Hotel Honolulu was published by Hamish Hamilton in 2001. The narrator is a novelist — a travel writer whose wife has left him and whose creative powers have dried up. He takes a job managing the Hotel Honolulu, a rundown establishment in Waikiki that caters to the kind of tourists who can’t afford the beachfront resorts: drifters, fugitives, honeymooners on a budget, Japanese sex tourists, military families.
The novel takes the form of interconnected stories — each chapter a self-contained narrative centered on a different guest or employee. The chambermaid who steals one item from every room. The man hiding from the IRS. The Japanese honeymoon couple who never leave their room. The permanent resident who turns out to be a fugitive war criminal.
Theroux uses the hotel as a microcosm of American transience — Hawaii itself being the last stop before you run out of continent, the place people go when they want to disappear. The novel’s structure echoes Saint Jack (another story of a man managing other people’s vices in a tropical setting), but with a colder, more detached narrator.
Collecting Hotel Honolulu
First edition (Hamish Hamilton, London, 2001): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- UK first edition, fine in jacket: $10–$20
- US first edition (Houghton Mifflin): $10–$20