![]() Laura van den Berg is an artist of the uncanny. Instead, read it as the inscrutable future cult classic it probably is, and let yourself be carried along by its twisting, unsettling currents. Don’t take the bait when The Third Hotel starts voguing like a thriller. It is in its weirdest passages that a reader is most likely to accept, even embrace, these instances of arch self-consciousness at these times the book is thrilling. The Third Hotel is at its best when it makes no claim to psychological realism. Van den Berg’s previous work, her short stories in particular, are prized for their thoughtfulness and descriptive intensity, and this book seems to me a refinement and intensification of those skills. What we get instead of narrative momentum is a richness of theme and an abundance of detail. Scenes begin with clear goals in mind, then are sidetracked questions, pointedly asked, go unanswered. ![]() ![]() If Clare is obsessed with negation and absence, The Third Hotel is eager to abet her: The book enthusiastically (and, I presume, deliberately) derails itself again and again. ![]()
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![]() ![]() They lived in Dickens, a “ghetto community” on the outskirts of Los Angeles. In Chapter One, the narrator explains that his father was a social scientist and the founder of something he called Liberation Psychology. After inhaling, he exclaims: “Equal justice under the law!” The court session begins. Now, sitting in the Supreme Court, he smokes marijuana from a pipe, reasoning that the crime he has been charged with is so extreme that he will not be prosecuted for anything as minor as pot smoking. He spent the previous day walking around Washington, DC. ![]() Nonetheless, he now finds himself handcuffed inside the Supreme Court after receiving a letter informing him that his case was selected to be heard. In the prologue, the narrator admits that, though this may be surprising to hear from a black man, he has never committed a crime. ![]() ![]() Problem is, Joliet wasn’t the western terminus of Thomas Jefferson’s National Road, which actually went to Vandalia, which was the Illinois state capital at the time and is more than 200 miles south of Joliet. The reviewer noted that while Zoellner is an editor and author, he’s also “an old-fashioned American vagabond,” so I was expecting something of a contemporary tome along the lines of William Least Heat Moon’s wonderful Blue Highways, Dayton Duncan’s Out West, or perhaps even John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.Īnd what really hooked me was the reviewer’s note that the book takes its title from The National Road, the nation’s first federal roadway that went from Cumberland, Maryland to, the reviewer said, Joliet, Illinois, which just happens to be my hometown. ![]() ![]() The NYT reviewer noted some great American travelogues, but also that in the 21st century, and especially in this year of Covid-19, Americans seem to have lost their urge to roam. ![]() ![]() ![]() There is though, a mystery around the town and the hotel. This is about a young Lost Property Officer working in a hotel. Harrod’s had a very efficient and very busy system when I worked there… Generally the items that I took down to the Lost Property Department were things like glasses, gloves, hats, purses and once a wallet that was bursting at the seams (it couldn’t close), with £50 notes, all on their edge, forcing the opening so that it bulged apart by about three inches… I never knew of a person, though to be left, or for that matter to be found in such a place… I have a transparent box in which I keep lost property for a month – mostly odd toys and the odd glove. which reputedly has some very strange things in it. Lots of things get lost – there’s a big Lost Property Office run by T.F.L. I have only just started this – it arrived at work today and I nicked one to read whilst having my lunch – it is wonderful. Why I never received a proof of this, I don’t know – I thought I was on everyone’s list for pre-publication Children’s books. ![]() ![]() Archie is smart and would forge different paths: one that was cut short by an early demise, one as a sexually confused young man attempting to find his way, another as a boy having his baseball dreams cut short by a horrific accident, and the last as a boy whose adolescence is influenced by an early trauma. Archie’s life would be colored by his imagination, which he used to make up a sibling, and by his grandmother teaching him to read and write. Stanley and Rose married, but multiple miscarriages proved frustrating until the birth of Archie. His father Stanley struggled and worked his way up, while his mother Rose had an easier road. ![]() ![]() His grandfather, Ichabod, came to the United States with an idea for a name, but in his garbled utterance, left his name up to Ellis Island officials. ![]() Archibald “Archie” Ferguson was born in 1947. ![]() |