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A review by shimmer
The Way Inn by Will Wiles
5.0
Will Wiles' first novel, Care of Wooden Floors (2012),* suspended its protagonist in the tragicomic tension of occupying another man's home, so perfectly designed to reflect the personality of its owner (a minimalist composer) that any other person trying to navigate it would be bound — like that protagonist — to chaotic misadventure. Wiles' new novel, The Way Inn , instead takes on a space tailored to no personality, the anonymous hallways and rooms of a corporate chain hotel with locations all over the world, each meant to feel as blandly familiar and welcoming to the corporate road warrior and conference attendee as any other. As those anonymous spaces become imbued with personality, the banal revealing itself to be idiosyncratic and unpredictable, so too The Way Inn becomes a novel between or across genres: the thriller, the haunted house story, the quietly reflective contemporary novel of work.
What intrigues me most is the complicating ambiguity the novel brings by way of these genre elements. Most thrillers, at least in my experience, reach a point of moral clarity — the good vs. the bad — and stories of threatening places ultimately negate the appeal of that place. The Way Inn, however, is honest about the pleasures of such anonymous spaces, that their disorientation can in fact be reorienting, like the shower in protagonist Neil Double's hotel room:
This stripping away, of experience, of accrued quotidian "filth," and of complication is akin to a past job Double recounts, in which he was responsible for finding cheaper replacements for the high-end building materials clients had actually contracted for, to produce husk versions of the buildings they actually wanted. It's cynical, and destructive, but there's also something appealing about reduction to a banal minimum — perhaps it's a dark way of achieving the simplicity and "presence" Peter Zumthor has championed in architecture.
It's that acknowledgment of the appeal, even as characters struggle against its source (and I'm trying not to give away much of the story unnecessarily) that most engaged me in The Way Inn, both intellectually and through the excitement of its increasingly action-oriented plot. There's a sense here of the thriller as a "proto-genre," something all-accessible and infinitely variable as a hotel space, like a field Double discovers near his hotel in which nothing grows, and where it seems nothing ever has grown or ever will grow, only layers of ahistorical nothing marking a quintessential opposite to natural landscapes (think, in contrast, of the rich layers of local knowledge and history and change over time pulled out of a "mere" field in a novel like Jim Crace's Harvest).
These spaces of Wiles' are horrifying, and cautionary, and yet… and yet they are also deeply appealing, as reader and protagonist are forced to acknowledge together. They are escapism incarnate, these spaces in which we might briefly become a stripped down, simplified version of ourselves — or not so briefly, if the appeal is so great or the career so all-encompassing we come to spend our lives in these spaces. Just as a reader prone to dismissing "less literary" genres like the escapist thriller or haunted house story — and less "significant" spaces like the conference hotel — might come to realize they can be richly complex, as complex and contradictory as our desires to step outside ourselves at times to feel like ourselves more fully.
* As disclosure, I reviewed Care of Wooden Floors for Ploughshares, and have since become friendly with Will Wiles, so these comments should be read in that light — I wouldn't review his new book more formally than on my own blog or here at Goodreads.
What intrigues me most is the complicating ambiguity the novel brings by way of these genre elements. Most thrillers, at least in my experience, reach a point of moral clarity — the good vs. the bad — and stories of threatening places ultimately negate the appeal of that place. The Way Inn, however, is honest about the pleasures of such anonymous spaces, that their disorientation can in fact be reorienting, like the shower in protagonist Neil Double's hotel room:
Every day the whole shower is reset by invisible staff, as if you had never been in it. In your shower at home, your repeated visits will eventually accumulate, and you must continually clean the unit. This, more than the dribbling water or the Swiss watchmaker precision needed to set the temperature between glacial and scalding, is the true disappointment of the home shower: you are constantly encountering yourself.
This stripping away, of experience, of accrued quotidian "filth," and of complication is akin to a past job Double recounts, in which he was responsible for finding cheaper replacements for the high-end building materials clients had actually contracted for, to produce husk versions of the buildings they actually wanted. It's cynical, and destructive, but there's also something appealing about reduction to a banal minimum — perhaps it's a dark way of achieving the simplicity and "presence" Peter Zumthor has championed in architecture.
It's that acknowledgment of the appeal, even as characters struggle against its source (and I'm trying not to give away much of the story unnecessarily) that most engaged me in The Way Inn, both intellectually and through the excitement of its increasingly action-oriented plot. There's a sense here of the thriller as a "proto-genre," something all-accessible and infinitely variable as a hotel space, like a field Double discovers near his hotel in which nothing grows, and where it seems nothing ever has grown or ever will grow, only layers of ahistorical nothing marking a quintessential opposite to natural landscapes (think, in contrast, of the rich layers of local knowledge and history and change over time pulled out of a "mere" field in a novel like Jim Crace's Harvest).
These spaces of Wiles' are horrifying, and cautionary, and yet… and yet they are also deeply appealing, as reader and protagonist are forced to acknowledge together. They are escapism incarnate, these spaces in which we might briefly become a stripped down, simplified version of ourselves — or not so briefly, if the appeal is so great or the career so all-encompassing we come to spend our lives in these spaces. Just as a reader prone to dismissing "less literary" genres like the escapist thriller or haunted house story — and less "significant" spaces like the conference hotel — might come to realize they can be richly complex, as complex and contradictory as our desires to step outside ourselves at times to feel like ourselves more fully.
* As disclosure, I reviewed Care of Wooden Floors for Ploughshares, and have since become friendly with Will Wiles, so these comments should be read in that light — I wouldn't review his new book more formally than on my own blog or here at Goodreads.