Hotel Honolulu [Hardcover]

Paul Theroux (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Scrappy, satiric and frowsily exotic, this loosely constructed novel of debauchery and frustrated ambition in present-day Hawaii debunks the myth of the island as a vacationer's paradise. The episodic narrative is presided over by two protagonists: the unnamed narrator, a has-been writer who leaves the mainland to manage the seedy Hotel Honolulu, and raucous millionaire Buddy Hamstra, the hotel's owner and former manager, who fired himself to give the narrator his job. The narrator is at once amused and moved by Buddy, "a big, blaspheming, doggy-eyed man in drooping shorts," who is as reckless in his personal life as he is in his business dealings. He hires the writer despite his lack of qualifications, and the writer returns the favor in loyalty and affection, acting as witness to Buddy's flamboyant decline. As the hotel's manager, the writer comes to know a succession of downtrodden travelers and Hawaii residents, each more eccentric than the next. Typical are a wealthy lawyer whose amassed fortune does not bring him happiness; a past-her-prime gossip columnist involved in a love triangle with her bisexual son and her son's male lover; and a man who is obsessed with a woman he meets through the personals. Theroux, never one to tread lightly, often portrays native Hawaiians including the writer's wife as simpleminded, craven souls. But he is an equal-opportunity satirist, skewering all his characters except perhaps his alter-ego narrator and Leon Edel, the real-life biographer of Henry James, who makes an extended, unlikely cameo appearance. The lack of conventional plot and the dreariness of life at Hotel Honolulu make the narrative drag at times, but Theroux's ear and eye are as sharp as ever, his prose as clean and supple. (May)Forecast: A nine-city author tour kicks off a promotional blitz for Hotel Honolulu, which includes a sweepstakes with a trip to Hawaii as prize. More carefully worked than Kowloon Tong, Theroux's last novel, and more familiar in setting, this may be one of the part-time Hawaii resident's better selling efforts.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A blocked writer seeking clarity and an escape from the life of the mind accepts a job as manager of a low-rent Hawaiian hotel, and his detailing of the denizens within the hotel community illustrate the old adage "Everyone has a story." Readers who know Theroux's fiction (e.g., Kowloon Tong) may not be surprised that many of the tales deal with the mystery and obsession with sex, and the author composes a good number of sad and twisted variations on love and lust, often found fleetingly. Though there is much sordidness here, Theroux skillfully portions out doses of humor, tenderness, and humanity, often with the turn of a phrase, as in the tale of two limping waiters or of a Filipino bride's deliverance to a relatively better position in life. By the time the reader navigates through these 80 snapshots of peoples' lives, a sense of this unnamed writer's shared experience becomes real. A most impressive and compulsively readable novel; highly recommended.
- Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (T) (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 061814613X
• ISBN-13: 978-0618146130
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,095,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THEROUX IS A TRENCHANT OBSERVER OF HUMANKIND, June 1, 2001

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hotel Honolulu (Hardcover)

Few capture the essence of a setting as sensitively as author Paul Theroux. One remembers with pleasure "Kowloon Tong" (1997), a vivid word portrait of China. Once more he renders unforgettable scenes in his latest work, "Hotel Honolulu," set in Hawaii where, by the way, Mr. Theroux maintains a second home.

But this is not the sun dappled island paradise of which many dream. It is instead a rather seedy spot, a down-at-the-heels 80 room hotel on an unimposing byway several blocks from the beach in Waikiki. "The rooms were small, the elevator was narrow, the lobby was tiny, the bar was just a nook."

The owner, Buddy Hamstra, a man with protean appetites, bridled at calling his place small. It was, he said, "Yerpeen."

Resident manager for this haven is an unsuccessful writer who has no hotel experience, but a sharp eye for observing and facile tongue for relating the human dramas that unfold behind closed doors.

Readers will find themselves drawn to the off-beat, flawed characters who visit the hotel, and reminded that Mr. Theroux is not only a trenchant observer of humankind but one blessed with limitless imagination and a powerful sense of place.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sad and funny and very very human. I loved it!, June 11, 2002

By 

Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hotel Honolulu: A Novel (Paperback)

There's a great premise for this novel by Paul Theroux. The narrator is an unnamed middle-aged writer who takes a job as a manager of a small seedy hotel in Honolulu. What follows is a book full of overlapping stories about the constant parade of guests and locals and a fresh look at what Hawaii is like by the New England-born author who now makes Hawaii his part-time home.

There's a wide variety of characters and a loose non-conventional plot. Most memorable of all is the larger-than-life figure of millionaire and hotel owner Buddy Hamstra, a big man who over-indulges his appetites in life. There's the writer's wife and daughter as well as permanent and temporary hotel guests and employees. It's a collection of vignettes interwoven with reoccurring themes and finely developed people. It's big and sprawling and full of pathos and humor, small portraits of human nature focusing on the themes of love and death.

I found myself drawn into it, enjoying the author's sharp observations and finding myself wanting to laugh out loud. How each character views this world is fascinating and the writer dares to ridicule it all. There's a power in the book that kept me reading in spite of the meandering pace. It's sad and funny and very human all at the same time as it willingly explores such topics such as ethnic tensions and physical disabilities. It might not always be a flattering picture of a place we sometimes think of as paradise, but it sure does seem real, as the characters grope and blunder along in their lives below a constantly shining Hawaiian sun. I just loved the experience of reading this book. Definitely recommended.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sounds like the hotel I stayed in, October 21, 2003

By 

L. Carroll "alrescate" (Strafford, MO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hotel Honolulu: A Novel (Paperback)

When I went to Hawai'i I hadn't yet read this book. I got home and picked it up to read. Now that I've read it I'm glad I got to go to visit first. I have reflected on the stories Theroux tells and I am able to appreciate Honolulu in a way I probably couldn't while I was there. I recognized so many of the people Theroux described and saw myself in them as well. I had to wonder how much of this novel was really fictional; it was far too easy to imagine that these things had happened. (Especially after getting to know some of the people who do live in Honolulu.)

Having grown up near a tourist destination this book give me an appreciation for those who have to deal with tourists for a living; it also gave me several insights into the human condition.

I would hand this book to anyone who is planning to travel (and not just to Hawai'i).