No. That won't fit. That's what I believed before imagining this situation I'm in. But tonight I am in a strange hotel and, therefore, an ulterior me. Yes, that surely makes sense. Unless, of course, in reality it doesn't. After all, it may be the case that the act of leaving him would not have left me changed. Perhaps, by my choosing to imagine coming to this place, I am merely absenting myself from what I don't know how to hear?
I loved Eimear McBride's two previous novels (A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians), and for the most part, I loved them because of their charged and creative use of language and their gut-punch of emotional connection; the love was visceral, organ-deep. With Strange Hotel, the writing is still unconventional but this time is more formal; cryptic and cerebral. In contrast to the young women in her first two novels, the main character in McBride's latest is met in middle age (the author has even acknowledged that this unnamed woman could be considered one of her earlier characters, grown), and whether the more formalistic atmosphere is meant to reflect the lifestage of the character or the author's own maturation, the effect was distancing. Turns out, I read with my viscera and I want them to get punched. To be clear: Strange Hotel is still well-crafted – intelligent and purposeful – and the three stars I've awarded it reflects this book's ranking against McBride's previous novels. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Sometimes she forgets all the places she's been until someone asks and she'll remember then. Then remember that what she's been regarding as bedrock has, in fact, acquired sediment. No, she hasn't been there once but now she has. The time for not knowing about it has passed, and often considerably, on. She likes to think this happens only about countries, allowing her to enjoy recalling that she has indeed travelled and is no longer the girl who's never been anywhere. When this happens, it's a real, and valuable, pleasure but is also not the only occasion it happens to her. She keeps so little of her past bonded close that she frequently has cause for surprise. Here lies a whole slab of your life you've completely left out in the cold. Not on purpose, out of cowardice or shame. Not, in fact, for any good reason she can name. Except there was youth and then there was later but only youth got to dig its claws in.
When we first meet the main character, she is thirty-five and checking in to a hotel in Avignon (with the ironic opening line being, “She has no interest whatsoever in France”). The narrative will eventually jump ahead five or so years at a time – and we will revisit this woman in hotel rooms in Oslo, Auckland, and Austin – and while we'll never learn what causes her to be constantly on the move (something like a hundred cities are eventually named), the settings aren't really that important when we only see these cities framed through hotel windows. What is important is that hotel rooms make this woman introspective – remembering and trying to forget events in her past, and while she's skilled enough at suppressing her memories to make the whole thing totally opaque to the reader, she will also use room-service wine and casual hookups to blot out that past. McBride makes the reader really work to find a storyline in Strange Hotel, but despite my complaint that I didn't emotionally connect with the character or the plot, there is some relief in late hints that she eventually makes peace with her personal ghosts.
The intractable belligerence of this – her memory – is what she's come to hate. How it seems to insist on a future her past has already generated. No corrections. No deviations. Or, more concisely put: a coherent path for a conciliated self – for which she lacks sufficient new evidence to justify a change. She would have once – changed – practically on a whim. But that was before her hard-won victories over the excellent carnage of being young. Nowadays it's just being again, and always again, as you always were. In bleaker moments she wonders whether her very last choice has already been made? And, whatever her disillusion with this, she cannot deny there was a stage when that was exactly how she'd wanted it. Now seems to be the time she has finally grown tired of it: this entombment in more practical, replicable versions of herself, erected on the notion that her past is a secret. And it isn't a secret. It just became the easiest version to be.
I have quoted at length to give some sense of what this book is like – as I don't have the words to describe what I found to be so maddeningly distancing in the writing – and while it is certainly a puzzle to work over, there's satisfaction in that, too. Eimear McBride is no paint-by-numbers artist, and while I wanted more of the same of what I thought I could expect from her, I can't be upset that she flexed her talents in a different direction. I will happily read whatever she comes up with next.
