dotlit: 'Paradise Lost: Theroux's Hotel Honolulu' by Sarah Mason Paul Theroux is vociferous about the nature of writing: 'There's a strange irrationality about the writing life. Often a writer writes just to maintain their sanity.' Fascinating, then, that he uses an unnamed ex- writer as his latest Hawaiian hero: exiled from Eden and washed to the shores of Honolulu, recruited to work as a hotel manager alongside the astutely named bar, 'Paradise Lost.' Perhaps Penguin's prodigal son has taken this opportunity to toy with his concept of personal insanity? As a writer who has abandoned writing, living on an island that despises reading, our hero resembles his thinly garbed alter ego. Who knows with Mr. Theroux? The part-time Hawaiian resident maintains his trademark wit, mordantly toying with the reader, brilliantly blurring the line between fact and fiction. Hotel Honolulu is a pilgrimage, a higgledy-piggledy assortment of shrewd vignettes that depict the core of humanity and deflate the notion of paradise. Theroux resists archetypical narrative, instead using eighty clear-cut episodes to map his hero's trek towards personal salvation. Each episode tells a strange pilgrimage for one of the satirised cast from the Hotel Honolulu: a shoddy multi storied hotel that exists in a very small way on the debauched beaches of the Waikiki. The narrative slinks its way through the eighty rooms of the hotel, slyly indulging in the basics of human nature: sex, life, death. Honolulu, Theroux-style, is sprung from wanton depravity to quash any notion of paradise. What is most interesting is the fact that most of these vignettes are drawn from Theroux's experiences. One has to wonder how he uncovered a love triangle between a mother, her gay son and his bi-sexual lover! Theroux is most well known for his travel writing, a handy precursor to Hotel Honolulu, however, his recent fictional and non-fictional works have been subject to critical scepticism. Theroux published My Other Life, a novel featuring a fictional character named Paul Theroux after an earlier work, My Secret History, was labelled a not-so-subtle autobiography. Cleverly, he continues this game in Hotel Honolulu with sly similarities of character and reference to real people. Leon Edel, real life biographer of Henry James and friend of Theroux, makes an appearance, and is, indeed, the only character to escape Theroux's scathing eye. While most of the Hotel Honolulu guests are transient, we find a second protagonist in hotel owner Buddy Hamstra: a boozy 'three balled tomcat' in droopy shorts who ousts himself as manager and bestows the position upon the endlessly underqualified hero. Also a fixture is the narrator's simpleminded and slightly wet native Hawaiian wife, Sweetie, the alleged product of a bath-tub tryst between a Chinese-Hawaiian prostitute and JFK. Strangely, our hero is noticeably absent from most of the action, and largely reveals himself through his satirical depiction of the characters around him. Theroux's acidic sketches initially appear shaded with racist undertones, but eventually develop into a distinct binary opposition between literary intelligence and illiterate futility. While the episodic observations are hilarious and intuitive, the hotel itself provides only the slimmest of links between the vignettes. Initially, they simply seem scatty and disjointed, but develop into an irritating deflection from the narrative we want to hear — the story of our hero. Notwithstanding their astuteness, the episodes are, in part, a self-constructed barrier between the narrator and his readers. The one enduring feature of the novel is the setting: the multi-storied Hotel Honolulu. No background is more conducive to self-analysis, loneliness or displacement than a hotel room. A holiday is, by nature, a leave of absence from normal life, and to a certain extent forces holiday- goers to assess that life without the distractions it affords. Unfortunately, self-realisation is not always full of warm and fuzzys, and the novel photographs some of the uglier reactions to self-awareness. Caustic, disturbing, laugh-out-loud funny, but who'd have it any other way? 'All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion' (Tolstoy). References John Milton, Paradise Lost. Paul Theroux. "The Savvy Traveler." Salon Magazine 1999. 24 Nov. 2001 . Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. London: Penguin Classics, 1977. Text is referred to in Hotel Honolulu.