The Lonely Hearts Hotel

   All children are really orphans. At heart, a child has nothing to do with its parents, its background, its last name, its gender, its family trade. It is a brand-new person, and it is born with the only legacy that all individuals inherit when they open their eyes in this world: the inalienable right to be free.

I think that the publishers of The Lonely Hearts Hotel has done it a disservice by marketing it as having “echoes of The Night Circus”, because these two books would have decidedly different target audiences; and while I certainly found the latter to be charming and light, Heather O'Neill's latest is disarming and dark. Filled with child abuse (sexual, physical, and mental) and two main characters who grow up to think of themselves as “perverts” who engage in degrading acts (described in graphic and gritty language), this isn't aimed at people looking for a breezy read. As for me, as a longtime fan of O'Neill and her exuberant, bewitching prose, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the book that finally gets her the Giller Prize.

The story stretches between the two World Wars and begins in a severe orphanage on the outskirts of Montreal. Two of the foundlings – Rose and Pierrot – are able to use their imaginations to surmount their bleak living conditions with music and dance and storytelling that delights their fellow orphans, and until the nuns realise that they can exploit the pair for fund-raising, they keep them apart and punish their efforts. When they become teenagers, the nuns decide to separate the pair for good; sending them out into service and tricking each into believing that the other has disappeared without a word. As the years go by and the days of Montreal's gangsters, cabarets, and opium dens profiting from America's Prohibition laws slides into the bleakness of the Depression era, Rose and Pierrot never forget each other; the reader hoping that they'll reunite not just for love's sake, but for art's as well. As I found the plot to be totally unpredictable, that's all I'm going to say about it.

What primarily separates O'Neill from other authors is her unrelenting use of metaphors and similes – there are delightful turns of phrase to be found on every page, and just when you think it's getting to be too much, she piles on more, and at the point where it goes beyond too much, for me, it feels just right; when everything is something else, you need to pay attention to what really is. Nearly every chapter ends with such a line:

   • On the window ledge was a robin that looked like a fat man who had been shot in the chest by a business partner.

   • A butterfly passed by the window. It had made its wings out of the pressed petals of flowers.

   • The pug, looking like a little old man wearing a bathrobe, stood by unimpressed.

And often, O'Neill stuffs whole paragraphs with these devices:

   • After the seventh toast, Pierrot had finished four tumblers of wine. His lips were dark red, as if he had kissed a Parisian whore. His teeth were purple, as if he had bitten into an animal. He was feeling hot. So he unbuttoned his shirt and flung it onto the floor. He sat there like a mad Roman emperor.

   • The sand resembled brown sugar. The seagulls leaped up and down as if they were at the end of yo-yos. The waves made the sound of someone biting into an apple. When they crashed, they were a hundred thousand chorus girls raising up their dresses at once. And then the water receded again like the train of a jilted bride walking off into the distance.

I recognise that I might be making the writing sound cheesy by sharing these bits out of context, but I was completely delighted in the moment. Further, as in her previous books, O'Neill uses metaphors that place humanity at the center of creation, as in the following (describing watching a clown juggle flaming sticks):

   If you were in the audience, you couldn't help but reflect on all the winking stars immeasurable distances away, which blazed so we'd have something to wish on, and lit up the sky so that we could walk our dogs without bumping into trees.

Perhaps it's just me, but I find that sense of human primacy to be doubly engaging and wondrous. Also as in earlier O'Neill works, even though there are nominally two protagonists, The Lonely Hearts Hotel is truly a story of women (and I am pointedly not using the terms “chick lit” or “feminist fiction”, because it is neither): from the frightened young girls, beaten by their fathers and abandoned by their beaus, who were forced to give their unwanted babies to the orphanage, to the prostitutes, wives, and nuns who rely on the support of men, the reader is led to recognise that, while Rose and Pierrot may have had identical upbringings and launches into the world, it is Rose who has fewer opportunities. 

   Women were still strange and inscrutable creatures. Men didn't understand them. And women didn't understand themselves either. It was always a performance of some sort. Everywhere you went, it was like there was a spotlight down on your head. You were on a stage when you were on the trolley. You were being judged and judged and judged. Every minute of your performance was supposed to be incredible and outstanding and sexy.

   You were often only an ethical question away from being prostitute.

Coming from the homeland of the genre-bending Cirque du Soleil, it's unsurprising that when Rose views and then conceives of various clown acts, these aren't of the carnation-squirting Barnum & Bailey's variety; her clowns are surrealists and existential artists; she makes the case that only clowns can truly reveal the human condition; her audiences weep and gasp and don't know why. And I think that it is around this point that The Lonely Hearts Hotel (and probably all of O'Neill's work) revolves: the metaphors and similes are the greasepaint that delight while masking the deeper truths; we laugh at the clown whose pants fall down because we all go around feeling exposed and ridiculous every damn day of our lives. 

I've read and considered the reviews that complain The Lonely Hearts Hotel is gratuitous in its depiction of child abuse and “shocking for shock's sake”; but art is often shocking, and this book is art. Art is also subjective and I recognise that this book won't be to everyone's tastes. For me, it all works.

When my boss saw me reading this the other day, she asked me if I was enjoying the book - apparently its publisher is calling it "the book of the year". Knowing that she might not like the graphic content herself, I explained that there is child sexual abuse and this business of self-described "perverts" engaging in sordid acts. I said that while I was enjoying it, it would be hard for me to decide to whom I might recommend The Lonely Hearts Hotel. When I said that, I was actually thinking of the maiden-aunt-pearl-clutcher types who always come in to buy the Giller Prize winners, so I was surprised to see on Goodreads that it is mostly young women who seem to be offended, using the "shocking for shock's sake" phrasing. I figure these are the readers who were led to The Lonely Hearts Hotel by the comparison to The Night Circus, and that's why I led with the point that the two books are nothing alike. I do hope this book finds its audience though; it is so much better than most of the bestsellers I read.