Funny and touching moments in introspective read

Strange Hotel

Eimear McBride, Faber, £12.99

The plot of Eimear McBride’s third novel, Strange Hotel, is minimal. An unnamed woman floats through a series of hotels. Thoughts float through her head. There are men. Sometimes she has sex with them, sometimes not. She thinks about these encounters and non-encounters a lot; mostly she thinks about a past affair with an older man. Where A Girl is a Half-Formed

Thing and The Lesser Bohemians were intense, Strange Hotel is less obtuse. McBride’s rootless woman muses on hotels’ copy-and-paste nature, though for her, “Familiarity is not the ambition… In fact, she’d say she has been at pains to let nothing embed.” This “carefully habituated ennui” is maintained through a kind of brooding verbal minestrone, a stream of constantly reshuffled (and not always interesting) thoughts to keep feelings at bay. As she muses, she’s “lining words up against words, then clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train”.

It’s self-consciously done. McBride’s writing is generally lovely, such as the description of the much-thought-about man: “He was more of a switchboard with the wiring ripped out whose adult life had been spent trying to intuit where it all plugged back in.”

Occasionally, it’s funny, and it has its touching moments. The woman admits to struggling with “the human condition’s most essential component: knowing someone alive, then knowing them dead”.

It’s an affecting novel. And its slippery introspection will appeal to many. Others, though, will be inclined to agree with the woman when she thinks: “Maybe I should stop f *cking around with language? It’s not improving matters at all.”