In ‘The Pink Hotel,’ delirious newlyweds head for a grand judgment

THE PINK HOTEL
By Liska Jacobs
318 pages. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.

A strange element of human behavior is that much of what we call “holidays” involves constantly changing our body temperature. Think of the beach. You lay on a towel, heat up, dip in the ocean to cool down, get out, warm up, dip in, cool down, repeat. The joy of recreation can’t be reduced to the fact that it’s really fun to switch between hot and cold, but typical vacation moments often involve this: snuggling up to a campfire on a cold night, diving into a freezing lake on a sweltering afternoon, coming in from the snow to warm up with cocoa.

The more luxurious the vacation, the more extreme the temperatures. In Liska Jacobs’ new novel, “The Pink Hotel,” characters at a swanky Beverly Hills establishment bake in triple-digit sunshine before re-entering air-conditioned rooms; then, shivering, don plush robes and walk on heated marble floors to fetch chilled Champagne from an ice bucket. All day long, they adjust their personal thermostats.

At the center of this dazed book are a pair of newlyweds, Keith and Kit Collins, who flew south from Sacramento for their honeymoon. The Pink Hotel is a slightly fictionalized take on the Beverly Hills Hotel, complete with banana leaf wallpaper, poolside cabanas, and a famous soufflé. Keith, 27, has curly hair, suave manners and is employed as the general manager of a Michelin-starred restaurant in “the boonies” (located in a town literally called Boonville). Kit is four years younger, pretty and docile, and works as a part-time waitress at the same place.

Kit thinks the couple flew to Los Angeles to kick off their wedding – but for Keith, that’s only half the plan. The other half is doing a bit of stealth networking. Two months earlier, he met Mr. Beaumont, the director of guest services at the Pink Hotel, and now he’s auditioning for the role of protege. A concert at the hotel — with its populace of CEOs, oil barons, hedge fund managers, real estate moguls and foreign aristocrats — would be a major breakthrough.

High-end hospitality details are not glamorous. If you rolled Mr. Beaumont’s job title into a de-euphemizing machine, he would turn out to be a combination of fixer, babysitter, therapist, scapegoat, animal control specialist, and janitor. This is especially true around the time of Keith and Kit’s visit. It’s summer in Los Angeles, and the chilly, arid weather has made customers restless. Fires erupt beyond the hotel’s borders and the sky is a haze of brown smoke. Particles of urban gravel are carried by high winds over lush lawns. When Kit brings up security concerns with Mr Beaumont, he reassures her that the hotel is ‘invulnerable’ to disaster, sounding a lot like a merchant navy executive bragging about a certain ship’s unsinkability. around 1912.

While Keith integrates himself with the staff, Kit wanders around the hotel in awe. She observes a circus of sin, with the seven cardinals represented. Guests complain about their servants, encrust their manicures and teeth with diamonds, and feed on chocolate truffles with gold flakes. They nap, rut and gossip. Kit and Keith, initially intimidated by excess, quickly find themselves adjusting to it.

Meanwhile, unrest continues to sweep the city. Highways are closing and domestic violence is skyrocketing. Riot police fire tear gas into a crowd of protesters. Storefronts on Rodeo Drive are incinerated. Jacobs does not dwell on the identity of these protesters or the nature of their demands, but tells us that they are shouting “EAT THE RICH” and erecting a guillotine in front of a Saks store. News from the outside world floods into the hotel in the form of footage filmed on a bar TV or seen on a cell phone between two glasses of rosé.

Jacobs is the author of two previous novels, “The Worst Kind of Want” and “Catalina.” Both are fast, insightful and raw. “The Pink Hotel” is relatively laborious and repetitive. It comes down to a choice of perspective: Jacobs moves fluidly between characters, pausing briefly in one person’s interior monologue before moving on to the next. Doing so with clarity is a technical feat, but it presents a narrative conundrum. If the reader is aware of each character’s intentions at all times, opportunities for uncertainty or deception – for suspense and revelation – become rare.

Being trapped in the minds of the couple and hotel guests also means that we exist in an endless stream of ditziness. Jacobs is good at conjuring up outrageous images – there’s a memorable pet monkey named Norma who wears a sequined harness and liberally defecates on the hotel grounds – but the examples lose their punch as they pile up . Neither Kit nor Keith is experimenting with what one might call an idea. They only exist as avatars of complacency and ignorance.

To hammer home the naivety of the couple, Jacobs uses and reuses the metaphor of childhood. Kit sucks her thumb, accepts candy from strangers, and kicks her legs “like a kid in a soda store.” Twice, she is compared to “a child who has a fever”. Keith is “an uncertain boy” and a “schoolboy”. Zoological allusions are also commonplace. People swarm, howl, howl, boo, act like “pack animals” or have “an animal vibe” or make “animal sounds” or behave like “animals sizing up other animals”. Everyone is a baby and everyone is an animal. The comparisons are vivid but slightly confusing. After all, a baby’s helplessness is not a bad behavior, and animals are not hedonists.

What’s missing from the book is a telling new target. Vulgar materialism, climate change denial, status anxiety and the solipsism of the wealthy are all implicitly denounced, as is misogyny. (As the couple arrive at the hotel, a group of men compliment Keith on his choice of bride, as if Kit were a sedan.) As the story progresses, we wait for the couple to clash. their delusions in a grand calculation. Eventually they do, but Jacobs hasn’t given them the depth to win our sympathy.