Hotel /

I RECENTLY ENCOUNTERED a new nonfiction term: "the constructed I." A quick consideration of any classic nonfiction text - one by Joan Didion, say - yields that the "I" in essays, journalism and memoirs is usually a partial invention. A nonfiction writer artfully sculptures an "I" narrator, similar to the way fiction writers sculpture their narrators. But what happens when a narrator is too constructed? When does artfulness ossify into artifice? Read together, Joanna Walsh's "Hotel," which her publisher describes as "part memoir and part meditation," and her new collection of short stories, "Vertigo," provide unexpected counterpoints to each other regarding issues of artistry, authenticity and vulnerability. They also raise additional questions about the newly popular - especially in nonfiction - fragmentary style. When does the reader feel enabled to fill in the blanks? When does the reader feel vaguely ashamed for wanting more guidance? Walsh, who is based in England, is an illustrator, writer, editor and founder of the Twitter hashtag #readwomen2014, established to promote female authors. "Hotel" discloses that Walsh worked as a hotel reviewer while going through a divorce. "Hotel," however, is not in the business of delivering a conventional autobiographical narrative. Instead Walsh approaches her material in a manner that is fragmented, citational and formally varied, thereby assuming, superficially at least, the innovative style of writers like Maggie Nelson and Wayne Koestenbaum. Some chapters begin with deadpan and whimsical dramatis personae (Wilde as a playwright; Groucho Marx as an entrepreneur). Others, such as "Marriage Postcards," are structured as a series of written communiqués ("This postcard shows the hotel dining room: No one is eating in there"). Quotations appear, from Foucault, Heidegger and Mae West, as do summaries of Freud's Dora case and an etymological explanation of unheimlich. Part 1, "Hotel Haunting," is an essay about hotels from Walsh's particular vantage point as a hotel reviewer and disconsolate, soon-to-be divorcée. My description possibly makes "Hotel" seem, on the surface at least, voracious and playful. At its heart, however, it is neither. Walsh's "constructed I" is corseted, pretentious and opaque. Rather than probe or illuminate, this narrator delivers riddlelike observations about, for example, a hotel bar. "A place to see and be seen, which is difficult," she says. "It is almost impossible to do something, and, at the same time, see yourself doing it." Midway through "Hotel," Walsh's formally restless approach begins to seem less an inventive way to convey her story (and her mind) and more a fashionable evasion tactic - one that is intimidating and disorienting, so that common desires for sense, order or the accrual of meaning are deemed moot, even foolish. I often felt like a guest at a luxurious but inscrutably defiant resort; when I complained to the concierge that my room was missing its bed, the concierge replied, "Instead of a bed, our customers prefer a strobe light." A strobe light is nice, but a bed is sometimes necessary, especially in a book about hotels and the emotional trauma of a broken marriage and a lost home. Freud would no doubt find it telling that Walsh, in a chapter called "Hotel Diary," deconstructs the lobby and the library and the switchboard and the restaurant and even the bedroom, but she has very little to say about the bed. "Hotel" has no platform for intimacy. The sadness driving Walsh's meditations fails to penetrate; the meditations themselves lack suppleness, curiosity and nerve. Walsh quickly abandons her cannier lines, thus turning a potentially fruitful and philosophical starting point into a dead-end aphorism: "In a hotel, everything must be just so." This is also true of "Hotel." The erudition and formal diversity on display prove, in the final accounting, to be "just so" : inert building blocks yet to be activated by a sweeping artistic vision. The stories in "Vertigo," by contrast, fixate directly on bad marriages and cheating husbands and the sexual threat of other women. Walsh's fictional narrators are, like her nonfictional one, armored and affected, but her stories reveal a psychological landscape lightly spooked by loneliness, jealousy and alienation. Walsh likes negative space and wordplay and repetition. Lydia Davis's methods come to mind, but Davis's narrators use logic as a means to hazard emotional connection; Walsh uses logic in a more expected manner, to keep emotion at bay. Of her mother, one character says what might be said of these stories as well: "She looks formal, arranged, neat. She cannot shake it." WALSH CAN OCCASIONALLY deliver frankness - "If I'd had any courage I'd have been a fat woman for longer" - but as with "Hotel," there's a prevailing and often infuriating caginess to many of the stories. They do not cut downward or inward; instead they move laterally until the energy simply dissipates. Her sentences are like a series of rocks expertly skipped across a body of water that maintains its surface tension, refusing to allow objects to sink in. Only the collection's last story - "Drowning" - threatens Walsh's emotional laws. Here eddying logic and wordplay yield to the despair of a woman on a beach, watching her estranged husband caring for their children. Pretensions are dropped; in their place is the resigned desolation of a narrator considering suicide: "I go back into the sea because there is nothing else to do. Or, there is, but I do not do it." In "Hotel," Walsh tells of keeping a box of treasured possessions under her bed in case of a fire, but "because I was always ready for escape, the fire in my house never happened." The final story in "Vertigo" suggests that Walsh might be ready to not be ready. She might be willing, in her next book, to let the fire happen. HEIDI JULAVITS is the author, most recently, of "The Folded Clock."

Walsh's (Vertigo) tangled, evocative book, the latest in Bloombury's Object Lessons series, juxtaposes her present time writing hotel reviews against her former time in a collapsing marriage. "Home," as representative of her earlier marriage, is described as a cuckoo clock where "one is in when the other is out." In contrast, her current, roving time in hotels defines these places as being without time ("Endings do not arrive in hotels") or consequence ("Everyone goes on and on repeating just what they did before"). Walsh's "hotel" is depicted as an emotional waypoint between the unhappiness of her marriage and a future that's not clear yet. Much of the book is spent breaking down films and literature, including Grand Hotel and the Marx Brothers' Room Service, as well as Katherine Mansfield's In a German Pension and Freud's relationship with his patient Dora. Behind Walsh's penetrating, nearly clinical analysis, the reader senses a nervous, searching need to understand where she's been and where she's ended up. Walsh is less interested in the anecdotal (readers get little more than snatches of hotel and marriage description) and more interested in the representational (etymology of the word "dwell"; what does Grand Hotel's denouement mean, really?). Occasionally she gets ahead of her readers and goes too far into the weeds, but sometimes the writing and feeling behind it perfectly align-a fragment about looking through her husband's pockets is particularly memorable ("Whatever I found there, it never told me anything about you"). Walsh's strange, probing book is all the more affecting for eschewing easy resolution. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.