Staying in a hotel room on your own can inspire a special kind of self-reflection. This is a space that’s meant to simulate feelings of relaxed domesticity, but it’s more likely to make you feel anonymous. It’s somewhere you can either radically confront yourself or create yourself anew. The nameless female protagonist of “Strange Hotel” seems caught in the impermanence of this liminal space that is “A place built for people living in a time out of time – out of their own time anyway. And if that isn't always the reason why they came, it is often the reason she has.” It’s not so much an escape from her reality as it is an escape from the boundaries of time itself with all her past disappointments and anxiety about the future.
If this sounds like a novel more concerned with ponderous thoughts than plot that’s because it is. The pleasure a reader can find in it will probably depend on how much they are prepared to engage with this amount of ambiguity and intense interiority. I was in the right mood to read this novel so found it a pleasure to follow the teasing twisted path of her inner journey. Exactly who she is and what she’s doing in the many hotel rooms she inhabits around the world is never fully explained although there are oblique hints. Like taking off layers of makeup or complex clothing, it takes time to get to the real person beneath. For instance, after using room service to order a couple bottles of wine she finds “a few drinks bring the further joy of shearing away the female body’s perpetual role as ill-fitting attire.”
Inhabiting these hotel rooms is part of her process of disengaging a degree of self-consciousness which comes from performing as a social being. Early on she becomes aware of how we talk to ourselves as if we’re always being observed or trying to justify our actions: “But, she explains to no one, it’s been a very long day… The perennial problem recurs. If only no one could be banished as easily as bade. It gets wearing, the contortions of the critic in her head to whose scrutiny she must, however, submit.” I enjoy how she points out the exhausting nature of this inner dialogue when you are in fact all alone, but still feel like you must act as if you are not. Part of the pleasure of following such an anonymous protagonist is nodding along to all these astute observations about silly habits which make us human.
There are also some excellent moments of humour. For instance, she uses alliteration to mock the simultaneous ridiculousness and joy of pornography (which can be so easily ordered on TVs in hotel rooms): “Primarily pinkly personnelled pornography. Popularly, perseveringly and – periodically perceivably painfully – protractedly pursuing previously private perspectives of perfectly pumped penii practically pummelling professionally pruned pudenda”. While we’re not given a description of her watching this it’s easy to imagine a figure who is in a slightly drunken fug casually watching such a video to make fun of it while also enjoying it.
Sometimes we’re given indications that things have occurred even if we’re not entirely sure what they are. At one point she touches a cold window and feels “It’s good to know, despite all that’s passed this hour, she has a body still affected by the world.” Yet what exactly has happened in that hour is unclear. Equally she sometimes considers jumping out the hotel window or imagines punching the wall so hard her fist is bruised, but what motivates such drastic potential actions is unknown. In a sense, she doesn’t need to explain it because if this narrative is meant to be some form of pure reflection of her mind such details wouldn’t naturally surface. She already knows herself entirely. And, as a counterpoint to the Ancient Greek aphorism, she states “I knew myself. I always knew myself. Which means that kind of declaration is as impossible to make as denying the inescapable state of knowing myself has invariably made matters worse.”
I found it especially fascinating reading this new novel after Nina Leger’s novel “The Collection” which was published last year. Both these books depict an unnamed woman visiting many hotel rooms and meeting various men, but no specific details their lives are ever divulged. Part of the reason for their ambiguity seems to come out of a frustration about assumptions which are made about people when details of someone’s circumstances or background are given. This is especially true when it comes to how society categorizes women. So, in a sense, withholding such information allows the reader to understand these characters in a more meaningful, unimpeded way than if they were presented with a trolly full of such baggage.
The narrative voice Eimear McBride has established over the course of her three novels is so distinctly her own. It’s a point of view that scoops out great heaps of interior experience and puts it on display so that we can wonder at all its absurdity, contradictions and weirdness. While it appears intensely confessional it’s also opaque because true understanding always feels just out of reach. It’s also a language very much aware of all the trappings and pitfalls of its own design. “Strange Hotel” feels less poetically-charged and more abstract than “A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing” or “The Lesser Bohemians” but it’s also a story that is blissfully unbothered about presenting dramatic peril. Instead, its protagonist is unbound by the specifics of identity to inhabit a freer state of mind.
