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Chosen by Anne Brooke of the Book Foxes
The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard: a slow-burn classic in the making
A seventeen-year-old London girl flies to Los Angeles for the funeral of her mother Lily, from whom she had been separated in her childhood. After stealing a suitcase of letters, clothes and photographs from her mum’s bedroom at the top of a hotel on Venice Beach, the girl spends her summer travelling around Los Angeles returning love letters and photographs to the men who had known her mother. As she discovers more about Lily’s past and tries to re-enact her life, she comes to question the foundations of her own personality.
This book isn’t a quick and easy page-turner but its charm slowly crept up on me and by the end I was completely under its spell. It doesn’t have much plot as such, the storyline consisting of a young woman’s slow search for her estranged dead mother, Lily, with occasional tension provided by her mother’s widower, Richard. But what it does have in vast quantities is an astute portrait of a wonderfully complex and fascinating main character in Lily’s unnamed teenage daughter.
The use of motifs in the text is also interesting. The main one of these, Lily’s suitcase, which her daughter takes during the wake, is full of items of clothing and old love letters that provide a starting point for our heroine’s emotional search. It’s interesting that it’s not in the end what she discovers from the clothes and the letters themselves that counts, but the way in which this information affects her character and outlook.
I also loved the way that Lily’s daughter is seen as very flawed and secretive, an aspect of teenage, and indeed older, life that is never overlooked or excused, but which adds to the girl’s interest and depth. She happily lies about her actions and who she is to the people she meets, but her reasons for doing so are more than justified by her own uncertainty concerning her present and her future.
One of the main focuses, apart from search and self-discovery, was the slowly-developing relationship between Lily’s daughter and the ex-alcoholic photographer, David. It begins with appropriate awkwardness on the beach after her mother’s wake, and continues through a series of subtle fits and starts throughout the book, and I grew to love David too.
From the middle of the novel, the pace increases a little and there are both some joyful and difficult encounters with David. At the same time the tension involving Richard is kept simmering away in the background and, in the end, comes to an appropriate and surprising conclusion.
So, by the time I finished the book, I was fully committed to the story and found the ending when we are brought into the current time of the older narrator both clever and very satisfying. This is definitely a book I recommend and I look forward to reading more of this author’s work.
You can find the full review at Vulpes Libris here: http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/the-pink-hotel-by-anna-stothard-a-slow-burn-classic-in-the-making/
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