The Pink Hotel by Liska Jacobs

Published by MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 19, 2022

The Pink Hotel is a luxury hotel in Los Angeles. The color, location, and history suggest that it is the Beverly Hills Hotel. The manager points out locations in the hotel that were favored by Sinatra and Madonna and hundreds of other celebrities. Many of the hotel’s guests and residents are living lives of waste and leisure, having been born into money that they have not yet managed to squander, although they are doing their best.

The hotel is undergoing a renovation. Half the rooms are unavailable. The other half re in high demand, thank to wildfires that are threatening mansions in the hills. One of the bungalows is the permanent home of a survivor of five marriages, each new husband wealthier than the last. “They’re all dead now,” she explains. “Every single one. I’m all that’s left.” She relies on her pet monkey for companionship. Maybe that’s better than searching for a less reliable love.

The story is of a new marriage and its immediate disintegration. Keith Collins manages a small hotel and restaurant outside of San Francisco that has recently earned a Michelin star. Kit is a part-time waitress who fell in love with Keith. At Keith’s urging, she is studying to earn her certification as a sommelier. When Richard Beaumont and his bored wife Ilka visit the restaurant, Beaumont suggests that Keith might be the right material to work at his pink hotel. Keith and Kit are both gorgeous and Keith has the kind of superficial charm that plays well in LA. After Beaumont learns that Keith and Kit will be getting married, he offers them a deep honeymoon discount at his hotel and suggests that it would be worth Keith’s time to visit the place. The honeymoon offer is actually the idea of Beaumont’s wife, Ilka, who feels inspired by the couple’s young love. Once they are at the hotel, Ilka sets out to test whether their love is real — because, if it is not, then no love is real, including her own.

The guests and staff are amused by Keith and Kit. They clearly don’t belong among the elite. Keith has convinced himself that he belongs, but he feels a need to assure others that he recognizes Kit is “not cut from the same cloth as them.” He refers, for example, to her “hillbilly laugh.” Keith is clearly underselling Kit and Kit is not amused.

Since wildfires have left the hotel understaffed, Keith volunteers to perform various managerial tasks, expecting that his performance will lead to an assistant manager position at the hotel. Keith claims that he’s doing it for Kit, but Kit isn’t happy that she’s being ignored all day. For most of the novel, it isn’t clear whether Keith is even in the running for the assistant manager position. Beaumont might simply be using him as free labor in a time of crisis, or playing a prank on a middle class kid. Kit understands that he wants the job because of “the throbbing empty center of him, the void he tries to fill with expensive pretty things in the hope he will feel whole.” Kit would like Keith to make her feel whole, but he’s more obsessed with pretty things than his pretty wife.

Life at the hotel is frivolous. As Ilka observes near the novel’s end, “In this place, nothing real can survive.” Fires are devastating the hills surrounding Los Angeles, riots have broken out in the streets, but hotel guests are oblivious. They demand constant entertainment and endless supplies of Champaign and cocaine, anything to alleviate the boredom of wealth, to distract them from reality. Toxic twins have given their caracals the run of the hotel. The twins torment Marguerite, a spoiled teen who treats Kit like a new toy. Marguerite dresses up Kit in couture, changes her makeup and shows her off to her wealthy friends. By the end of the novel’s week-long timespan, the hotel has succumbed to the anarchy of its guests. Nothing real is surviving, but little about the lives of the hotel’s guests is real. In the end, they are no better than the protestors who riot outside the hotel, a class war fought without class or dignity on either side.

Love might be real but what is love in the Pink Hotel? “Love is a fantasy,” a hotel guest opines. Beaumont is having an affair with Coco, the hotel’s most competent employee who is nevertheless a glorified waitress. Since her husband is giving her no attention on their honeymoon, Kit is spending too much time with a hot construction worker. Keith reacts by responding to Ilka’s flirtation. This might be the stuff of soap opera, but it’s fun.

While mocking the wealthy is always a good time, the novel’s greater value lies in its dissection of the Collins’ marriage. Kit already feels like she has failed as a wife. She’s torn between love for her husband and a desire for the freedom she had before she became Mrs. Collins. When she tells Keith she doesn’t want to be a sommelier, that she might want to go back to school or become an artist, his response sends the message that he doesn’t believe she’s sufficiently smart or talented to make it in the world without his guidance. The honeymoon opens Kit’s eyes to the reality of her relationship. At the same time, Keith really does love Kit. He knows he should listen to her, knows that they should talk about their problems, knows what he should say to her. If Keith and Kit would just talk, their love might produce a middle ground that allows them to flourish independently and together. They both know that but the words never come.

The woman with five dead husbands might provide the key to the novel when she muses: “Learning how to be so filled with anger and hurt, sadness and fear — all the horrors life can throw at you, and still somehow offer love. Because how else could any of this work? Love despite the monster. Without it there’s nothing.” The novel ends without resolving the issues that are pulling the Collins' marriage apart, but exploring those issues in such a chaotic setting is sufficient. Engrossing events that cause multiple characters to melt down, just as the surrounding world is doing, make The Pink Hotel a bizarre but strangely compelling story.

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