When you enter the negative universe of Rick Moody's "Hotels of North America," remember you are walking the same path Jonathan Swift took with "Gulliver's Travels," and J.P. Donleavy's "The Ginger Man." That way, when you read the hilarious scatalogical adventures of Reginald Edward Morse you won't stop at the political incorrectness. The "hero" of this novel, the unreliable narrator, disburthens himself of his adventures in hotels across the USA, throwing in a few in Europe for good measure. The book is structured as a set of online hotel reviews (mostly bad) but the author intrudes with his sexual escapades, criminal activities, and general misbehaviour. As Moody explains in his metafictional "Afterward" the story is as much about aloneness, the feeling of being separate as anything else. For Morse, being separate gives him the license for misbehaviour. Morse is a cad and a creep. His quasi-reviews make us wonder a bit more about the people whose reviews we actually read on TripAdvisor (me included). I'm sure there is a "Morse" Code, maybe a cynical man's da Vinci Code, and it could take some time to find it. Moody puts the pretentious on trial, the hotels and motels that try to deliver a retail experience and why we fall for them. A hotel stay is a peculiar form of reality we adore because we too are pretentious. Home is not good enough for many of us so we crucify our homes as dull and boring. We look for "reality" on TV. What drove this home for me was the very funny passage on the porn channels that can be found on the TV sets of "family" hotels. Porn is the antithesis of home. Destructive. Disgusting. Moronic. And a big time profit centre for hoteliers. Go figure. ( )

Quite fabulous, quite funny but also heart-rending. ( )

This was a difficult book to rate. I enjoyed huge sections of it, and found myself perversely drawn to the protagonist and his off putting voice, but there were enough drawbacks in the narrative structure and the choice to end on the note that it does that it kept my score at a three and not higher. But it's a fairly short read and subverts the online review culture in a tasty way, so I'd still recommend it. I just wish it went a little deeper at points and didn't have any afterward. ( )

Witty and entertaining by I got quickly bored of the format and repetitiveness. ( )

*Disclaimer* I received this ARC from a GR giveaway

I was really excited about winning this book. It seemed like it was a quirky, weirdly formatted novel, and I'm a sucker for that. I made it to page 44 and realized that I just wasn't enjoying reading it. I was bored.

The main characters are bourgeois grifters, and I think that maybe this is supposed to be a social commentary, but if it is it doesn't come across clearly.

I skipped ahead to the afterword hoping that it would lend some insight and make me want to continue with the book. Well, I quickly grew bored reading that as well.

I don't think this book is badly written. I think the author tried to do something interesting and fell short. It just wasn't my cup of tea. ( )