Hotel World by Ali SmithAnchor Books, 2002 (Originally Hamish Hamilton, 2001)

Hotel World is a novel divided into six sections, each named for a grammatical tense (e.g. “present historic” or “future in the past”), and each (well, except for the last, which is broader) centered on a character with some connection to a particular hotel. As the back cover puts it: “Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter.” The first section is narrated by that chambermaid’s ghost, by the fading bit of what’s left of her ghost six months after her accidental death. We get little bits of the chambermaid’s life in this section: how she unexpectedly fell for a girl in a shop, having previously assumed that she was straight, how she went swimming the day she fell for the girl in the shop, how there was a woman at the pool who couldn’t fit into the changing cubicle, how people stared (how it is to be different, how it is to be a person, how it is to have a body). Then there are three sections of third-person narration: a section about Else, who begs on the pavement outside the hotel, a section about Lise, a receptionist at the hotel, and a section about Penny, who’s writing a publicity piece/review of the hotel. Clare, who’s the dead chambermaid’s sister, narrates her section in first-person stream-of-consciousness: it’s an inner monologue, partly talking to herself, partly talking to her dead sister. And then there’s the last section of the book, which touches on other ghosts, other people, how life continues.

The different sections are different in style, but there’s a lot of satisfying linguistic and literary playfulness throughout: a Joycean-but-not “Yes, I said, yes” moment in a shop, the different senses of the word “change,” plays on Else’s name (“I don’t know what else to do” as “I don’t know what, Else, to do”), plays on the word “well,” quotations from John Donne. There are bits of straightforward narrative and lovely descriptive passages, and there are also other kinds of narrative, lists and deconstructions. There’s a list of “Some of the other things policemen and policewomen have said to Else over time,” and a list of “Some of the things (concerning love) which members of the public have said to Else over time,” and a list of things from Else’s pockets that were photographed for a newspaper story; there’s a great bit in Lise’s section that dissects, in reverse order, a whole previous passage, phrase by phrase; there’s a list of things in the storage room in the hotel full of stuff accidentally left behind by guests. (I really really really like lists.)

And oh, there are so many good moments in this book, everyday moments of hypocrisy or disconnect (a well person telling a sick person that illness is “revelatory,” a comfortably well-off person thinking that poor people can’t handle money, that having no money “must be a relief”) balanced by moments of, if not connection, exactly, then kindness and togetherness, or just everyday ordinariness: starlings on a building ledge, a purring cat, rain on tree branches.