Alix Strauss: The Luxury Hotel as Literary Platform

It’d been nearly a year since the last time I saw Alix Strauss, which had been the launch party for Death Becomes Them, so I was delighted to meet up with her recently to chat about her second novel, Based Upon Availability—which is a bit like her debut, The Joy of Funerals, only “run backwards” as Alix puts it; where that book told the stories of several women and then tied up all the narrative threads with one longer story at the end, this one starts out with the story of Morgan, a manager at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, as she encounters a batch of women through the course of her work, then backtracks to explore what brought each of those characters to the hotel.

“I was fascinated by hotels and the idea of anonymity,” Alix said of the novel’s origins. “I love the idea that you could be anybody from anywhere, check into a hotel, and then the minute you check out, that room is wiped clean and any presence of you is erased.” Why the Four Seasons? “It’s signature, it’s branded, everybody understands it—there was that instant recognition of the hotel, but also an instant recognition of the kind of person who stays there.” For research, she spent a lot of time in the hotel’s lobby and restaurant, and relied on her previous experiences writing about it in a journalistic capacity, then spent a night in one of the rooms, “channeling” one of her multiple protagonists—in this case, a middle-aged rock star whose publicist has checked her into the hotel to go through withdrawal. “I ran around naked, had an unlit cigarette dangling from my lips, slapped on some fake tattoos, brought a bottle of vodka with me,” she recalled. “I ended up laying on the bathroom floor like my character does, trying to induce this psychotic lapse into inebriation and lunacy.”

So what does the Four Seasons think of its latest literary recognition? “I got a call from the PR person, who I’ve known for a number of years,” Alix told me. “She said, ‘We can’t stop hearing about this novel, can we get a copy?’ And that was a couple of weeks before it came out. I’ve not heard from her since… but I hope that they embrace it in the sense that it was meant, which was as a huge tribute to the hotel. Yes there are a lot of shenanigans that go on, but what hotel doesn’t have that?” In the meantime, she’s been doing readings in a number of other hotels in Manhattan and other cities; tomorrow night (July 21), for example, she’ll be at the Liberty Hotel in Boston.

20 July 2010 | interviews |