Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride
As someone who has spent solitary nights in hotels, thrilled to be on my own and away from responsibility yet at the same time guilty for leaving my family, I was immediately drawn in by the book jacket description of Eimear McBride’s new novel, Strange Hotel.
A nameless woman enters a hotel room. She’s been here once before. In the years since, the room hasn’t changed, but she has. Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms. From Avignon to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each is as anonymous as the last but bound by the rules of her choosing.
The book opens with a list of world cities, about three-quarters of them marked with a mysterious “x,” its meaning left to our imagination.
McBride writes of the cobbled streets in Prague and the remoteness of Auckland, but most of the time, we’re immersed in the narrator’s inner contemplations as she passes time in one indistinguishable hotel room or another. This conspicuous lack of place emphasizes the power of anonymity, how it’s only when we’re stripped of our place in the world, with all responsibilities and expectations temporarily lifted, that we can truly ask “who am I? What do I want?”Eventually, it becomes clear that “x” signifies the narrator’s trysts with anonymous men she meets on the road. She rejects their pleas for more: an emotional connection or a longer term relationship. She seems to fear that by allowing them in, she would lose too much of herself. Nonetheless, for much of the book, she caters to these men’s needs and cares more about how they see her than she’d like to.
As I read Strange Hotel, I sensed there was more at play than just a lust for no-strings-attached sex. I sensed the unnamed narrator was running from something dreadful that happened in the Avignon hotel room years earlier. Something that had to do with the unavoidable memories of “him” that haunt the book. In the era of #MeToo, I worried for her.
What woman hasn’t found herself alone in a room with a man and realized—sometimes too late—that she’d put herself in danger?
Over the course of the book, she works to put her happiness first, even though, like most women, she had been accustomed to thinking about others before herself.
She’s favoured the painless elegance of leaving all those rooms, all those men. And if, in reality, it wasn’t all particularly elegant—especially earlier on—she had at least ensured she invariably left alone. It hadn’t come naturally either, not double-checking their pleasure was pleased. And accustomed to the opposite as she had been, the perfect grade of disconnection had taken some time for her to correctly calibrate. She had mastered it though and settled in.
Finally, by the time she lands in Auckland at forty-nine,, she no longer worries about the things that plagued her in her twenties and thirties, back when she continue to stay in a hotel room with a man for his sake, even when she was ready to leave, back when she would be ashamed if the neighbors heard her porn channel through the walls.
Forty-nine is as good as any place she could realistically be. Still too young for the truly great installations of regret. Too old for the game of being boored into silence. And if what-might-have-been does occasionally catch her out, well, no one gets everything. The net result is, those type of years have never been a cause of anxiety for her. By ‘her age’ she means simply her time, her era.
Although the book is short—under 150 pages—it is dense with musings about women’s relationships with themselves and others, relationships that have been conditioned throughout time to be neglectful to the former while nurturing to the former. Many of us will relate all too well.
Ultimately, we learn that the narrator’s demons are not nearly as sinister as I feared, and we see her grow in self-sufficiency, confidence, and agency.
By the conclusion of the story, I found something truly unexpected—hope.
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