The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg 9/3/2018 1:29:53 PM
A review of author Laura van den Berg's latest novel, The Third Hotel. The Third Hotel
by Laura van den Berg
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1st Edition(August 7, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0374168350
ISBN-13: 978-0374168353
Price: $26.00
"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
"Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
"He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
"The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
--"Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden
The sudden loss of a loved one rips a hole in the fabric of our reality. How does one make sense of a universe where living, breathing—thinking—beings can just disappear? And what of time’s arrow? Does it only move in one direction, and is there only one time, one reality? Or do all times and realities exist simultaneously? And finally, how does one react when, upon visiting a strange city for the first time, one encounters that deceased loved one—an encounter that’s wholly impossible, because one had viewed the dead loved one’s remains in the morgue, not more than five weeks ago? That’s the inexplicable premise in Laura van den Berg’s novel, The Third Hotel. First, a caveat: van den Berg’s novel is not a mystery—at least not in the traditional sense; readers expecting a tidy resolution to the central mystery of the novel will be disappointed. While it contains Hitchcockian elements of your standard suspense tale, it is first and foremost a literary novel. At its core, it is an intelligent meditation on grief, loss, and the fallibility of memory. Reminiscent of the film adaptations of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (both the 1972 Tarkovsky film and 2002 Soderbergh remake), van den Berg’s novel explores similar terrain and probes similar questions: how well can we ever know our spouse? How do we reconcile the composite image of that person with the real, corporeal being? Even more so, how does tragedy inform our lives and alter our very DNA? Set in the only recently-accessible Cuba, van den Berg wisely capitalizes on the still-mysterious elements of this island nation to the south, and it helps contribute to the disorienting tone of the book. Some readers expecting Gone, Girl in Cuba will no doubt be put off, not only by the ambiguity of the novel, but also of van den Berg’s writing style, which some early Amazon reviewers categorized as pretentious. Van den Berg employs a close 3rd-person narrative, which keeps its recently-widowed protagonist, Clare, at a distance and might leave some readers cold; however, the psychic distance the author maintains between reader and protagonist is by design. This is a character we are not meant to know well; in fact, it is an impossible feat, for she is a character struggling to know herself. As an elevator sales representative, she is forever in transit—whether traveling from city to city on sales calls, or as a passenger on elevators, herself. Sleeping in strange hotel rooms, she is a woman forever seeking an anchor—be it an unknowable spouse, or a perfectly formed fingernail left behind in a hotel nightstand drawer. Her life is in flux—not only is she grieving a dead spouse, but she must also contend with a father being slowly claimed by the fog of dementia. Childless, she is acutely aware that nothing of her husband carries on after his death except for a mental scrapbook of memories that she obsessively attempts to fit together like a puzzle. Her late husband, Richard, had the uniquely-original career of a professor of film studies with a special focus on horror films. There are frequent callbacks to the conventions of the slasher genre—particularly the concept of the Final Girls. It isn’t difficult to see that Clare likens herself to a Final Girl—the last survivor of her own narrative as her life plays out like a horror film. Van den Berg also explores the psychology of travel, and how when we visit a foreign country, we somehow leave a version of ourselves back in our homeland while this strange, new iteration of our self becomes immersed in an alien culture. In some ways, The Third Hotel is the fictional successor to Joan Didion’s heartbreaking memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which also centered on an intelligent, seemingly-rational widow coming to terms with the death of a husband—and the strange irrational leaps of judgment and belief that loss and mourning permit. Just as Didion refuses to give away her husband’s clothing out of the admittedly irrational belief that he may somehow return and need them, it is at once both unbelievable and believable that Clare would discover a very much alive Richard living in Cuba, ironically as Clare visits for the screening of the very first zombie movie ever filmed in Havana. This hot material might make for a mess of a narrative in the hands of a lesser novelist, but van den Berg expertly navigates this strange land wrought with emotional landmines and does so without risking story or plot. While this is a novel to be most enjoyed by the MFA crowd, there is a lot for readers of genre and mainstream fiction to also appreciate, but they need to approach the book with the knowledge that any satisfying conclusion to the mystery will have to be supplied by the reader. Part travelogue, part supernatural suspense thriller, and part existential inquiry, The Third Hotel is a brilliant puzzler that will haunt the reader for days—long after the finer details of the story are lost to the fog of memory.
