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.


From Booklist
Place is crucial to both Theroux's penetrating travel books and his potent fiction. In his newest novel, an adroitly crafted work of vigorous description, complex pathos, and ironic humor, he captures the molten cultural, racial, and linguistic amalgam of Hawaii in a racy variation on the Grand Hotel template. No setting could be more conducive to Theroux's worldliness and sensitivity to loneliness and displacement than the Hotel Honolulu, the last of the funky old off-beach hotels on an island masquerading as paradise but wracked by every imaginable form of discord and woe. Ejected from his cushy life as a successful writer, Theroux's unnamed narrator washes up in Honolulu at age 49 in need of a job and a whole new mode of operation. Buddy Hamstra, Hotel Honolulu's rich, boozy, reprobate owner, anoints him hotel manager, and Theroux's grateful narrator soon realizes that listening to Buddy's wild stories is a crucial part of the job. Although he marries Sweetie in Housekeeping--the beautiful daughter of a genteel Chinese Hawaiian prostitute and (unbeknownst to her) JFK--the protagonist remains an outsider, observing life at Hotel Honolulu as though he'd landed on another planet, recounting the tragic and erotic goings-on in chapters as well formed as fables or Poe horror stories. Lust and death are inextricably entwined as characters attempt to control their fates by committing infidelities, murder, and even suicide. A misfit mocked for his reading habit, Theroux's hero watches Buddy's spectacular self-destruction, listens to hair-raising accounts of child abuse, incest, and thwarted love, and wonders if he'll ever write again. Ultimately, inspired by his precocious daughter and a new friend, Theroux's cultural castaway finds a path back to his true passion and discovers the paradise he believed was lost. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

Whether he is writing fiction or nonfiction, Paul Theroux's sense of place runs powerfully through the heart of all his works. In Hotel Honolulu, Theroux takes on the tourist culture of Hawaii -- a would-be paradise for wanderers, adulterers, and honeymooners alike. Having left behind a life in shambles, Buddy, a failed writer, is signed on as the manager of a hotel. But before he knows it, the hotel, its inhabitants, and their clandestine (and not-so-clandestine) goings-on occupy the whole of Buddy's universe -- driving him unknowingly toward the very truth about himself and America that had once eluded him in his art.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this wickedly satiric romp, Paul Theroux captures the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted. The novel's narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, escapes to Waikiki and soon finds himself the manager of the Hotel Honolulu, a low-rent establishment a few blocks off the beach. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all check in to the hotel. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest has come in search of something -- sun, love, happiness, objects of unnameable longing -- and everyone has a story. By turns hilarious, ribald, tender, and tragic, HOTEL HONOLULU offers a unique glimpse of the psychological landscape of an American paradise.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booklist

Place is crucial to both Theroux's penetrating travel books and his potent fiction. In his newest novel, an adroitly crafted work of vigorous description, complex pathos, and ironic humor, he captures the molten cultural, racial, and linguistic amalgam of Hawaii in a racy variation on the Grand Hotel template.

Heller McAlpin - Chrisitian Science Monitor

In Hotel Honolulu, Theroux has written a morbidly fascinating handbook of alienation and a Baedeker of his fantasies and inner life.

Seattle Times

a delightful, loose-limbed riff of a novel...full of Theroux's sharp wit, unashamed crankiness, pungent observations and surprising insights.

Philadelphia Inquirer

What makes Paul Theroux so good is what always separates the fine writers from the pack: his ability to look at the familiar in a fresh, original way - and make us richer for it.

New York Times Book Review