The Swank Hotel

by Lucy Corin

A stunningly ambitious, prescient novel about madness, generational trauma, and cultural breakdown

At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dependable, dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously waits to hear news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing—again. Em’s days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house (bought with a “responsible, salary-backed, fixed-rate mortgage”) and her dreary office. Then something unthinkable, something impossible, happens and she begins to see how madness permeates everything around her while the mundane spaces she inhabits are transformed, through Lucy Corin’s idiosyncratic magic, into shimmering sites of the uncanny.

The story that swirls around Em moves through several perspectives and voices. There is Frank, the tart-tongued, failing manager at her office; Jack, the man with whom Frank has had a love affair for decades; Em and Ad’s eccentric parents, who live in a house that is perpetually being built; and Tasio, the young man from Chiapas who works for them and falls in love with Ad. Through them Corin portrays porousness and breakdown in individuals and families, in economies and political systems, in architecture, technology, and even in language itself.

The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, unforgettable, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel that interrogates the illusory dream of stability that pervaded early twenty-first-century America.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

406 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 5, 2021

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The October 2021 selection for The Nervous Breakdown Book Club seems the most deserving to be read by a “club” with such a name—at least of the ones I’ve read. I don’t mean that in a light way; it’s a book about serious mental illness and of more than one character, though it’s Ad, the beloved sister of Em, the main character, who’s the focus.

I don’t know (there are a lot of “I-don’t-knows” for me in this work) if living with the consequences of her sister’s mental illness is what attunes Em into seeing mental illness all around her, or if that’s the point—that there *is* mental illness all around us—or if the consequences of Ad’s being declared dead after a suicide attempt (and Em living with that so-called fact for days before she hears otherwise) and then her not dying is what triggers the arguably self-destructive actions of Em herself.

I don’t know how to describe the prose style of this work, or who might like it, though certainly there’s an audience for it. It’s wordy—nothing minimalistic about it at all—and disorienting, which is appropriate for its subject matter. It’s also about the several characters’ (literal and metaphorical) place in the United States during the 2008 financial crisis. With banks foreclosing on starter houses and jobs being lost as pink slips are attached to small severance checks when businesses abruptly fail, it’s no wonder bad (re)actions are triggered. This unsettled U.S. seems a lot like today’s, except for superficial things like flat-screen TVs and cell phones just starting to become ubiquitous.

I never wanted to put the book away, but it did take me longer than usual to read. I didn’t feel a real thrill with it until the second section, a sort of interlude to the rest of the text, called “Voices,” which employs different techniques, including a section written and illustrated by Corin’s real-life sister (the inspiration for Ad). This section helped me to both connect with and understand what the writer’s doing, though I don’t know if I’ve grasped it all, including the full meaning of the novel’s title.

Architecture is an important symbol throughout. The most memorable passage for me comes late in the book and describes a certain section of L.A. (the rest of the novel is set in various, mostly unnamed, locations across the U.S.) becoming incorporated into the landscape of Em’s dreams. At a different point I thought the key to the work might be that I was in David Lynch-territory, but the next second I found the comparison inaccurate, though maybe I’m wrong again.

Hours after thinking my review could only be “I don’t know how to review this,” I see I’ve written paragraphs.

[SWank567 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disclaimer: this review is written by someone with intimate/close knowledge of the people depicted in the book.

Lucy Corin, creative writing teacher @ UC Davis from Berkeley Hills, California attempt to fictionalize her own family's history leaves a lot of open questions and raises a number of concerns regarding the ethics of writing about family trauma. Particularly troubling are the depictions of her sister, Emily Hochman (referred to as "Adeline" in the book), who has been struggling with mental health issues, and whose life provides the DNA for this book

As visual artist, writer and activist Emily Hochman is addressing her mental health history for decades. It represents the very core of her identity and is documented on her webpage (www.emilyhochman.com) and her social media blogs. She talks frequently about the connection between mental illness, vulnerability and trauma resulting from excluding people affected by mental illness from public discourses and participation in our society.
Hochman talked about such topics in radio documentaries (“All the pretty little horses”, “Thoughts of suicide” etc) and essays for mental health advocacy group “Mad in America”. On her social media blogs she talks about how abusive behaviour towards people with mental illness can become the source for trauma and instability and how such circumstances can become dangerous triggers for vulnerable people.

What is so outrageous about this book is the fact that in those 10 years it took Corin to finish this book she never consulted her sister, never asked for any type of permission to use those highly personal biographic details from her life. For Corin it was rather more important to consult her lawyers and editors - to be sure if she can legally get away with such publication. 
Emily Hochman writes: “I found Lucy’s manuscript in its almost-final edit. I flipped to several more pages. What I saw was my life. It was my suicide and my coming back to life and my psychosis and my hospitalisations. In case the question came up how Lucy had such intimate knowledge of mental illness, that’s how. And I felt like this is MY story, it’s MY book to write.“
Hochman found Corin’s manuscript purely by accident, when it was ready for print. It was a deeply traumatic experience for her. 

In 2012 when Hochman was hospitalised in Berlin, Lucy Corin attempted several times to contact her sister in the psychiatric ward from California. Hochman developed a strong aversion for those calls and told her doctors that she believes that her sister is only contacting her because she wants to educe descriptive details about her hospitalisation which she plans to use in her upcoming book about Hochman. At that time doctors, family, friends assumed that those were symptoms of paranoia and delusion, but years later it turned out that this was the beginning of Corin’s work on „Swank Hotel“.
In those 10 years Corin never approach Hochman for a professional, in depth conversation in order to gain more insights about her illness/condition. She rather continued with her manipulative, secretive methods to extract intimate insights from her sister's life, 

Reading this book, one is immediately struck by Corin’s ignorance and lack of understanding of mental illness; it is nothing short of astounding.  . As if approaching an all-you-can-eat buffet: Corin simply grabs episodes from her sister’s biography and turns them into ill-conceived narrative twists, with utter disregard for consequences, stigmatisations or potential triggers. For Hochman her identity as neurodiverse individual is the center of her identity, for her sister it’s just a commodity, capital that she can acquire/employ for free. At what point does ambition turn into narcissism? 

Just because you are in a position of power, to write a book, it does not make it right, or ethical, to appropriate biographies of vulnerable people. Check your privileges, Lucy Corin.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am giving this 4 stars instead of 5 as a judgement that The Swank Hotel will not be for everyone. It almost was not for me. I would call it experimental. I would call it tough and challenging. I would also call it amazing.

Two sisters battling mental illness as it affects their relationship and navigating the increasing insanity of 21st century culture. Told by the supposedly sane sister. Long reflective passages that read like fever dreams. Tortured relations between many characters.

If you like novels that follow a predictable pattern about people who grapple with and overcome life's problems and leave you feeling uplifted or comforted this is not for you.

I like to read a certain percentage of novels that are downright weird and put me inside the heads of characters that I could never be. I almost gave up on Lucy Corin's story and characters but I am so glad I persisted because she gave me courage to keep it real in my own writing, she gave me permission to admit that I am weird by "normal" standards and to tell my story without worrying (too much) about how I might come across.

I thank her for that from the bottom of my crooked little heart!

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If you decipher what the madman means, you may yet understand yourself and what it is you must do. You have to look through their eyes to do it, which may make you crazy, too. You’re so brave, though, if you look.”

A masterwork — a force of genius and verve. Unforgettable.

[Melissa Malouf · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's 2008-2010—not 2001, as the skimming reviewer for the NYTimes put it. This reviewer did take the time to read a screed in an online platform about Corin’s supposed “exploitation” of her real sister’s real mental illness, the same real sister who has her own chapter about reading the book. The reviewer concludes, in my view derisively, that this novel is taken from “direct experience.”
Far from it: the direct experience here is that of a writer writing, making sentences and whole paragraphs that are searching to make sense of the world in which her sister, and so much else, is missing. The economy has tanked, our heroine and her co-workers have crappy jobs, and then they lose them. Em--said heroine--has already lost her bearings, is alienated from far-away family, is obsessed with her missing sister, the mad woman who has long-since taken up residence in the attic of Em's mind. And what a mind it is!
Her missing sister is there, but so is the news on the radio, the mundane language that permeates the culture, the mesmerizing dead baby jokes Em's father reads on the computer while he waits for the missing/dead? daughter to wake up. "On Saturday afternoon, Em talked to her father, who said Ad was brain dead but, as an organ donor, remained on life support. Sunday morning...Em's father called and said that Adeline has moved her hand."
Of course Em has to fly west, where her sister Ad had been found, overdosed, in a swank hotel; there is a madwoman on the plane who “began to vocalize the private part of her brain.” Em “could not discern the madwoman’s affect as she allowed herself to be led [off the plane], if she was resigned, suspicious, begrudging, afraid, perplexed, immune, anxious, detached, enthusiastic, grateful, amused, deflated, pensive, sour, defensive, righteous, forlorn, deadened (though there are plenty of things it was definitely not).” Indecisiveness, guess-work, thumbing through possibilities is one of the many thrills of this novel. Before she heads west, Em spends some time fucking the janitor in the now-empty office building: “She remembered a sex moment when she’d been, privately, with him but not with him, an undocumented animal, not quite fox, not quite bird, not quite salamander, and another moment when she’d been an animate piece of furniture, hilariously something not quite a table and not quite a sofa and not quite an armoire.”
Em eventually stays in a motel near the hospital, where she walks
"through the corridors and units, along the green path to the ICU. Monitors blinking, making low groans and faraway rhythmic beeps in watery darkness. Not recording normally is how she felt in its vicinity.... We are surrounded by math."
She leads us to see that we are also surrounded by the "ordinary" madness of self-checkout, of passwords, of whether we need to be afraid of India or China, of this country bombing "some countries transparently and some countries covertly." On the radio she hears about a madman who has stopped highway traffic by walking into it and across it and is then on top of someone’s car, cursing, yelling at the sky. Her former co-worker Frank, serial divorcee, is “in love with a man off his rocker,” who is himself married to a woman who yells at the world “We are adrift!” shortly before she slips off a kitchen table with a knife in her hand. What is going on here in this mad world?
I’ll offer one more extraordinary moment, in my effort to continue to whet your appetite: “She’d also made that mistake people make thinking they can get it right. I don’t think you can get it right. Not now, not in these conditions. If ever. I think you get up near it. You have your shape next to it, and feel for its shape. You remember that you are insubstantial, that matter is the finest wordplay you ever held in your mouth. You bring a mouth to the idea of a mouth, you bring eyes to eyes, even imagined eyes. You bring your whole body up to the limits of your imagination. All you got.”
And in giving it all she’s got in these must-read pages, Corin’s missing sister will never be missing again, ever.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Corin's challenging and funny book, although I should be clear, this isn't a laugh out loud work. It requires reading with close attention, and expects a reader willing to engage it on its level. The novel centers around Em and her worry about the whereabouts of her sister, Ad, who suffers from psychosis. Increasingly throughout the novel, Em's grasp of reality also seems to be tenuous. Additionally, she encounters more and more madness, from her co-worker's unstable boyfriend, the estranged wife of said boyfriend, her parents and their odd obsessions, and the workers helping to renovate their home. The madness seems to inflict the very building where she works, the city outskirts, and even the narration of the story. Told generally in 3rd person, the novel occasionally slips into first person, suggesting a storyteller beyond that frame. One might even expand the madness further when a reader learns that Lucy Corin's sister in some ways resembles Ad, but one also notes that Corin's sister's name is Emily–or Em for short. In fact, Emily gets her own chapter in this book.

I heard Corin speak at the AWP conference in Seattle and immediately went downstairs to buy her book. If you like Lucy Ellman or William Gaddis, this is in your vein. It can be disorienting, but rewards the engagement.

--

"The image of herself was swimming through the hallways of the swank hotel, its overwrought carpets and mirrored wall coverings, desperate bedclothes and curtains turning visceral, its elevator shafts bulging, the angles and grids of its layouts dissolving to fractal mush so that as she swam, though she'd never been a graceful swimmer, forward was the direction she was taking because it was the direction of her body, and the direction the body took was always toward her sister, and when she arrived--then what? then what?--the fantasy of the sacred, shared--of healing contact and insight--dissolved into the violence of penetration, inhabitation, occupation, violation."

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is like the female autistic version of Fight Club, only much more ambitious and complex. The book is about madness, neurodiversity, the mortgage crisis, architecture and space, the psychology of crowds (briefly), and much more. Don't read further if you don't want spoilers or if you want to approach the novel on its own terms, from a clean slate.





After reading the novel, and having family members who experience psychosis myself, I suspected that the author, Lucy Corin, had lived experience with the material described in the book. Corin has stated in an interview from The Nervous Breakdown Book Club posted on Literary Hub that the book was inspired by an event in her life: the death/reversal of death of her sister, https://lithub.com/lucy-corin-on-the-.... In the acknowledgments, Corin credits Emily Hochman and her mind for being "intrinsic" to the novel. (Hochman is a talented artist and illustrator, who has written about her experiences in the psychiatric system: https://www.emilyhochman.com). However, in her acknowledgments, Corin does not identify Hochman as her sister. Artwork and a piece of fiction from the Hochman are also included in the novel. In an Instagram post, Hochman describes her sister's book as "fictionalized, not fiction": https://www.instagram.com/p/CU5c4DDIC... Moreover, Hochman writes in this post, "The discovery that Lucy's new book so heavily and intimately drew on my life and our private dialogue threw me for one of the biggest loops of my life and caused a rupture in our relationship that we are still navigating. This is all addressed tidily in my written piece, which somehow comes in the overarching form of a synopsis of an episode of My Strange Addiction." Previous to publication, Hochman's husband had spoken out about the content of Corin's novel and her right to tell her sister's story, which he characterizes as an ethical violation: https://swank-hotel-review.medium.com.... Yet, the cover of the book, which is Hochman's art and the Instagram post by Hochman suggests that this is a complicated collaboration/relationship, with no easy ethical resolutions regarding how someone can tell their own story (or a story) when that story so intrinsically involves a person who is vulnerable.

I really admire this book, and I'm now a fan of the writer. But it's a book that was challenging to read at times for me personally. I'm looking forward to letting some time pass and reading it again.

[Ilana · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly exquisite read. I will be thinking about it for a long, long time.

[Maddie · Rating 1 out of 5]

did not finish, this book is not only poorly written, dense, and from the point of view of a personality-less character, but also the way in which it was written is so problematic and steals intimate details of mental illness from a family member without her consent (read the one star review written by SWank567 for more info)

[Michael Howley · Rating 1 out of 5]

The seven page graphic description of a porno isn't enough to overcome the three and a half pages of 12-year-old edgelord dead baby jokes. I hated this book BEFORE I found out the author had lightly fictionalized her own sister's mental illness and suicide attempt without her consent. Fun this book all the way into the trash where it belongs.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The narrator is writing about her mad sister, but much of the time the narrator seems like the mad one herself. That can only be deliberate. Flashes of brilliance, moments of insight maybe, lots of outlandishness, much sadness and loneliness and bereavement. None of it really worked for me. A reviewer called it "antic," but he must have confused this book with a different one.

[Dhruvit · Rating 1 out of 5]

gave up halfway i had no idea what was going on at any point in this book

[Vivek Tejuja · Rating 4 out of 5]

The themes explored in “The Swank Hotel” are large and sometimes hit home very closely. There is familial loss, grief, a tangled web of relationships, and a lot of times just plain confusion.

It took me a while to even get to the core of the novel – which is discontentment, the madness surrounding all of us, the madness we are all a part of it, and yet constantly living day after day.

Em, a corporate employee is haunted by her sister’s disappearance. Her sister, Ad, who has battled mental illness for much of her adult life, and this disappearance isn’t a new one. This plagues her everyday living to a large extent and there is this unspoken guilt that she cannot get rid of. At the same time, there is her manager Frank who has a long-time affair with a married man, Jack, who Em obsesses about. We also meet Em’s parents who are in the state of constantly building their home, which also becomes about their age.

The plot of The Swank Hotel is perhaps not a plot in that sense and yet there is so much going on in it. The structure of the book moves from stream of consciousness at times to vignettes to people just being left half-way in the plot only to come back with no tying up of the story, and yet everything comes together in its own way at its own pace. The writing is sharp, meandering, touches the core, and sometimes just the surface, and all of it is imperfectly perfect, just like life and the medley of characters we encounter in this work that is experimentative and unique.

[Mark Frangia · Rating 1 out of 5]

While a fan of chick lit and many serious female authors, I was sorely disappointed by this recommendation. I managed to struggle through the first 45 pages before laying it aside feeling overwrought by all the psychotic stream-of-consciousness the author employs to tell her jumbled story. If you're looking for a narrative of a dysfunctional medicated (and not) family, this is it. But I found no redeeming humor in it to lighten the burden of mental distress the characters live with.

Mark di Frangia, author

[Sara Gerot · Rating 5 out of 5]

The reviews for this are kind of killing me. This book is fantastic. The last time I enjoyed a book on to this degree was reading DFW. And Corin is even a bit funnier than him. This isn't for everyone, and I get that, but come on now. . . the writing is masterful. This is a genius book.

[Eva · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5