Hotel Honolulu

By Paul Theroux


Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras -- he lives in and writes about places most of us never see. His alienated fictional characters and his alienated traveler-self have become familiar, eventually merging as his novels featured characters named Paul Theroux ("My Other Life") or ones modeled on himself (Andre Parent in "My Secret History").

In a collection of travel essays, "Fresh Air Fiend," he wrote, "I was an outsider before I was a traveler; I was a traveler before I was a writer; I think one led to the other."And he also noted there, "All my adult life I have lived in places regarded as prime tourist destinations. Yet for the whole of that time I have never had much to do with tourists." So it makes sense that he has now written a kind of anti-travel, anti-tourist novel. In "Hotel Honolulu," Theroux's main character essentially stays behind the counter of the hotel he manages, and travelers come to him.

There is a rich tradition of "hotel novels." The grandfather is Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," in which pilgrims converge at Harry Bailey's inn. And writers as diverse as Sinclair Lewis ("Work of Art"), Tennessee Williams ("The Night of the Iguana") and Anita Brookner ("Hotel du Lac") have set important work in hotels.

It is a risky format, emphasizing discrete vignettes and diverse characters who do not necessarily interact, sacrificing cohesive narrative for the charm of observation and sketch. In "Hotel Honolulu," Theroux solves these problems by making the hotel's guests secondary to the relationships among its unnamed manager, staff, owner and selected Honolulu residents.

Those relationships are tinged by corruption. There is so much incest, rape,

prostitution, betrayal, suicide, murder, loneliness and misery in and around the Hotel Honolulu that its atmosphere ("a hotel is a hothouse") is intensely harrowing. A gay man is killed by his lover after being found in bed with the man's mother. Another man, in his 60s, hangs himself by the door of his luxury automobile after falling for a woman one-third his age. A woman abused by her stepfather becomes a prostitute and marries the hotel owner, then brings her sister to Hawaii to sleep with him. As such events accumulate, the reader realizes that Theroux's often seething imagination has finally boiled over.

The narrator-manager is Paul Theroux in all but name: "I was fifty-seven years old, a former writer and world traveler, a onetime literary success, who now lived on a small island with a simple wife and a small child, earning a low five-figure salary for managing one of the grubbier hotels in Waikiki, perhaps the only hotel manager in the world who was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters." The character allows Theroux to explore what might have happened had he made other choices. Thus, one might view the novel as an autobiographical fantasy where the worst that could have happened is never far from what does happen.

Living in paradise, it appears, all Theroux had to do to see it vanish was look around. It is a mess, tainted by the savagery of human self-indulgence -- the very acts we're made to witness -- and this infuriates him.

The narrator came to Hawaii and took the hotel job because he could no longer write. Shattered, he "did not want to have a past." But coming to know the staff, renaming its bar, marrying the daughter of a woman who serves as a part-time prostitute there, involving himself in the life of the hotel's owner and a few fellow islanders, he finds his way again.

For all the erotic and desperate events that occur, "Hotel Honolulu" is a story of how the narrator rediscovers his voice and writes the book we are reading: the grim story of people who assist in the ruination of paradise.