Youth's Glorious Absence of Context: Eimear McBride's Strange Hotel [Part One]
Cordelivres Club Episode Three Show Notes
This post contains the show notes for the most recent edition of our Cordelivres Criticism Club podcast; check out the episode if you haven’t yet—it’s free!
And there’re a couple photos of my edition down below.
Let’s get into it!
Strange Hotel and The Current World of Publishing
This week (our first two-part episode!) we’re taking about Eimear McBride’s 2022 novel Strange Hotel, from Faber & Faber in the UK. Although not super well known here in the States, this book is super compelling in is narrational techniques and language—and even tells us something about the current state of contemporary publishing trends in fiction. That this book has done so well in Ireland and the UK might give us some hope for the beginning of pushback against commodification in the marketplace, although probably a bit more across the Atlantic than here, for now. In any event, the need for more of this type of fiction is the exact reason why we started Indirect in the first place, and this novel is a great example of risk-taking modern fiction.
Exploring Strange Hotel’s Narrative (or, Narrational!) Style
The novel, on the most straightforward narrative level, follows a woman traveling through various hotels. A notable structural element is the way McBride breaks up her sections / chapters via lists of cities as interludes, which turn out to be the places the protagonist has been, seemingly both running from and chasing memories of a complicated past. Despite the fact that the cover looks like a murder mystery (and a distressingly low rating on Goodreads), Strange Hotel has a scintillating narrative style and a bit of a spiritual connection to The Driver’s Seat, from last week.
We can place Strange Hotel in that Modernist heritage we talked about in the first episode of this series; our main thesis, so to speak, is that the novel's composition mirrors the protagonist's psychological experience through its language and narrative structure. This quintessentially Modernist approach is one wherein the reader's experience of the text reflects and refracts the character's experience of life, and vice-versa.
There are a few things we can pull out from her style that give it both a specific, idiosyncratic texture and a organic propulsion which serves to generate enormous investment and grounding:
Fragmented syntax and short, sometimes incomplete sentences ("Door, scratch, dull lock, put in turn the key fail") that immerse the reader in the character's moment-to-moment experience.
Fluid movement between external description and interior thought, often within the same paragraph, creating a woven texture that we can compare to a tapestry or a basket.
Free-indirect discourse where the narration adopts the protagonist's idiom and worldview without explicitly marking her thoughts.
Deliberate withholding of the protagonist's name, keeping readers closely aligned with her perspective and privileging authenticity above all.
Linguistic playfulness (like in a certain alliterative moment) that intensifies during moments of the character's emotional discomfort.
So ultimately McBride wins here via language—more so than Spark—but also a heavy use of scenic immediacy and third-person perspective. In the second half we talk a bit about the relationship of this narration to stream of consciousness, but for now we take a close look at the close third-person narration build around accessed interiority, which provides a strong sense of immediacy. This immediacy might be a recurring theme in the Cordelivres Criticism Club!
McBride's Approach to Third-Person Narration Techniques
McBride’s great strength is her dexterity in language, vocabulary, and sentence structures. We look at a few examples of how she modulated the psychic distance between interior and exterior perspectives, using techniques such as free-indirect style that give a real, palpable texture to the narration while filtering everything through the protagonist’s mind-style. We talked in previous episodes about the broadly Modernist approach to interiority-centric narration; contemporary Modernist writers like Rachel Cusk are incredibly agile in the ability to interweave scenic immediacy and detail with rich perspective-characterization (i.e., the way in which we can see the world “through the eyes of” the character to whom we have inner access, in the third person), fueled on free-indirect and an abundance of sensory descriptions.
In Strange Hotel, McBride makes liberal use of both present and past tense to render memories and our heroine’s thought process. We see this right away when she checks into her first hotel room (a deft parallel to The Driver’s Seat that, sadly, was unplanned), setting the book up both narratively and narrationally right from the jump. Moving between scenic descriptions and interiority—especially by using brief, fragmented sentences to capture a character's inner state—is an effective way to provide verisimilitude to consciousness and drive a character-based story arc through various situations; McBride is very skilled at this type of "intermediate range third person," which, as we talked about last time, lies between distant third-person narration and stream of consciousness. Really good stuff here, and somewhat remarkable among mainstream(-esq) contemporary fiction.
An Antagonistic Hotel Room Encounter
A choice example of this approach that we take a look at in the episode is the scene in which our protag, in her hotel, meets a man in the room next door. The scene describes their interaction over cigarettes and wine, and the way there seems to (yet again) be an antagonistic relationship the heroine has with both the fictional world and her would-be suitor. The really fascinating aspect in this passage is the contrast between the banality of the narrative and the profundity of the narration, with McBride’s rich language sort of underlying this tension on the page. Again we see the importance of telling over story in our understanding of the art of “story/telling”.
On one level, the elliptical and atmospheric writing creates a specific tone; McBride uses language to establish atmosphere, a bit like how films use music and visuals. On another level, parallel to the first, we see how the novel immerses the reader in a linguistic universe that mirrors the character's isolation, creating a deep sense of empathy through language. We take a look at the intentionally slow pace of the novel and the use of alliteration—especially in one particularly pyrotechnic paragraph describing our heroine getting up to something in the room. This relationship to language is what sets Strange Hotel apart, and in the second half we’ll keep looking at this narrational mode, its relationship to stream of consciousness, and the character's journey in the second half of the book.
Thanks so much for listening and hope everyone enjoyed the talk.
À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.
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