Hotel Honolulu [Paperback]

Hotel Honolulu was an interesting collection of short stories because of the strand of continuity running through them. The stories revolve around guests and workers at the Hotel Honolulu, a secluded hotel in Waikiki. Guests come and go, providing a range of characters for Theroux to get his head round, and the book is essentially a collection of vignettes about different characters, perhaps fitting for a collection of stories set in a hotel, where there will obviously be rotation of guests.

Sex and death permeate many of the stories, and they are frequently witty. There is a diverse collection of characters, each with a unique story, and not one is repeated twice.

Theroux wisely does not just restrict himself to the guests, allowing us to build affection for those who work at the hotel too, the most obvious example being Buddy, the owner of Hotel Honolulu. By focussing on a series of characters throughout the book, Theroux encourages us to care for the characters, and it is also a useful way of helping the book to hang together. Were the narrator not to reveal his story, the book would be more of a revolving door collection, and wouldn’t have hung together quite as well.

Overall this is a coherent collection of short stories with a genuine connection to each other as opposed to the fact that they are between the same cover. Hotel Honolulu is a collection well worth reading and contains some of the finest short stories I have read.

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.

For the theme of this series of short tales is life. Using the image of a "decomposing writer," he's transformed into a manager of an off-beat hotel while suffering the loss of his muse. The muse has not truly deserted him, nor us, as he records the lives of guests, family, other staff and local residents. Theroux is an avid listener to "the coarse language of life." He listens well, conveying what he gleans with unsurpassed vividness. He may not be composing a novel from what he learns, but he tells us what they imparted. We are watching their existence through his eyes. The view is distorted little, if at all.

Theroux's travels have brought him to understand life isn't a finished work. There's no discernible plot line, simply a series of episodes from birth to the end. Many of the events bear no apparent meaning, but they all add up to an individual's history. That's how he's constructed this book. Those who complain that the plot line is thin need only look in the nearest mirror. Any one of us could be a character here, with notable exception. Nearly all the people the "writer" encounters are astonished to discover his trade. Few however, if any of them, read. His distress at this discovery is apparent, but while it diminishes the narrator, none of the characters feels they've missed anything. They are getting on with other things - their own lives, as inadequate as we may judge that life to be.

There are too many characters in this book to record here. One of the most endearing is the barman Tran, a refugee, and one time boat person. His patience compels our attention and is matched only by his sense of irony. Buddy Hamstra, the hotel's owner, becomes the pivot for many of the story's populace. Theroux returns to Buddy throughout the book, a sun-like presence around which many of the others orbit. He's despised and adored with equal weight depending on the relation he's established with them. He, too, hates and loves with fierce intensity. But his impact on them and the writer is unquestionable. Hamstra becomes the dominant example of Theroux's experience of life's story.

Theroux incorporates various real people in his account. His exchanges on writing with Henry James scholar Leon Edel read with perfect validity. Their conversations are mute but significant. Edel gently nudges the writer to return to his craft. Novels are only the extension of the writer's fantasies. His words could encourage anyone to bring those fantasies to life on the page. Theroux, of course, has done just that with this book. The difference between Theroux and the rest of us is his passion for narrative. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]