Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
In this wickedly satiric romp, Paul Theroux captures the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted. The novel's narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, escapes to Waikiki and soon finds himself the manager of the Hotel Honolulu, a low-rent establishment a few blocks off the beach. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all check in to the hotel. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest has come in search of something -- sun, love, happiness, objects of unnameable longing -- and everyone has a story. By turns hilarious, ribald, tender, and tragic, HOTEL HONOLULU offers a unique glimpse of the psychological landscape of an American paradise.
Synopsis
Welcome to the Hotel Honolulu, a down-at-the-heels tourist place that’s two blocks from the beach on a back street in Waikiki, where middle America stays and dreams.
Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest in this eighty-room hotel has come in search of something — sun, love, happiness, unnamable longing — and everyone has a story. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all land at the Hotel Honolulu. But the hotel is as suited to being a crime scene as a love nest. Fortunately, our keen-eyed narrator, a writer down on his luck, is there to relate all the comings and goings. He’s lost money, friends, house, and family, and he has no experience running a hotel. But all that doesn’t stop Buddy, the bloated, boozy hotel owner — the last of a dying breed — from signing him on as manager. It isn’t long before the hotel expands to encompass the narrator’s whole world. His original plan of escape from a life of the mind becomes something altogether different: a way to return to the world he left, the world of imagined life.
No one but Paul Theroux could write this romp of a book, with its acutely drawn characters and canny insights into a place that is often viewed as a simple island paradise. In this unforgettable novel, Theroux shows us a funny, languid, louche floating world, island style. This is the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted, and it is also the heart of America.
New York Times Review of Books
Theroux's stylistic brilliance...and his extraordinary ear make him one of the most impressive living American writers.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Whether he is writing fiction or nonfiction, Paul Theroux's sense of place runs powerfully through the heart of all his works. In Hotel Honolulu, Theroux takes on the tourist culture of Hawaii -- a would-be paradise for wanderers, adulterers, and honeymooners alike. Having left behind a life in shambles, Buddy, a failed writer, is signed on as the manager of a hotel. But before he knows it, the hotel, its inhabitants, and their clandestine (and not-so-clandestine) goings-on occupy the whole of Buddy's universe -- driving him unknowingly toward the very truth about himself and America that had once eluded him in his art.Booklist
Place is crucial to both Theroux's penetrating travel books and his potent fiction. In his newest novel, an adroitly crafted work of vigorous description, complex pathos, and ironic humor, he captures the molten cultural, racial, and linguistic amalgam of Hawaii in a racy variation on the Grand Hotel template.Heller McAlpin
In Hotel Honolulu, Theroux has written a morbidly fascinating handbook of alienation and a Baedeker of his fantasies and inner life.— Chrisitian Science Monitor
Seattle Times
a delightful, loose-limbed riff of a novel...full of Theroux's sharp wit, unashamed crankiness, pungent observations and surprising insights.Philadelphia Inquirer
What makes Paul Theroux so good is what always separates the fine writers from the pack: his ability to look at the familiar in a fresh, original way - and make us richer for it.New York Times Book Review
Theroux has established himself in the tradition of Conrad, or perhaps Somerset Maugham.New York Times Review of Books
Theroux's stylistic brilliance...and his extraordinary ear make him one of the most impressive living American writers.Portland Tribune
a cunningly assembled affair...'Hotel Honolulu' is Theroux at his diabolical best.From The Critics
A cross between a novel and the fictional equivalent of a stamp album, this book is composed of countless brief, highly colored stories of love affairs and sexual encounters, dumb tricks, business deals, bright ideas, social climbing and falls from grace. As irresistible and unreliable as gossip, the stories bubble up from the eponymous hotel's guests and staff, from kitchen and guest suites and from the slightly seedy hotel bar, named Paradise Lost by the narrator and manager, who has the same name and history as the novelist himself. To further illustrate the back and forth of life and fiction, one of the resident guests, a retired cabinetmaker, is at work on a coffin like the ship's carpenter in Moby-Dick. Odder yet, the great James Joyce scholar Leon Edel turns up, courtly and erudite, having lunch with the fictional Paul Theroux, who is suffering a monumental writer's block. This is a foolish book that celebrates foolishness. It has no great point but to marvel at human variety, its squalor and its liveliness. In the end, one is reminded of a line by Southern writer Flannery O'Connor. She happened to be describing a stand of scrub trees in full sunlight, but her description applies equally well to Theroux's parade of humanity: "even the meanest of them shone."—Penelope Mesic
(Excerpted Review)