to set his alter-ego narrator down amid uneducated, semi-literate hotel workers who mostly speak Pidgin English, then loudly bemoan a lack of intellectual companionship. It is this narrator, a fiftyish ex-writer now hotel manager in late mid-life transition, who provides the commentary and, like Scheherazade, spins the intricately woven tales of everyone who comes to live at or near the Hotel Honolulu. Eventually the manager begins to be more revealing of his own inner life, which has a decidedly different tone than that of those around him, milder, less two-dimensional. He makes a friend; he admits his love of the printed word and the importance of being understood; he loses at Scrabble; he tends bees. As the first line points out, themes of death run throughout the hotel. This may be paradise but people are throwing themselves off balconies left and right because they cannot effectively cope with the changes in their lives. Most of the characters have dramatic pasts, but lives change, cultures change and language changes, especially in Hawaii. Even the manager who suffers with writer's block confronts his fear of dying if he cannot find his voice in this new world. It has been a common technique of Theroux to allude to events which may or may not be aspects of his own life, putting the reader in doubt. Although the narrator's small daughter Rose (one of the few female characters who is not cast in a slightly misogynist light), maintains a certainty about what is real, it is not as clear cut for us. A hotel is a great symbol for the unconscious so it is not surprising when the narrator states that it has become his whole world, the perfect place to manufacture stories - fantasies about sex, death and, if you are a writer, about writing. While not always a comfortable read and no doubt Theroux's darkest comedy, Hotel Honolulu is in my opinion a tremendously original and moving novel.

Few capture the essence of a setting as sensitively as author Paul Theroux. One remembers with pleasure "Kowloon Tong" (1997), a vivid word portrait of China. Once more he renders unforgettable scenes in his latest work, "Hotel Honolulu," set in Hawaii where, by the way, Mr. Theroux maintains a second home. But this is not the sun dappled island paradise of which many dream. It is instead a rather seedy spot, a down-at-the-heels 80 room hotel on an unimposing byway several blocks from the beach in Waikiki. "The rooms were small, the elevator was narrow, the lobby was tiny, the bar was just a nook." The owner, Buddy Hamstra, a man with protean appetites, bridled at calling his place small. It was, he said, "Yerpeen." Resident manager for this haven is an unsuccessful writer who has no hotel experience, but a sharp eye for observing and facile tongue for relating the human dramas that unfold behind closed doors. Readers will find themselves drawn to the off-beat, flawed characters who visit the hotel, and reminded that Mr. Theroux is not only a trenchant observer of humankind but one blessed with limitless imagination and a powerful sense of place.

Paul Theroux loves to play the intelligent, uninvolved raconteur, the perpetual, if distant, visitor. In his inimical style of episodic narration he tells the stories of those characters he meets, or he writes his fantasies about them (read sexual). In Hotel Honolulu he continues the witty, winking entertainment he began in his fictional autobiographies My Secret History and My Other Life, all viewed from his superior stance. Now that he is transplanted from England to Hawaii, the flavor is Polynesian, but the sly, voyeuristic prose the same. No other autor carries the reader along so effortlessly, so superbly, and on such a smooth amusement ride. No literati populate this world, however, a world of prostitutes, con men, complainers, and calculating crones. If readers are hoping for plot, try Theroux's masterful sci-fi story O-Zone, or the bizarre sexual deviant thriller Chicago Loop, ore even the anti-establishment raves Milroy the Magician or Mosquito Coast. Discover Paul Theroux, a truly great writer, a mastermid who can take his reader on a funfilled ride of literary loops and thrills that leave you breathless at the feats of prose prowess and always wanting more.