Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

Critics have read Hôtel Splendid as a deconstruction of French literature. Certainly almost everything about structures or edifices—the hotel and its figures, literally—has been dismantled by the final page, nothing left but the hotel’s sign hanging in the sky—and not even the full sign, only Splendid, an adjective with no noun to describe. Yet I think the novel is also a critique of the masculo-sexual arc: écriture feminine? I read Hôtel Splendid—with its three female characters “receiving” hordes of male guests, three female bodies as decomposing as the hotel they inhabit, and as swelling and subsiding as the swamp in which they sit; and with its abolition of a single wave in favor of a sea of many small ones—as a feminist critique altogether. The narrator exists, maintains, and renders in words a field of tensions that pulse around her, almost a sense of malign plotting outside her, as she tries to retain integrity—of place, body, self. If plot in Aristotelian terms springs from character, here we’ve gone awfully far from that: plot swarms around character. As our narrator says, “You would almost think it was deliberate.”