Book Review: Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride
Hotel Room, by Edward Hopper
Joe Kenelm reviews Eimear McBride’s latest novel, Strange Hotel.
The protagonist of Strange Hotel is a woman who travels from hotel to hotel. The novel is way-marked with six lists of places, her itinerary. Opening and closing the book, they divide the narrative into snapshots of her stays in hotel rooms in five different cities. The lists jump from Cheltenham to Calgary, Sydney to Listowel. In the opening section, she is in Avignon; just a case of “another unzipped bag, in another uninteresting hotel room”. Though wide-ranging, her travels have settled into a profound inertia. She is fluent in the language of the hotel room, recognises slight departures from the tropes of hospitality decor, is “au fait” with the complexities of air conditioning units, and, in one hotel, recalls the unusual position of the minibar. By her own admission, however, she has no ear for the regional variations in the sound of door locks. (That she holds herself to such standards reveals the depth of her familiarity.)
The reason for her behaviour is revealed gradually. A“he” haunts the novel. He was “the thing”. He survives through their only child. By moving forward, onto the next hotel room, she can avoid her past, keeping it behind a “padlocked door”. It is a project of forgetting, averting her gaze from the “apertures in memory” through which she can’t help but glimpse him. She has a series of one night stands — each one marked with an “x” by the place in question in her itinerary — and encourages no more than a physical connection with the men. She likes herself “callous”.
Her callousness is an extension of the hotel room. Unlike the home, that space is indifferent to the person who occupies it. Late in the novel she asks herself: “Does she think of her life in these hotel rooms as laboratorially contained? Clearly, the answer is yes.” Here, the hotel room is a neutral space; set apart, in the sphere of scientific investigation. She remembers holding rocks over ants as a child, deciding whether to drop or not, and compares that game to her current situation: “anthill — hotel rooms, ants as men”. It is an indifferent project: whether she drops the rock or not, it makes no difference to her.
Wayne Koestenbaum theorises a “hotel prose”, and sees Joan Didion as one of its chief exponents: in The Last Thing He Wanted, the narrator describes a conference at which eight members of the Kennedy Administration meet at a hotel in the Florida Keys, to reassess the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In one paragraph, she sets the scene: “The hotel was pink.” It is comatose writing. The prose’s task, Koestenbaum accordingly summarises, is “stupefaction”. In Strange Hotel, the protagonist must confront her own stupefying hotel prose. In a man’s room in Oslo, she asks herself why she has not yet left for her own bed. She admits that in this very act of reasoning, she distances herself from intimacy. Her language is corporeally disconnected, “as far as possible from blood and guts”, “literal daub and waffle.” Her hotel prose is a dodge: she lines up “words against words, then clause against clause, until an agreeable distance has been reached”. Like hotel rooms, her idiom becomes a way for her to keep moving on and never confront her past.
In the final section of the novel, she is in Austin, hastily shutting her hotel room door on a man. He lingers in the corridor outside. She is panicked, and unsettled. The dynamics are unclear: is this a liaison that has gone badly wrong; is this man a threat? Actually, that is not far from the truth. She found him easy to be with; she cannot remember laughing so much in bed, and their intimacy is intense and sustained. The “earth — just a little — shifts”. In the morning, she reflexively agrees to have breakfast with him. It is an unprecedented step. Realising that she has failed to keep herself callous, she hurries him out.
She cannot keep the past padlocked away. She must open the door to it. She remembers the night when “he” told her about his own traumatic past. On that evening, he offered to find her a hotel for the night, but she chose to remain. Her decision settled their relationship. Now, she imagines instead that she left for a hotel, and constructs an “imagined room”. This “strange hotel” recasts the apathetic space of the hotel room: by its very nature, this room is personal. She imagines it, and can dictate the decor. This hotel room facilitates her central realisation. Would staying in a hotel that night have meant she would have escaped her present condition? No, “to leave rather than to stay, would betray the most fundamental bargain I’d made: You be London, and I will rise to that.” Like this strange hotel room, her nature is to be alive to a heterogeneity of that metropolis. She could not have left him because of his troubled history. To have done so would have made a “wasteland” of her.
As she finally imagines running out of the hotel, the formal and narrative preoccupations of Strange Hotel are elided. She shrugs off the “pseudo-intellectual garble which serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a long sentence”, and returns to her Austin hotel room. The man is still outside in the corridor. In the final list of the novel, she returns to Austin five times, each one with a small “x” printed beside it. The final stop in Strange Hotel is London, the first time she has returned since the very opening of the novel. Alongside it is an “x”: her American companion? The novel shrugs off hotel prose; as its protagonist readmits herself into human intimacy, and goes home.