The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 27 March 2014
by Paul Theroux
Hawai'i is a unique place in the United States. Many tourists travel there and feel like they've left this country. It is far away, across a vast ocean, the most remote large populated spot in the world. The state is one of the most diverse cultural crossroads in America, and its native population still recalls the underhanded way in which the United States went about annexing their land. There is a feral, untamed quality to the culture, rural on the one hand, urban and wealthy on the other. It is a beautiful island paradise, and a gritty rural outpost.
Paul Theroux is best known for his travel writing. But, here he turns to fiction to tell his story of Hawaii (he kept a residence there). There is a quirky autobiographical quality to the story of a writer who gives up writing to hunker down as the manager of a second-tier hotel in Waikiki. The book sports eighty short chapters, most of which tell the story of one or another of the weird characters that come and go at the hotel. There is the owner, Buddy Hamstra, a larger-than-life figure who spreads his dissipated personality through the book. The unnamed narrator marries Sweetie, a woman who may be a lost love child of JFK, so he names their child Rose. There's the suicidal owner of a neighboring hotel. There are the enigmatic Hawaiians on the staff of the hotel. There are desperate young women trying to leave poverty in the Philippines. And there are famous people who make cameos, most notably musician Brother Iz Kamakawiwo'ole. But this is a sprawling tale of people who have gone through their own individual trials to wash ashore in Honolulu. Almost all of the tales have themes of desperation and many of those are of desperation born of sexual desire or violence. Theroux here seems particularly interested in women who have been through a kind of sexual odyssey before coming to rest in a marriage in the islands. The men have a blind desire for the exotic women of the Pacific. There is little genuine gentleness in any of their lives. The extremity of these experiences makes the book often troubling to read. The stories are often brutal and tragic. There is a lot of dissipation and death. It is a deeply darkened side of life in Honolulu that Theroux brings to these pages, and, yet, it sustains a troubled veracity. People come from all over to find their dreams, their personal paradises, and some sort of refuge. Life is rarely fair to these folks. In the end, this reader, despite having his own experience in the islands, felt run through a bit of a wringer. And yet, in a couple of his later chapters, Theroux gracefully and vividly describes the experience of being a cultural outsider in Hawaii. He puts his most honest and brutal words in the mouth of ever-present Buddy Hamstra. And he reflects on his own despair of fitting in to this alien land, even after years of living there. The book is sprawling and dark, and yet it has its rewards. It is an entirely believable corner of Waikiki, a flip-side view of those beautiful beaches and swaying palm trees.
Also by Theroux: [The Great Railway Bazaar]