Hotels of North America - Rick Moody

In her Object Lessons book Hotel, Joanna Walsh describes her experience of being a hotel reviewer. During this time, her marriage was failing, and, as her home no longer felt like a home, she was in search of something else. Hotels provided 'the impersonal: the comfort of strangers. An orderly way to be'. They offered the opportunity for reinvention - each hotel room offers us a suggestion of what could be done, offering 'erotic chocolates, jelly-flavoured condoms... incense and calming bubble bath. The hotel sells you misbehaviour, then something to deal with the fallout'. Ultimately, though, the reinvention is necessarily impermanent: 'a hotel's secret is that it's only a seeming mini-break from the rights and wrongs of home. A hotel is an occasion for unheimlich longing. We expect our desires to be dispensed with. Instead, they are put on ice'. The experience of living in hotels for a month left Walsh physically ill, 'no longer able to tell what was my fault or someone else's, no longer having the energy to call room service... I took a chill and went home to a place where what was expected of me was less formalised, if more rigorous'.

Hotels of North America comprises the collected works of Reginald Edward Morse, reviewer of hotels for the website RateYourLodging.com. The preface from Greenway Davies, Director of the North American Society of Hoteliers and Innkeepers, tells us that it forms part of 'a small, high-end run of books of various online reviews of lodging: the harsh, the laudatory, the fanciful, the elaborate, the joyful and the melancholy', which will be kept in hotel rooms next to the Gideon’s Bibles. A motivational speaker by day, Morse rose to prominence as one of the site’s top reviewers between 2012 and 2014, detailing his peripatetic existence through the accommodation he was staying in at the time, from the Groucho Club to Ikea’s car park.

It is interesting to think about how this sort of online writing is judged. Unlike most forms of literature, worth can be judged by algorithms, with usefulness and quantity being the key performance indicators. Reviewers themselves are quantified, ranked and rated, and become jealously protective of their status, as Morse does. There is always a lingering suspicion of motive, particularly when writing under a pseudonym: are they secretly connected to the product under review, or a rival? Morse does show signs of being an unreliable narrator, although in a different way. There are hints of alcoholism, and of scams employed to get reduced or free accommodation, which indicates a certain shiftiness, at least. Is he, like Walsh, using hotels to escape some uncomfortable situation in his own life? And how effective can this panacea be?

Morse’s style also displays a level of grandiloquence, and thwarted ambition, which he shares with comic characters such as Adrian Mole and Francis Plug. His discussion of the economics of hotel-room pornography suggests a frustrated intellect ('demand among frequent users is inelastic'), while the little we learn of his background indicates downward mobility, beneath the expansive vocabulary (his abiding memory of his grandmother, for example, is 'the stink of decline... juniper and toxic waves of grandmotherly perfume').

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sense of thwarted ambition is strong throughout his reviews. In one hotel, for example, he complains that 'the Jacuzzi was just a big bathtub with a few extra jets of water, loud enough that it could cover over just about any cries of despair'. There is an underlying dissatisfaction with conditions not as advertised, a constant awareness of the gap between aspiration and reality. Walsh finds that the false domesticity of the hotel room brings on a feeling of angst; for Morse this manifests itself physically: 'often, when travelling alone, I will walk into a room and feel an overpowering need to defile myself. Nothing says lonely like a brisk six or seven minutes with Candy Store Vixens'.

As liminal, transient spaces, hotels have a great appeal to storytellers. To pick some recent examples, Morse’s accounts are closer to the alienated hinterlands of Anomalisa than the quirkiness of The Grand Budapest Hotel; fortunately, they don’t quite reach the depths of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel. As is often the way, we are told that Morse simply disappeared after writing his final review in March 2014. The reader is left to pick over the clues left in his increasingly confrontational and rambling posts.

Hotels of North America effectively captures the tone of a certain type of online reviewer, whilst also providing enough leeway for character development and narrative progression. Morse isn’t necessarily a narrator you want to spend a lot of time with, but the format is ideal for dipping into; on the downside, some entries feel inessential, and could probably have been trimmed. Whether it actually becomes as ubiquitous as the hotel-room bible is doubtful, but Hotels of North America is an interesting example of an author engaging with digital communication and using the format to drive a narrative, rather than simply as a gimmick.