Bed to bed
To get into the spirit of Rick Moody’s new novel, it helps to start with the copyright page.
“Opinions about hotels contained in Hotels of North America,” its disclaimer reads, “do not represent the opinion of the author or the publisher at all, but are, rather, the opinions of a desperate, disgruntled, and wholly fictional hotel reviewer named Reginald E. Morse.”
“Hotels of North America” is Morse’s time-scrambling crazy quilt of online reminiscence and innuendo. Its prose has a slapdash swagger as Morse addresses the failures and fractures in his personal life. Hotel evaluation does rear its head from time to time — but what keeps Morse and the reader going is his attempt to make sense of his existence.
Much of that sense comes in the form of obsessive digressions on everything from the “diversity of key and lock design in contemporary lodging” to a detailed taxonomy of sleeping habits. Thoughts on bedbugs, hotel sex, hotelroom pornography and the way “things can go wrong during your vacation” are also part of the picture.
So who is Reginald E. Morse?
He’s an itinerant motivational speaker whose qualifications for the job are far from clear. (His declaration that he has “surpassing persuasive skills” is not exactly convincing.)
He has a failed marriage behind him and a young daughter he fears losing. He’s also having an ongoing kinky affair with an unnamed “language arts instructor” in various hotels around the country, and a healthier if still eccentric blossoming romance with a woman referred to only as “K.” who enjoys taking on different aliases in the various lodgings where they stay.
Reginald, in his own words, is “a top-rated reviewer at an online hotel-reviewing organization with no job security, very little money, and uncertain prospects.” References to his “gambling losses in Saratoga Springs” and his “tendency to do badly when it comes to keeping up with rent and mortgages” make it clear he’s not ideal romantic-partner material.
It’s no surprise that he’s a bit of a con artist. (See Page 30 for his bring-your-own-cockroaches scam to get hotelroom discounts.) He is perhaps at his most Reginald-esque when he’s holding forth on hotel hair-care products — this, despite the fact that, as he approaches 50, he has very little hair left.
Moody endows Reginald with a neo-Nabokovian “fancy prose style” that engenders much of the novel’s humor. The unexpected thing is how poignant some of his reflections can be, whether they’re introspective (“I don’t know that I have ever made a good impression”) or outward observations.
“Few downtowns are as ghostly and despondent as the downtown in Cleveland,” he writes in one forlorn passage. “Well, there are some other dead downtowns. Detroit, as is well known, is so crowded with the afterimages of failed capitalism that it is impossible to take a step there without the sharp in-breath of astonishment at how shattered destinies can be.”
With “Hotels in North America,” Moody (“The Ice Storm”) portrays a man who can’t settle on who he wants to be, dwelling in a tired country that no longer knows what it is. Reginald’s online reviewing takes scattershot stabs at finding answers to those uncertainties. The hostile input he gets from some online commentators actually helps him focus on what gives meaning to his life.
Almost all the hotels, including San Francisco’s Hotel Whitcomb, are real. But not all of the places where Reginald stays are hotels. His accommodations, at certain low points, include an Ikea parking lot, a shrub near New London’s Amtrak station and a vacant hardware-store front in downtown Brooklyn. A handful of lodgings — London’s Groucho Club, a few Italian hotels — aren’t North American.
While Moody is obviously lampooning the self-help bromides that are part of Reginald’s motivational-seminar arsenal, there’s a vein of sincerity in play here, too.
Moody himself offers “Life Coach” services on his website (www.rickmoodybooks.com), and his lengthy responses to his troubled correspondents are from the heart, even if they’re delivered with good humor. His website answer to “Friend to None,” a New Yorker who after 10 years in the city feels he still hasn’t made any true friends, would fit nicely into “Hotels of North America.”
“Loneliness is the affliction of the age, and we are not supposed to feel it,” Moody writes to his friendless pen pal. “The entire consumer economy is arrayed to prevent this feeling.”
If you like your thoughts methodically organized and your prose neatly combed, “Hotels of North America” may not be for you. But the wastrel waywardness of the novel is energizing, and its wrestling with the irresolvable loose ends of personality has a wry and powerful melancholy to it.