How many lives does a cat have? Probably not quite as many as writer Paul Theroux. This most un-American of major US novelists has always seemed far closer to Greene and Maugham than to any of his countrymen. Few US writers have set their work outside the US as Theroux, the stateless traveller, has consistently done. There is also the legacy of the spilt personality that appears to stalk him, the novelist in one corner versus the travel writer in the other.
But whatever genre this son of Medford, Massachusetts chooses to operate within, Theroux the cold, opinionated observer of exact, unemotional prose and sharp insight remains fascinated by one of his most enduring themes, his life. Despite the success of good novels such as the Whitbread prize-winning Picture Palace - cool, intelligent reportage appears to be his natural area as he proved with his wonderful The Old Patagonian Express (1978). Yet as long ago as his portrait of modern Britain, The Kingdom by the Sea (1983), there were hints indicating his awareness of self would eventually prove an obstacle to his non-fiction.
Hotel Honolulu comes close on the heels of Sir Vita's Shadow, his abrasive memoir of fellow writer V.S. Naipaul. As portraits of "friendships" go, it spilt equal measures of acid and blood. Less of an agenda surrounds this graphically explicit new novel. Theroux wastes little time getting to its purpose. As early as the first paragraph he has set the scene. The narrator is now living in Hawaii, working in a hotel with a new wife, a baby "and as the writer said after the crack-up, I found new things to care about."
None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has read two of his earlier books, My Secret History (1989), and particularly, My Other Life (1996), interestingly both published with the subtitle "a novel" as both read as offbeat autobiographies. Still there are no rules. Phillip Roth spent much of his early to late mid-career chronicling his sexual angst and mid-life crisis with a frenetic candour. Theroux is as openly self-absorbed but his tone is colder, more remote, deliberate and often, all of it is brilliantly served by his relentless feel for the absurd.
Theroux has already given us several variations on the theme of writer - as cynic, observer, restless traveller, egoist, opportunist, outsider, truth-teller and in My Secret History, and most explicitly, in My Other Life, as an introspective lost soul. Whether we are reading memoir or fiction no longer seems to matter, as in Hotel Honolulu Theroux's largely passive narrator seems, for a while to be almost at peace, if only because the characters he is living and working among are so tormented, unhappy, stupid or angry.
While we know the man now managing the shabby hotel is a writer who no longer writes, the centre stage belongs to Buddy Hamstra, a larger than life often sadistic buffoon with a genius for horrible jokes - including offering his dead wife's ashes in the place of fresh-ground pepper to his guests - and a terrifying zest for life. He also writes letters to his other dead wife and is completely believable. Whether as a creation or a study from life this loud desperate man proves unforgettable. Throughout the novel Buddy insists that Theroux, whom he tends to introduce to strangers with the line "he wrote a book," writes the story of his, Buddy's, life. Theroux does, in a way, while also telling many others' stories en route. The result is a strange collection of anecdotes and asides featuring walk-on players and a variety of hotel guests, as well as the biographies of several of the core characters who form part of the immediate daily world of the narrator.
`History happens to other people," the narrator remarks, "the rest of us just live and die, watch the news, listen to the guff, and remember the names." This sounds accurate enough, although he appears to have done more than most. His life as a hotel manager is quite funny as he doesn't do much except depend on his staff and listen to the endlessly pornographic ravings of Buddy, who owns the place, and while professing little regard for the guests appears to have their comfort at heart. Meanwhile the narrator concedes his young wife is beautiful, if not too bright, but his small daughter is very clever. Somehow this casual, deliberately random and conversational narrative offered by a writer who has chosen to drop out from his world and abandon his craft, achieves a convincing sense of everyday life as lived by a group of people for whom the tacky hotel is home.
Perhaps because most of the other male characters appear so preoccupied by sex, the narrator seems courtly, and even kindly, by comparison. His self-awareness is quick to emerge if initially at least with less regret than might be expected. "My career as a writer had not trained me for anything practical. I thought of describing this as a despairing book of exile I would title, Who I Was. Writing had made me unemployable, had isolated me and given me the absurd delusion that I could perform tasks that were beyond me . . . I understood fantasy - it was what writing had taught me." There are episodes of appalling sexual cruelty while the adventures of Pinky, Buddy's child-bride, even before her deranged marriage to him, are tragic. Equally there are many comic moments. Theroux can be very funny, describing the absurd with laconic, deadpan understatement. The dialogue reads as spoken. A greedy, newly-married computer woman arrives at the hotel and announces "I can't believe this kid's not online." Her father, the narrator replies, "she's six. She reads."
Just when it seems the narrator is content to allow his old life to slide away he meets a fellow spirit from his former life. An elderly man wearing a Panama hat turns out to be Leon Edel, biographer of Henry James. The encounter develops into a three-way relationship featuring the narrator, Edel and James. For the narrator Edel represents more than James, he also recalls Theroux's dead father. By this time the narrator who has become a reader, no longer a writer, is haunted by his loss of writing and begins to suffer panic attacks.
Yet these doubts and regrets are not permitted to take over the book. Theroux continues his routine of story and observation, looking at lives beyond his own. Interestingly, although the self-absorbed writer is certainly as interested as ever in himself, he is also looking at other people throughout this long, apparently casual but deceptively methodical book. He also explains the garish tragedy of Hawaii's fall from innocence.
For all its reportage Hotel Honolulu is extremely personal. As he watches Buddy and the pathetic Pinky slug it out in the hotel bar at almost three in the morning, what has happened to his own life finally dawns on him. "This was one of those moments of dazzling clarity when I knew without having to remind myself that I was 57 years old, a former writer and world traveller, a onetime literary success, who now lived on a small island with a simple wife and a small child, earning a low five-figure salary for managing one of the grubbier hotels in Waikiki, perhaps the only hotel manager in the world who was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, with the rosette in the lapel of my Aloha shirt to prove it."
Edel dies in the novel as he did in life aged 89 - only four days before his 90th birthday. Buddy also dies. "The risk taker, madly signalling for attention, is always preparing you for his death, and as time passes, this interminable anticlimax is more maddening than morbid," recalls the narrator. Theroux's funeral eulogy to his dead friend and saviour, Buddy, is so apt it leaves the attendance cold. But this strange, sleazy, offbeat confession of an autobiographical novel proves compelling reading. Now, as so often before in a long career, Theroux, the witness, sustains his chaotically ordered narrative by efficient prose, shrewd observation and brutal truth.
Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
