Paul Theroux: Hotel Honolulu

By TINA SHAW*

At the end of Paul Theroux's novel, the narrator's daughter Rose says that all happy stories are the same, but "every unhappy story is different, unhappy in its own way."

These are the quirky, unhappy and often crazy stories of the lives and loves and deaths of dozens of different characters who cross the threshold of the Hotel Honolulu.

It's not so much a novel as a story collection, linked by the unnamed narrator, a 49-year-old writer who "needed a rest from everything imaginary" and has washed up in Hawaii. He marries Sweetie, the illegitimate daughter of John F. Kennedy, manages the hotel and keeps an eye on this parade of degenerates.

Take long-time hotel resident and gossip columnist Madame Ma. Calculating and insincere, heavily made-up, like "a decaying empress," she presides over her 41-year-old son Chip and his lover, Amo Ferreti.

One day Chip murders Amo. It's called a "gay murder" until the facts are revealed, with the story twisting full circle back to Madame Ma.

Then there's Jasmine the prostitute, who is so hard-nosed that "Men don't pay me for sex, they pay me to go away."

Or the young Filipino, Pinky, who marries 66-year-old boozy Buddy Hamstra, the hotel owner. Buddy himself is a repulsively fascinating character, a sadistic prankster, who weaves his way in and out of the book. At one stage he even fakes his own death to play a joke on his new bride. "He was one of the last of a dying breed, a rascal in the Pacific."



This book, which has loads of sex and death, is one long spoof, full of the unusual Theroux characters you mostly wouldn't want to meet in real life. You can almost hear Theroux chuckling over his keyboard and halfway through I did start to flag.

As the narrator points out, "Being the manager here was like existing within an unpredictable jumble of episodes and characters to which I alone knew the narrative line."

Hamish Hamilton

$34.95

* Tina Shaw is an Auckland writer.