In America, Jean Baudrillard maps out the Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles as one of the ultimate sites of postmodernity. The building, he claims, is a “box of spatio-temporal tricks” (1988: 59). Decentralised and detached from the world outside, it creates and orders its own utopic reality; its guests and visitors seemingly stranded in a dislocated, sanitised hyper-reality.
This is surely the same environment into which Smith plunges the reader in her 2000 novel Hotel World – territory which is disturbing in its familiarity. Seen from a variety of vantage points, the hotel is a place of work, of life and – in one case – of death, a symbol of social inequality and a site of grief and memory. This is in spite of the hotel chain’s claims to uniformity – the obliteration of difference which extends to the people who work there: “…it is important, behind Reception, to wear hair tied back and to wear ‘subtle’ make-up. There Lise is, there she can see it, her subtly made-up face above her Name Badge, sleek and smiling, emptied of self, very good at what she does.” (112)
Yet, despite every attempt to erase the personal or the temporal, bits somehow get left behind. There are the physical reminders – “…the Left Behind Room; this is where all the things guests leave behind are stored…alarm clocks; batteries; books…” (105) or the dust “made of human skin,” (191). And there are the grieving friends and relatives left behind in the wake of a death. And no amount of regulation – no artificial measure of control – can, it seems, prevent the random accidents and encounters which live on in people’s minds and memories, in spite of the transience of hotel life.
There are few writers, I believe, who quite succeed in occupying the minds of their characters to the extent that Ali Smith does. She renders them instantly recognisable, their traumas, dilemmas and joys our own. And they also offer a point of resistance to the apparent pessimism of Hotel World and its inhuman territory of pressed, starched sheets; numbered doors and static. They break down barriers, and refuse to submit to the sterility and quiet tyranny of postmodern existence.
This is another book which proves that Smith is one of the most outstanding authors of her generation.
Kate Cudahy 