The result, of course, is retrospection, though Butler is careful to indicate that Michael’s and Kelly’s memories hardly match, or even coincide. The isolation that has led to their divorce is evident in how separately their minds work, and in how ineffectual their attempts at communication have always been.
Butler does a good job of not being a divorce lawyer in this case. He’s interested in developing the inner life of each character, not in blaming the wife for being too demanding, the husband for being too withholding, or the mistress for keeping her eye on the main chance. He does not seem to be choosing one or the other as the protagonist or, more important, the antagonist.
One of his techniques is to construct each story from the inside out, making sure the reader knows these characters before revealing what they have done. The result, in some ways, is all the more poignant because each character’s romantic missteps are shown to have been the result of years of habit.
Michael, in particular, has spent his entire life avoiding using the word “love” because when he was a boy, his father equated showing affection not merely with weakness but with pain. Love, according to his father, could not be worthy except as a form of wordless striving to please. As a result, Michael has spent his marriage doing just that. Kelly, confronted with Michael’s impervious surface, eventually develops habits of good behavior that hide her own attempts to find a deeper connection.
Butler does not seem to be asking larger social or political questions in “A Small Hotel,” but the fact that the novel is set on the Gulf Coast is no accident. Michael, Kelly and Laurie live in a culture that prizes that impervious surface that Michael has cultivated. Symbolic of this is the costume party Michael takes Laurie to, where she wears a Civil War-era ball gown. (we remember here that Scarlett O’Hara had a 17-inch waist). The dress is hard to get into, hard to manage and uncomfortable, but it represents an ideal of romantic dash and stoicism that everyone aspires to, except during that one week per year at Mardi Gras when manners fly out the window. Like the gown, the hotel Kelly checks into is neat, beautiful and flower-bedecked. The whole city is so quiet as to be almost depopulated. A few emergency messages get through only when cellphones happened to be turned on.
At the beginning of the novel, all three characters are confident that they know what will happen next, which presents Butler with an artistic challenge: no apparent suspense to the plot. But “A Small Hotel” does not turn out to be purely retrospective, purely analytical. As former feelings are recalled and old conclusions reexamined, uncertainties arise. The most dramatic of these is whether Kelly will actually swallow the long line of pills that she has laid out on the table in her hotel room.
As a result of Butler’s evenhanded rendering of his characters’ virtues and failings, the reader feels that the climax is more fascinating than compelling, more interesting than dramatic, but in “A Small Hotel” he has performed an unusual and worthy feat. The puzzle may have only three pieces, but each of these has many facets, and the way they eventually fit together delivers a surprising charge.
Smiley is the author of many novels for adults and young adults, and several works of nonfiction.
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