Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
Narrated by Robert Olen Butler
Robert Olen ButlerUnabridged — 5 hours, 59 minutes
Narrated by Robert Olen Butler
Robert Olen ButlerUnabridged — 5 hours, 59 minutes
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
Despite the humor threaded through his works, Butler's characters are indisputably tragic, in that their abundant knowledge of their own needs and flaws traps rather than frees them. This is, of course, the tragedy of Hamlet, remade by Butler in a distinctly post-Freudian style that reaches its apogee in A Small Hotel, a slim and wise, and painfully realistic, study of a contemporary marriage.
—The New York Times Book Review
…[Butler] has performed an unusual and worthy feat. The puzzle may have only three pieces, but each of these has many facets, and the way they eventually fit together delivers a surprising charge.
—The Washington Post
This slight conventional drama from Pulitzer-winner Butler (Hell) tells the story of a failed marriage through flashbacks on the day the couple is to be divorced. Reserved tough-guy Michael Hays is hoping to bed his much younger girlfriend while his soon-to-be-ex, Kelly, skips out on filing the divorce papers to ponder suicide in the same hotel room where they fell in love 20 years ago. Flashbacks tossed in under negligible pretexts give Michael and Kelly ample opportunity to ponder their history for the reader's edification, showing Michael to be a boorish void and Kelly a needy woman desperate for one romantic declaration. With few surprises and facile psychology (daddy issues abound), this insubstantial tale is at least easily digestible. (July)
"Piercing . . . Bristling with insight . . . Butler’s most impressive accomplishment lies in capturing the mingled emotions of anger, remorse, pain and even love that mark most divorces. . . . Honest and compassionate, Butler’s exploration of a marriage’s sundering is the work of a mature, reflective author.”—Harvey Freedenberg, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"Intelligent, deeply moving . . . Remarkably written . . . A Small Hotel is a masterful story that will remind readers once again why Robert Olen Butler has been called the ‘best living American writer.’ —Jeff Guinn, The Fort Worth Star Telegram
“[A] deliciously, unapologetically romantic novel . . . [Butler’s] empathetic, precise writing flirts with melodrama but never feels hackneyed. In less skillful hands, this story would be a guilty pleasure. Instead, it’s just a pleasure.” —O Magazine
"Richly observed . . . Butler's lucid writing style always conceals turbulent depths beneath a placid surface. He is, in fact, one of the boldest literary writers working today, willing to follow his imagination wherever it leads."—Chauncey Mabe, Sun Sentinel (Florida)
"Intriguing . . . Intricate . . . Butler skilfully sets up expectations only to twist them, and twist them again. Words said and unsaid can change eveything in an instant." Colette Bancroft, The Mercury News
“A sleek, erotic, and suspenseful drama about men who cannot say the word love and the women they harm . . . Butler executes a plot twist of profound proportions in this gorgeously controlled, unnerving, and beautifully revealing tale of the consequences of emotional withholding.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“With mesmerizing detail, Butler excavates layers of memory and illuminates moments of both tenderness and alienation.” —The New Yorker
“From each spouse’s point of view we witness the feelings that didn’t break the surface at the time, but never went away.” —The New York Times
“Butler . . . is masterful in the way he draws us into the hearts of his characters. . . . [He] gives the last pages of his quiet book the urgency of a thriller.” —Bookpage.com
“Engaging . . . Butler [has a] unique writing style . . . with rich descriptions and smooth transitions . . . similiar to Hemingway . . . A Small Hotel is a powerful statement about human nature.” —bookreporter.com
“Butler brings exquisite sensitivity to the details, unearthing them with the care of [a] good archaeologist.” —Karen Sandstrom, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Visions of the past arise in husband and wife on the brink of divorce, as metaphoric, coded conversations, minute gestures, and hurtful silences threaten grave consequences in this tightly focused, intensely imagined, masterfully omniscient novel. Robert Olen Butler understands the failings of men, and he understanding the failings of women just as well.”—Susan Vreeland, author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue
“A Small Hotel is a gorgeous, hot-blade of a novel, infused with lyric grace—a page-turner that tracks the unexpected turns of a marriage. Reading it, I could not pull myself away. It is the story of a man and a woman—of love, betrayal and the cost of silence. Revelatory and precise, A Small Hotel is a gem of great literary fiction which contends that the life we live every day is not pedestrian, but charged, lucent. It can turn on a dime by what we say and what we fail to say.” —Dawn Tripp, author of Game of Secrets
“This tiny, romantic novel could be read at a single sitting, but it's best savored in small slices, accompanied by the quiet ticking of the heart. A marriage on the rocks, a race against time, the duel between past and present that exists in every living soul. As a woman, I particularly admired the portrayal of the husband, Michael, the type of silent man who is an enigma to women and a source of great pain in our relationships with him. Through Butler's insightful rendering, Michael's point of view came as a revelation.” —Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander
"Separation and the seemingly insurmountable divide between men and women provide the novel's strongest themes and they do so by unflinchingly illustrating the small moments that seem to come and go unnoticed—yet in the end define us."—Flavorpill (online)
“Intriguing . . . beautifully told.” —New York Journal of Books
"Slight, intense, elliptical, it's a book that requires concentration and forbearance. Brace yourself for the deep renderings of the slightest movement; stay still for the immersion in New Orleans. . . . Longing, desire, and silence are the subjects of A Small Hotel. . . . How strange I felt when I left the world of this book to return to the 'real world.' Somehow the world of this book seemed more authentic than the world I actually exist in."—New World Reviews
"Lyrical, haunting . . . Readers will be touched by [Butler's] careful exploration of . . . the human condition and how we relate to each other." —Curled up With a Good Book (blog)“[Robert Olen Butler] is an excellent chronicler of the small domestic moments that create and destroy love.” —Patricia Henley, Sycamore Review
No stranger to the published word, Pulitzer Prize winner Butler (Hell) here presents a page-turner set in modern-day New Orleans, deftly using the city as a backdrop to a crumbling marriage. The narrative takes place mostly in the titular hotel, where Kelly Hayes has fled on the day of her divorce, and in flashbacks to happier (and not so happy) times for Kelly and husband Michael. After 20 years of marriage, Michael appears to have moved on with a much younger woman, while Kelly remains adrift in a sea of despair. But everything around Michael reminds him of his soon-to-be ex-wife. Caught between these two is their 19-year-old daughter. So Kelly sits in the same hotel where she and Michael first fell in love, trying to understand all that has happened to her and make a decision that will affect them all. VERDICT A quick and easy read, this book should appeal to fans of literary novels as well as romance aficionados; it will see much use in most public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, 1/3/11.]—Leann Restaino, Girard, OH
A painful marital breakup stimulates a flow of harsh memories leading toward a decisive climactic choice, in NBA-winner Butler's emotionally charged, uneven novel (Hell, 2009, etc.).
Though its title alludes to a Broadway show tune about the joys of honeymooning, the subject is the impending divorce of Kelly and Michael Hays, left unaccomplished when she fails to show up in a Louisiana courthouse to sign final papers. Thereafter, we observe the pair in present circumstances and both shared and separate memories, as Michael second-guesses his own rapidly escalating affair with a beautiful younger woman (Laurie) and Kelly reconsiders experiences that have eroded her enchantment with Michael's confident masculinity and gracefully borne sense of honor and responsibility (as it happens, he's an attorney). The book waxes and wanes frustratingly, whether in the memory of a drunken Mardi Gras episode (from which he rescued her); Michael's "clever" marriage proposal (a ludicrously mishandled scene); Michael's borderline-bathetic recall of having disappointed his tyrannical, macho dad; and Kelly's far more plaintive memories of inevitable alienation from her withdrawn, unresponsive father. Fleeting echoes of William Styron's famous first novel Lie Down in Darknessappear, notably in later scenes that document Kelly's virtually passive swoon into despairing guilt (over a foolish, pointless misadventure with a married man). On balance, this is a fairly short book that feels like a rather longer one, perhaps because we learn much less than we feel we need to know about its principal characters' inner lives (despite considerable soul-searching). And minor characters like Michael's new lover Laurie (basically a charmless fantasy figure) and the Hays' adult daughter Sam barely register on the page.
As the eponymous show tune (from: "Pal Joey") coyly asks, "Not a sign of people. Who wants people?" One answer: Novels do.
| BN ID: | 2940175334396 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dreamscape Media |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2011 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
He recognizes her, too. "Ah," he says. "Welcome back, Mrs ..." and he snags on her name, even as she forces her body to turn, forces her feet to the pavement outside, and she rises from the seat.
She sees him duck a little, to check out the passenger side of the car. He is looking for her husband.
"If you can just take care of the car," she says, wanting only to stop any small talk, wanting only to close the door behind her in her room.
"I'm sorry," the man says. "I used to be better at names."
"Beau, isn't it?"
"Beau. Yes. Thanks for remembering. I used to be better at that." And he steps to the rear of the car, seeing her small Gucci upright bag lying in the back seat. He reaches for the door handle.
"Beau," Kelly says, firmly, "I can handle my bag. Just do the car."
Beau withdraws his hand. "The car," he says. "Sure."
"I'm sorry," Kelly says. "Hays."
"Mrs. Hays," Beau says, brightening. "Of course. Glad to have you back."
And now she stops on the sidewalk before the door to the hotel, and she lets go of the handle of her rolling bag. She can turn and stop Beau, who has only this moment closed the driver door of the car, she can stop him and she can get back into her car and drive away. Ah, but to where. To the house. To Hell with the house. She doesn't want the house. Someone laughs down the street.
She turns to look. It is a small sound from this distance, but she heard it clearly. A young man and a young woman lean into each other at the door of a bar at the corner of Bourbon Street. She knows the bar, too. The young couple in this moment and perhaps the bar twenty-five years ago and half a dozen times since: these are things she can consider. But nothing else for now. The rest is carefully put away. The rest is inside the bag, whose handle she now grasps. She will go in. And she does. She goes up the steps and through the door into the Olivier House, an early nineteenth-century townhouse with a Federal façade of plastered brick and a labyrinthine Creole inner life with loggias and two courtyards and slave quarters and four floors of galleried rooms.
And she is at the end of the entrance hall, near the parlor door, and she is glad the young man at the desk is a stranger and she has her key and is through the double doors behind him and crossing a small flagstone courtyard rimmed in banana trees and fig trees and she is through a low, curving loggia and into the larger courtyard with the swimming pool, but she turns at once up a staircase and she climbs one floor and another and she is breathless now, not from the climb but from the room before her.
Room 303. Two narrow black doors, each with three stacked panes of glass: fully half the doors are glass, and it surprises her; this is a thing she should remember well but she doesn't. The doors are hung with white ruffled curtains, and her hand jitters the key against the lock, unable to get it into the hole. She stops. She lowers her hand. She wants in badly, wants into this room that she came to feel was her own place in the Quarter. No. She always felt it was their place. But hers now. Entirely hers. And she wants in so badly that she cannot get in, from the very wanting of it. She breathes deeply. She raises her hand again and focuses on keeping it steady, and at last the key slips into the lock and the door is opening and she is inside and the door shuts behind her. She lets go of her bag. She closes her eyes.
The smell of the place is always the same. Old wood and old rugs and fresh sheets and from the open balcony doors the sweet but tainted smell of the Quarter, jasmine and roux and shellfish brine, beer and piss and mildew, and something of the river too, and the swamp, and a hard rain that passed by, and ozone and coffee and sex, Michael's smells and her smells: can all of this be inside her in this room in this moment? Probably. She is weeping.
* * *
And as Kelly lets the tears fall without even lifting a hand to them, the man she is still married to is across the Mississippi, driving fast, an hour west of New Orleans along Louisiana 18. On one side is the river, invisible behind the berm of the levee, and on the other side has been a run of tank farms and cane fields and strip malls and swamp, and Creole plantations too—Laura and St. Joseph and, at last, Oak Alley. Michael Hays slows his BMW. He put the top down when they crossed the cantilever bridge into the West Bank and took to the state two-lanes, and he has glanced at the woman beside him half a dozen times since then, watched her hair: she has tied it up tightly in a scarf but some tendrils have gotten free and are flaring behind her, a pallid yellow flame. Michael is fifty-five. The woman beside him, Laurie Pruitt, when she tells anyone of her boyfriend, which she has begun now to do—a few select friends, her mother—she told her mother last week and is determined never to speak of him to her again—Laurie always describes him as "a handsomely ripening fifty-five." She is twenty-nine. Michael has timed his glances from his periphery so she never sees him. He wishes simply to collect these snapshots of her. He has stifled even the impulse—which is strong in him—to reach out his hand and put it in this flame of her hair. If it could actually burn him, he might. A strong assault of feeling: this he could take. But not the gentle thing, though he knows this weekend at Oak Alley will inevitably bring that too. But waiting for word from Pensacola, he has stayed bound tightly inside himself.
Before them now is the quarter-mile alley of live oaks leading from the highway to the Big House, and Michael slows even more. He and Laurie both turn their heads, as they slide past, to look down the canopied corridor of trees. With the massive frame of the oaks, the Creole pavilion house shows only its wide, double-galleried face, fronted by two-story Tuscan columns, and then it is gone. And momentarily Michael slows almost to a stop and turns into the plantation grounds, passing a sign that announces: Antebellum Fashion Festival.
Before he accelerates again, Laurie says, "I wish we'd begun a year earlier."
He has had these what-can-you-possibly-be-thinking moments several times already with her. The wreckage he is leaving behind was inconveniently timed? He will not let her remark make him consider the wreckage now. And it is deeply in his nature not to make his inner life visible. So he shows nothing. If she looked at him, Laurie would not be able to tell if he even heard what she said. Not that this occurs to her. After only a moment's pause, she says, "There are twenty-eight oaks and twenty-eight columns around the house. It would be cool if I were twenty-eight this first time." He speeds up now on the perimeter road and she has said what she has to say, more for herself than for Michael, and that he makes no indication whatsoever he has heard is of no consequence to her. The Big House emerges fully as they run parallel to the alley of oaks, its dark, hipped roof rising to a widow's walk.
* * *
And Kelly is standing in the center of Room 303, at the foot of the four-poster double bed, with the posts and the canopy frame and two birds plucking at an overflowing basket of grapes on the headboard all done in black wrought iron. This and so many other things are as they always have been. The bed wall is exposed brick. The lamp on the night table is a sandalwood palm tree. The lamp on the desk on the opposite wall is a teak monkey in a fez, climbing another palm. He is draped with Mardi Gras beads. The beads may have changed over the years, but there have always been beads. The French windows are open to a trompe l'oeil balcony, a filigreed iron balustrade from one side of the jamb to the other. Nowhere to step outside. Just lean there and look down to the courtyard and out to the hipped and gabled roofs of the Quarter and to the sun, falling toward late afternoon in the western sky before her.
Laughter wafts into the room like a fresh scent from the street. Kelly leaves her bag behind and moves to the balcony. She looks down. In an open doorway to one of the pool-level suites, a young couple laughs and the woman nudges the man's shoulder with her forehead and he says something else and she lifts her face and laughs harder, though the sound strikes Kelly's ear only faintly, as faint as distant memory; the laughter has sounded in her enough to have drawn her to look but not enough to dissipate the murk in her head, her chest. She turns away, faces back into the room.
She looks at her bag sitting upright on the floor, its handle extended. She moves to the bag, grasps the handle. The laughter dies. She lifts her eyes to the door of the room. Outside, she herself waits to enter. Kelly at twenty-four. Perhaps the age of the woman in the courtyard. But Kelly in this present moment, holding tight at the handle of her rolling bag, squeezes back the memory, keeps the door shut. She angles the bag toward her, turns, pulls it to the side of the bed. She lowers the handle and bends and lifts the bag and places it gently on the mattress. She is breathing heavily, though the bag was light. She waits. She slows herself down. There is time yet. Perhaps even options of a sort. This whole process is to do one thing and then wait and then do another thing.
For now, open the bag: the zipper tab between her thumb and forefinger, the ripping sound, her hand tracing the bag, down and across and up. And she lifts the lid. Inside is a folded, bulky, white terry-cloth robe. But it is here only for padding. She unfolds the robe, and within are simply a bottle of Macallan cask-strength, single-malt Scotch and a bottle of Percocet.
* * *
Michael steps from his car into the driveway next to a pitched-roof cottage with a screened front porch and a wooden back deck. Surrounding the plantation grounds is the ongoing enterprise of the last hundred and seventy years at Oak Alley, sugarcane. The air still smells faintly of smoke and cane, the fall harvest having been completed only a short time ago, the crop cut and gone for processing and the stubble burned to the ground, leaving six hundred acres of dark rutted earth waiting for the new shoots. Michael takes in the smell, a pleasure he had not expected this weekend.
"It's wonderful," Laurie says. "More than I'd imagined."
Michael does not look at her but heads toward the trunk, lifting her Rollaboard from the back seat as he passes. He takes one step beyond the end of the car and puts her rolling bag on the driveway for her to pull. She's in the small front yard, her back to him, arms rising as if embracing the scene before her: another cottage on the service road and a maintenance shop farther out and then five hundred yards of naked cane fields to a distant line of trees marking an unseen railroad track. Her arms move on, though, and she clasps her hands at the back of her head. Her shoulders lift and pause and fall in a sweet sigh of contentment.
Michael doesn't see it. One by one he pulls Laurie's suitcase and a mate to Kelly's upright bag and his garment carrier out of the trunk, setting the larger bags beside each other and draping the garment bag over Laurie's suitcase.
He turns to close the trunk and she is beside him now. "Thanks for letting me choose this place," she says.
He lowers the trunk and gently clicks it shut. He turns to her and she is kissing him hard on the mouth and he is fine with bodies, fine with using the language of the body, and he presses her close and the kiss goes on and then ends and they break. Laurie looks Michael in the eyes.
She says, "Now that's way too somber a look after a kiss like that." She cocks her head slightly. "Don't you think?"
And he clenches inside. What more does she want from him? He is a man of words in the courtroom, this Michael Hays. But the expectation of words in a circumstance like this always makes him take the Fifth—silently—no matter what those words might be if he were inclined to figure them out. So instead, suddenly clumsy even with his body, he kisses her again, trying for the forehead—given his putoffedness—but his incipient move prompts her to raise her face to him, as she assumes he's after her lips. Consequently, he ends up kissing her high on the bridge of her nose. Which gives even the usually chilled-out Laurie her own what-can-you-possibly-be-thinking moment.
But now they are pulling their luggage along, and she has taken his garment bag over her arm without his even asking, and they are through the porch door and the cottage door and moving through their living room full of cherrywood Chippendale reproductions, and Laurie leads the way into the dining room and then, to the right, into a hallway that leads back toward the front of the cottage and into the master bedroom. The bed is large, mahogany, the four high, fluted posts with carved rice plants. She stops, leaves the luggage on the floor, moves around the corner of the foot of the bed with one hand on the post like a stripper doing a slow turn on her pole.
He has stopped, blocked by the bags on the floor.
"I love it," she says. "I love it all."
She puts her hand now on the floral chintz quilt. But she pauses and straightens and looks at Michael. "Of course," she says. "Now I get your mood. Duh."
She does not elaborate, and Michael looks at her and suppresses a bristling at her trying to read his mood. She has cocked her head at him. He waits for more.
"You were here with her," she says.
He leaves the upright where it sits and collapses the rolling handle of Laurie's suitcase. He lifts the bag. He finds the heft of the thing a comfort at the moment: the physical focus helps him stop the memories. He steps around the bags on the floor and puts the suitcase on the luggage stand by the dresser.
"Did you come for the festival?" Laurie says.
He turns back to the other bags and she twirls on the bedpost again, once, and heads for him. He stops, straightens, waits.
"Did she dress up?" she says.
"No," he says.
She is before him now. Smiling very slightly at one corner of her mouth. Smelling of something with patchouli that Kelly used to wear. "So I'll be your first Scarlett," Laurie says.
"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," Michael says, sounding harsher than he wants, in spite of this being, prima facie, a joke.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Small Hotel by ROBERT OLEN BUTLER Copyright © 2011 by Robert Olen Butler. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
