Hotels of North America by Rick Moody – tthe confessions of an itinerant hotel-reviewer

The author of The Ice Storm is back on form with this comic take on the impermanence of modern life

^‘We are reverting,” wrote EM Forster in 1910, to a “civilisation of luggage”, in which people accrete material possessions “without taking root in the earth”. Reginald Edward Morse, the hotel-hopping hero of Rick Moody’s sixth novel, doesn’t seem to have much luggage, but his life as an itinerant online reviewer of guesthouses, motels, inns and B&Bs nevertheless encapsulates this vision of a deracinated modernity in which stability and permanence are rare experiences for the peripatetic denizens of late capitalism.

The novel mostly comprises reviews of “hotels hilarious, anonymous, modest, opulent, strange”, collected into a volume to be left on bedside tables for the perusal of fellow travellers, “right alongside the scripture”. The pace is breathless as Morse jumps around in time and space, roaming cities and continents to recall holidays with “the woman who became my ex‑wife”, work trips, liaisons with lovers and lonely nights staring into the abyss. What emerges from the chaos is a vivid impression of modern life: Morse has plenty of emotional baggage, and by way of sprightly anecdote and frank confession, these reviews become essays in self-revelation.

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