SOURCE: McAlpin, Heller. “A Honolulu Hotel for Fringe Sad Sacks.” Christian Science Monitor (19 April 2001): 21.

In the following review, McAlpin offers a positive assessment of Hotel Honolulu, calling Theroux a “sharp, unblinking storyteller.”

The ever-prolific Paul Theroux, who demonstrated a playful predilection for fantasizing alternate lives for a character named Paul Theroux in his novels, has this time addressed what might well be his worst nightmare: What if he were totally blocked and washed up?

Theroux's writing has long shown a fascination with people out of their element. In Hotel Honolulu, he imagines a writer who shares many of his biographical particulars but finds himself “humbled and broke again, my brain blocked, feeling superfluous, out of the writing business, and trying to start all over at the age of forty-nine.” His narrator gets a job managing a second-rate, 80-room hotel two blocks from the beach in Waikiki.

Reader beware...