Hotels of North America
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed Rick Moody, a darkly comic portrait of a man who comes to life in the most unexpected of ways: through his online reviews.
Reginald Edward Morse is one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels around the globe -- they tell his life story. The puzzle of Reginald's life comes together through reviews that comment upon his motivational speaking career, the dissolution of his marriage, the separation from his beloved daughter, and his devotion to an amour known only as "K."
But when Reginald disappears, we are left with the fragments of a life -- or at least the life he has carefully constructed -- which writer Rick Moody must make sense of. An inventive blurring of the lines between the real and the fabricated, Hotels of North America demonstrates Moody's masterly ability to push the bounds of the novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Moody's Best So Far
I loved Four Fingers of Death - every page was worhtwhile and delivered that Moody conection of amazing prose and gut wrenching emotion. Hotels is the same, but different. Where Fingers went on in luscious landscaps of pages (many many pages) Hotels is like the cross country trips it emulates, one short stop, then another, then another, but the Moody effect is still there and still so powerful.