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(More customer reviews)These are stories from a hotel or hotel stories or stories that a ho tells or a ho sells-- isn't that what hos sometimes do in hotels? That's my little riff on Mike Taylor who lived for seven or eight years at the Carlton Arms Hotel in Manhatten after a girlfriend locked him out of his apartment where he wrote these interlocking, interracting, acting-out short stories where the characters, a variegated group-- some with pretty girl disease (PGD), others who spend a lot of time getting high or using the F word, a dog named Bijou, a couple with a green card marriage and a "young kid English painter of cartoons on walls" et al -- come in and out of, much as people visit hotels.
Interesting as these characters and the situations they get into may be, HOTEL STORIES is ultimately about the language. Mr. Tyler puns and plays with words and teases the reader again and again. Omelettes morph into amulets, beauty is in the eye of the beholdee, those who are already out do not have to attend an outing, a rubber duck wears a condom, extraneous = extra-anus, and we are off to a wonderful, wonderful wedding-- so odd. (At times I felt as if I were reading a Walt Whitman who was on marijuana. Maybe that's why he called his magnum opus "Leaves of Grass.")
Then there are passages that rise to the level of poetry. (Okay. Forget the fat woman joke and the urban myth section.) Mr. Tyler's description of the day of that wedding: "The weather was special. The weather was a special delivery from, whatever. It was beautiful. The day. The sun. The leaves. The colors but not just that, how they decided to fall. Like they were choreographed. The leaves and their colors knew when to take off, knew the time to take off, knew how to take off and in what order. They fell as the b 'n b (bed and breakfast, bride and groom) stood there stabilized by glory." The author's description of how lawyers parse sentences is so right-on as well as his telling us that word processors aren't really word processors but have other professions in real life like, say poets. And surely his statement that walking in museums makes you tired should be reprinted on T shirts.
Having rambled on about how much I love Mr. Taylor's language, I'm not sure I have a clue as to what this book is really about. To lift his metaphor (my favorite in the entire book) about European cities, I "feel like a sock in a dryer." Enough said.
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Quickly ducking under the arch metaphor of the "hotelstory," Mike Tyler, an influential figure in theindependent literary and music worlds, examines thenature of intimacy in eleven vibrant connected shortstories, and the need for anonymity to experience itwholly in an over-exposed world.
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