The Swank Hotel
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A stunningly ambitious, prescient novel about madness, generational trauma, and cultural breakdown
At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dependable, dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously waits to hear news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing—again. Em’s days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house (bought with a “responsible, salary-backed, fixed-rate mortgage”) and her dreary office. Then something unthinkable, something impossible, happens and she begins to see how madness permeates everything around her while the mundane spaces she inhabits are transformed, through Lucy Corin’s idiosyncratic magic, into shimmering sites of the uncanny.
The story that swirls around Em moves through several perspectives and voices. There is Frank, the tart-tongued, failing manager at her office; Jack, the man with whom Frank has had a love affair for decades; Em and Ad’s eccentric parents, who live in a house that is perpetually being built; and Tasio, the young man from Chiapas who works for them and falls in love with Ad. Through them Corin portrays porousness and breakdown in individuals and families, in economies and political systems, in architecture, technology, and even in language itself.
The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, unforgettable, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel that interrogates the illusory dream of stability that pervaded early twenty-first-century America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Corin's insightful latest (following her collection One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses) interweaves themes of human connection, mental illness, sisterhood, and hope through the story of a missing person. Em is accustomed to her younger sister, Ad's disappearances, the recurrent consequence of a debilitating psychosis that has afflicted Ad for years. So, after Ad goes missing again, Em and her parents commence the familiar search, restlessly going about their days amidst "the ordinary suspense" of Ad's vanishing. But after Ad is found unconscious in a hotel room and placed on life support while in a coma, Em finds herself utterly shaken, reflecting on her understanding of Ad's illness as her own grip on reality begins to falter. Though the story's narrative course proves occasionally circuitous and tricky to follow, the peripheral stories generally serve to unearth the characters' innermost feelings, shining a light on anxieties that are not so easily articulated. Marked by Corin's limber voice, this brims with genuine depth and humor, particularly when unacquainted characters discover previously-unseen commonalities, as is the case with Em and her gruff coworker, Frank, a former manager whose own relationship with his lover Jack is marked by instability. Delightfully askew, Corin's work offers a memorable exploration of how a loved one's mental illness can impact an individual's outlook.
