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Summary
Summary
Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time, A Small Hotel chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hays, who have decided to separate after twenty-four years of marriage. The book begins on the day that the Hays are to finalize their divorce. Kelly is due to be in court, but instead she drives from her home in Pensacola, Florida, across the panhandle to New Orleans and checks into Room 303 at the Olivier House in the city's French Quarter--the hotel where she and Michael fell in love some twenty-five years earlier and where she now finds herself about to make a decision that will forever affect her, Michael, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Samantha. An intelligent, deeply moving, and remarkably written portrait of a relationship that reads as a cross between a romance novel and a literary page turner, A Small Hotel is a masterful story that will remind readers once again why Robert Olen Butler has been called the "best living American writer" (Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram).
Author Notes
Robert Olen Butler is a novelist, screenwriter, educator, and short-story writer who grew up in Granite City, Illinois.
Butler served in Vietnam. Following the Vietnam War, Butler began writing. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and The Saturday Review, as well as in four annual editions of the Best American Short Stories and six annual editions of New Stories of the South. A collection of his stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler's novels include The Alleys of Eden, Countrymen of Bones, and Sun Dogs. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Butler also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches creative writing at McNeese State University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This slight conventional drama from Pulitzer-winner Butler (Hell) tells the story of a failed marriage through flashbacks on the day the couple is to be divorced. Reserved tough-guy Michael Hays is hoping to bed his much younger girlfriend while his soon-to-be-ex, Kelly, skips out on filing the divorce papers to ponder suicide in the same hotel room where they fell in love 20 years ago. Flashbacks tossed in under negligible pretexts give Michael and Kelly ample opportunity to ponder their history for the reader's edification, showing Michael to be a boorish void and Kelly a needy woman desperate for one romantic declaration. With few surprises and facile psychology (daddy issues abound), this insubstantial tale is at least easily digestible. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* After the roaring satire of his last novel, Hell (2009), protean Butler returns to the interior intensity of his short story collections, Severance (2006) and Intercourse (2008), in a sleek, erotic, and suspenseful drama about men who cannot say the word love and the women they harm. Kelly, glamorous at 49, checks into a room she knows intimately at the Olivier House, a discreet, classy hotel in New Orleans and a place of great significance in her long marriage to reticent attorney Michael. He is staying at a restored plantation to attend the Antebellum Fashion Festival with a woman half his age. Kelly was supposed to finalize their divorce that very day, but she has not. Now both of them are assailed with nearly overwhelming memories of their life together, beginning with their initial meeting, when Michael rescued Kelly from drunken louts at Mardi Gras, and including recollections of their taciturn fathers, who let their families suffer in silence. As Kelly and Michael's divergent perspectives play in trenchant counterpoint, tension escalates as she considers suicide and he tries to convince himself that he's doing the right thing. Butler executes a plot twist of profound proportions in this gorgeously controlled, unnerving, and beautifully revealing tale of the consequences of emotional withholding.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TOWARD the end of "A Small Hotel," Robert Olen Butler's feverish new novel, a Florida lawyer named Michael Hays tries to convince himself that his prospective lover, Laune, blond and 26 years his junior, is something other than the "ditz" she proclaims herself to be. "She's a perfect client," he thinks. "Surprisingly smart and self-aware and honestly self-critical" Michael could easily be describing any of the characters who populate Butler's vast and diverse body of fiction - a dozen novels and some halfdozen story collections, some more successful than others - from the Vietnamese immigrants in "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain," which won the Pulitzer in 1993, to the panoply of the famous damned in his 2009 novel "Hell." Despite the humor threaded through his works, Butler's characters are indisputably tragic, in that their abundant knowledge of their own needs and flaws traps rather than frees them. This is, of course, the tragedy of "Hamlet," remade by Butler in a distinctly postFreudian style that reaches its apogee in "A Small Hotel," a slim and wise, and painfully realistic, study of a contemporary marriage. The novel takes place over the course of an unseasonably warm day in November 2009, the day on which Michael and his wife of two decades, Kelly, were to finalize their divorce. Instead of signing the papers, Kelly drives to New Orleans and checks into the Olivier House hotel - where she and Michael fell in love, "their place," "thick with the ghosts" of their former selves - carrying just one small bag, which contains uttie more than two bottles: Macallan and Percocet Meanwhile, Michael, too, crosses the state line, with Laune, who has persuaded him to don a swallowtail coat for an "antebellum fashion festival" on a sugarcane plantation. Kelly, we assume, has been traded in for a younger model. But as in many of Butler's tales all is not as it seems. Very little happens in the novel's present. Kelly counts pills and takes a walk, while Michael tries to give himself fully to Laune, whose every movement sparks a memory of Kelly, who is herself endlessly sifting through memories: the night she and Michael met; his courtroom proposal; their wedding. More than anything else, Kelly's mind turns to moments in which her husband's emotional reticence - he has never once uttered the words "I love you" to her or their daughter - eroded her confidence. Rather than indicting Michael, Kelly struggles, in a manner that will be familiar to anyone married for more than a year or two, to understand why she needs things Michael "can't readily give," why she can't simply trust that he loves her. Despite Butler's skillful plotting and absorbing characters, "A Small Hotel" is ultimately a novel of ideas, an interrogation of the limitations and uses of language. "Love means never having to say I love you" Michael tells Laurie, in one of the novel's most agonizing scenes. "Are you . . . kidding me?" she responds. Why is it so important to Kelly that Michael utter those three small words to her? Perhaps because - as Butler demonstrates in the novel's moving climax - when uttered truthfully, they don't just express but enact the roiling and conflicting emotions that lie beneath them, the difficult and inexplicable feelings that form the foundation of a marriage, a family; that allow us to imagine, for a moment, that we are anything but, as Michael thinks of Kelly, "a terrible, everlasting mystery" to each other. Joanna Smith Rakoff is the author of the novel "A Fortunate Age."
Kirkus Review
A painful marital breakup stimulates a flow of harsh memories leading toward a decisive climactic choice, in NBA-winner Butler's emotionally charged, uneven novel (Hell, 2009, etc.).Though its title alludes to a Broadway show tune about the joys of honeymooning, the subject is the impending divorce of Kelly and Michael Hays, left unaccomplished when she fails to show up in a Louisiana courthouse to sign final papers. Thereafter, we observe the pair in present circumstances and both shared and separate memories, as Michael second-guesses his own rapidly escalating affair with a beautiful younger woman (Laurie) and Kelly reconsiders experiences that have eroded her enchantment with Michael's confident masculinity and gracefully borne sense of honor and responsibility (as it happens, he's an attorney). The book waxes and wanes frustratingly, whether in the memory of a drunken Mardi Gras episode (from which he rescued her); Michael's "clever" marriage proposal (a ludicrously mishandled scene); Michael's borderline-bathetic recall of having disappointed his tyrannical, macho dad; and Kelly's far more plaintive memories of inevitable alienation from her withdrawn, unresponsive father. Fleeting echoes of William Styron's famous first novel Lie Down in Darknessappear, notably in later scenes that document Kelly's virtually passive swoon into despairing guilt (over a foolish, pointless misadventure with a married man). On balance, this is a fairly short book that feels like a rather longer one, perhaps because we learn much less than we feel we need to know about its principal characters' inner lives (despite considerable soul-searching). And minor characters like Michael's new lover Laurie (basically a charmless fantasy figure) and the Hays' adult daughter Sam barely register on the page.As the eponymous show tune (from: "Pal Joey") coyly asks, "Not a sign of people. Who wants people?" One answer: Novels do.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
No stranger to the published word, Pulitzer Prize winner Butler (Hell) here presents a page-turner set in modern-day New -Orleans, deftly using the city as a backdrop to a crumbling marriage. The narrative takes place mostly in the titular hotel, where Kelly Hayes has fled on the day of her divorce, and in flashbacks to happier (and not so happy) times for Kelly and husband Michael. After 20 years of marriage, Michael appears to have moved on with a much younger woman, while Kelly remains adrift in a sea of despair. But everything around Michael reminds him of his soon-to-be ex-wife. Caught between these two is their 19-year-old daughter. So Kelly sits in the same hotel where she and Michael first fell in love, trying to understand all that has happened to her and make a decision that will affect them all. VERDICT A quick and easy read, this book should appeal to fans of literary novels as well as romance aficionados; it will see much use in most public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, 1/3/11.]-Leann Restaino, Girard, OH (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
