“There was a time in my life when I lived in hotels,” writes Joanna Walsh at the start of Hotel – while haunting “a marriage I was soon to leave”. She took up reviewing hotels for a start-up website, half-thinking that by residing in them she would get a foretaste of what it might be like to live elsewhere. An unhappy woman, on the move, looking for somewhere to land, Walsh discovers that hotels are not the home from home they pretend to be but “the opposite of home”. It’s an insight that gives this slyly humorous and clever little book its internal propulsion.
In spite of their myriad comforts and round-the-clock service, the elevation (or is that inflation?) that hotels offer their clients belongs to the realm of fantasy. In truth, observes Walsh, you are neither your ideal self nor your best self when you inhabit a hotel. You are flattened into a being who ceases to have desires, since hotels exist solely to meet and thus neuter them all. You are not so much a guest as a ghost – a “paying ghost”.
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