Hotels of North America feels like a novel hung on a gimmick that can't sustain it, a novel unsure of what it wants to be. It's not quite entertaining enough to work as a comedy, and it's too slight to be wholly profound.
This book is to middle-age what Albertine was to youth and Ice Storm was to suburbia. It's Moody at his most inventive, most playful, most bitter and biting and cruel.
By the end...it felt as if [Moody] was in the grip of his device. I wanted the novel to rise out of the banks created by the hotel reviews; I wanted Morse to emerge as well, which he does at times.
Has late capitalism turned us all into peripatetic, vaguely dissatisfied opinion-makers, taking our personal strife out upon hapless, low-wage employees? Is the book critic, with her limited column space and diminishing sphere of influence, any different from some goofball grousing, at great length, about a razor on Amazon.com? Perhaps so. More certain, however, is Moody’s triumph in writing a little book that raises such big questions.
Hotels of North America has its eye-rolling distractions, too—the name R.E. Morse, for instance—but it’s a much more controlled performance and inflected by gentle humor. Mr. Moody has a perfect grasp of the new genre of online reviewing, which is faceless yet weirdly interactive.
It’s formally daring, often very funny and surprisingly moving. It should earn Moody new fans from a millennial cohort that was still in diapers back when he was basking in his early critical acclaim. It should also help him win back those who felt his last two novels were sprawling, messy misfires.
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.
Hotels often brings off paradoxes: a sweet stay that turns to a bitter memory, or a farce that tumbles into an abyss of grief. Most of the funny business derives from an unsparing honesty about the American hardscrabble.
Morse’s sharply observed evisceration of commercialized hospitality stands on its own, and requires no post-hoc literary-philosophical noodling to justify its existence. My advice, fellow travelers, is to relish the individually shrink-wrapped cookies, enjoy the industrial-strength showerhead, and wring as much pleasure out of the 'video incidentals' as you possibly can. Savor the amenities, because Hotels of North America (much like the life of its peripatetic narrator) doesn’t arrive anywhere particularly satisfying. Maybe that’s the point.
Moving from barbed, brokenhearted cleverness and playful conceits to genuine pathos is an oft-attempted but very difficult trick. The transition here is never complete; but close. Along with laughs and some tedium, there are several moving, hollowed-out mediations here.
I braced myself for the downhill slide with every new chapter, aware of the notorious difficulty involved in keeping artistic gimmicks from going stale, but my interest and investment only deepened as the novel wore on, as Moody revealed not only a man, but an entire culture through these scattered fragments that mirror the workings of memory and of real day-to-day living.
