This is Mr. Moody's best novel in many years. It's a little book, a bagatelle, but it's a little book of irony and wit and heartbreak. It is insightful on topics like the joy of stockpiling hotel hair-care products while also asking the big questions, such as, "Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a fetal ball?…At its heart, Hotels of North America is a close examination of the middle-aged American male in sexual, emotional and financial free fall.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
09/14/2015 Moody’s (The Four Fingers of Death) clever latest explores the narrative possibilities of online reviews, that form of democratic criticism crucial to the success of everything from toaster ovens to literature itself. The novel consists primarily of an idiosyncratic collection of hotel reviews written by Reginald Edward Morse, a sporadically employed motivational speaker leading a life of “nomadic compulsion.” A hotel site’s top reviewer, whose real-life identity is a mystery, Morse mixes in autobiographical accounts of his own professional, familial, and romantic failures amid disquisitions on the “diversity of key and lock design” and hotel pornography (“at the heart of travel in America”). The online reviews look back over a period of roughly 40 years, from Morse’s childhood stay at the Plaza Hotel in 1971 to a visit to a bedbug-infested Bronx motel in 2014. In his delightful archness and strategic reticence, Morse is reminiscent of the epicurean narrator of John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure. However, the wryly perceptive passages about the hospitality industry, which include a hatchet job on bed-and-breakfast inns, occasionally give way to slightly mawkish outpourings. And the afterword, in which Moody inserts himself into the text to track down the “fragmentary” Morse, could’ve been removed. Still, this is an amusing, vibrant narrative. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Nov.)
Praise for The Four Fingers of Death:
"Moody's powers of invention, his ease in his own prose, his ability to develop interesting characters-in short, his enormous gifts as a writer-are on full display here."—Clancy Martin, New York Times Book Review
"[Moody's] energy and sheer inventiveness make The Four Fingers of Death an original and exhilarating read."—Jane Ciabattari, NPR.com
"Comic, grim, tender and masterful....Highlight[s] Moody's gift for being as thoughtful as he is entertaining."—Bloomberg
"The book is entertaining and often poignant, probing the limits of technology, consciousness, and language in the face of grief."—The New Yorker
"[A] comic tour de force...Moody is at his most daring and arresting."—Bookforum
"Moody's powers of invention, his ease in his own prose, his ability to develop interesting characters--in short, his enormous gifts as a writer--are on full display here. And when he wants to write a gorgeous paragraph, he delivers as you know he can, even when he's still spoofing."—The New York Times Book Review
Praise for Right Livelihoods :
"Marvelous....at once deadpan and antic.... 'The Albertine Notes' is one of the best stories to appear in the new millennium; it underscores that Rick Moody is one of our best writers."—Washington Post Book World
"Moody's chilly, lacerating prose is a seduction."—Los Angeles Times
"His subtlest and most darkly comical performance yet."—Chicago Tribune
11/15/2015 Divorced father, motivational speaker, and once-prolific contributor of hotel reviews to rateyourlodging.com, Reginald Edward Morse has vanished from the online scene, sending an author named Moody on a quest to find him, or at least to understand him. Morse's several dozen hotel reviews, ostensibly compiled for a Moody-edited volume in a travel guide series, include his 1971 impressions of a childhood New Year's Eve spent at New York City's Plaza Hotel with his mother and her "entrepreneur" boyfriend and various domestic and European stays with his first wife and then his lover, known only as "K." His musings on key cards, complimentary toiletries, hotel pornography, and the overabundance of throw pillows and potpourri in American B&Bs are interspersed with the details of his failures as a father and his dwindling speaking career. In the end, a darkly comic (and remarkably comprehensive) vision of a man and of the American traveler's world emerge in this fun and edgy novel. VERDICT Fans of award-winning novelist and essayist Moody (The Ice Storm; Garden State) will not be disappointed. Those new to his work may find this a particularly accessible first choice.—Jennifer B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast
2015-08-18 A motivational speaker, who's often on the road dispensing wisdom though he has problems of his own, turns to reviewing hotels online—and Moody tells his story primarily through his reviews. Thanks for the synopsis, Captain Obvious. The conceit runs deeper, for Moody's (The Four Fingers of Death, 2010, etc.) Reginald Edward Morse—his trinomial perhaps an indication of Brahmanic tendencies and amplitude of ego—has a seeming need to criticize, sometimes fussily but usually rightly, and moreover to let the world know of it. The M&M cookies are a little stale? Send a dispatch, and then reflect and perhaps grouse: "when I am stressing, in a lecture on motivational speaking, how certain words can do a lot for you, fresh is often a word I often rely on." Reginald has a few characteristics in common with Anne Tyler's Macon Leary, though in The Accidental Tourist, Tyler takes a somewhat more forgiving view of us foible-philic humans. As Reginald moves from hotel to hotel and continent to continent (for, as we learn, he's not confined to North America), we discover, detail by carefully rationed detail, more about his life: he has control issues, he has a checkered family history and a troubled daughter, he often travels with a companion, he has a thing for grits ("and I do not mean cheese grits"). All pretty ordinary, really, the failings and the accomplishments, but Moody offers both a subtle psychological portrait and even the hint of a mystery—"what I would call the mystery of Reginald Morse," he writes with game-is-afoot breathlessness in an afterword. It's a slyly delightful turn, considering all we've learned about Reginald and his views, whether on hotel pornography or the three chief shortcomings of B&Bs: "throw pillows, potpourri, and breakfast conversation." To say nothing of gazebos. Lively and lightly written. Not the strongest of Moody's books but of a piece with them, offering a sardonic but entertaining look at modern American life.
Narrator Jefferson Mays taps into the darkly disappointing life of Rick Moody's protagonist, Reginald Edward Morse, a man whose hobby is rating hotels online. Mays's drab tone heightens the irony of Morse's job as a motivational speaker. It also spotlights the depressed state of the character, who initially takes to the Internet to share his hotel experiences but ultimately winds up telling his life story. The intensity Mays infuses into Morse when he addresses his critics augments Moody's sardonic portrayal of the online rating phenomenon, making it darkly humorous. Mays's performance of this offbeat novel is well crafted and entertaining, but it's best not to listen to this audiobook en route to a hotel if one has anxiety about bedbugs. J.F. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
DECEMBER 2015 - AudioFile
Narrator Jefferson Mays taps into the darkly disappointing life of Rick Moody's protagonist, Reginald Edward Morse, a man whose hobby is rating hotels online. Mays's drab tone heightens the irony of Morse's job as a motivational speaker. It also spotlights the depressed state of the character, who initially takes to the Internet to share his hotel experiences but ultimately winds up telling his life story. The intensity Mays infuses into Morse when he addresses his critics augments Moody's sardonic portrayal of the online rating phenomenon, making it darkly humorous. Mays's performance of this offbeat novel is well crafted and entertaining, but it's best not to listen to this audiobook en route to a hotel if one has anxiety about bedbugs. J.F. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
DECEMBER 2015 - AudioFile