SOURCE: Feehily, Gerry. “Novel of the Week.” New Statesman 130, no. 4535 (30 April 2001): 58.

In the following review, Feehily provides an overview of the narration and themes in Hotel Honolulu.

Mention Hawaii and most people think of the famous TV show: those rolling drums, that zoom shot of the handsome Jack Lord, the hula girls, the canoe loads of portly islanders chugging up the bay. In this [Hotel Honolulu], his latest novel, Paul Theroux has created a similarly secure universe, a series of variations on a theme—which, although full of tears and death, has a strange predictability.

Our unnamed narrator is, would you believe, a writer who has rejected the literary life. Soft-landing in Hawaii, he comes under the protection of a millionaire called Buddy Hamstra—“a big, blaspheming, doggy-eyed man in drooping shorts.” Something of a Falstaffian figure, lusting after comely masseuses, cherishing a heart-shaped box in which he...