SOURCE: Newton, Michael. “The Voyeur's Tale.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5117 (27 April 2001): 24.

In the following review of Hotel Honolulu, Newton finds Theroux's preoccupation with sexual indulgence tiresome, but appreciates his larger interest in the significance of literary culture.

Nothing is so erotic as a hotel room. So the narrator of Paul Theroux's powerful new novel, Hotel Honolulu, tells us. Theroux locates this sexual allure in rooms permeated with the presence of those who briefly call the place home, and, with equal clarity, he summons up the melancholy of hotels, their aspiring elegance, their improvised and impoverished encounters, their soulless bars, their loneliness.

Theroux's narrator is a writer who has stopped writing. On a whim, he goes to Hawaii and finds a new job as a hotel manager. Here, to complete the scenario of a full-blown, late-mid-life crisis, he marries a much younger local girl (the illegitimate daughter, he supposes...