The M&M cookies are a little stale? Send a dispatch, and then reflect and perhaps grouse: “when I am stressing, in a lecture on motivational speaking, how certain words can do a lot for you, fresh is often a word I often rely on.” Reginald has a few characteristics in common with Anne Tyler’s Macon Leary, though in The Accidental Tourist, Tyler takes a somewhat more forgiving view of us foible-philic humans. The conceit runs deeper, for Moody’s ( The Four Fingers of Death, 2010, etc.) Reginald Edward Morse-his trinomial perhaps an indication of Brahmanic tendencies and amplitude of ego-has a seeming need to criticize, sometimes fussily but usually rightly, and moreover to let the world know of it. Thanks for the synopsis, Captain Obvious.
Still, this is an amusing, vibrant narrative.A motivational speaker, who's often on the road dispensing wisdom though he has problems of his own, turns to reviewing hotels online-and Moody tells his story primarily through his reviews. And the afterword, in which Moody inserts himself into the text to track down the "fragmentary" Morse, could've been removed. However, the wryly perceptive passages about the hospitality industry, which include a hatchet job on bed-and-breakfast inns, occasionally give way to slightly mawkish outpourings.
In his delightful archness and strategic reticence, Morse is reminiscent of the epicurean narrator of John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure. The online reviews look back over a period of roughly 40 years, from Morse's childhood stay at the Plaza Hotel in 1971 to a visit to a bedbug-infested Bronx motel in 2014. The novel consists primarily of an idiosyncratic collection of hotel reviews written by Reginald Edward Morse, a sporadically employed motivational speaker leading a life of "nomadic compulsion." A hotel site's top reviewer, whose real-life identity is a mystery, Morse mixes in autobiographical accounts of his own professional, familial, and romantic failures amid disquisitions on the "diversity of key and lock design" and hotel pornography ("at the heart of travel in America"). Moody's (The Four Fingers of Death) clever latest explores the narrative possibilities of online reviews, that form of democratic criticism crucial to the success of everything from toaster ovens to literature itself.
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