Hop Alley

Hop Alley by Scott Phillips.   192 pages

This book is a follow-up to Cottonwood (2004) which featured a Kansas town in 1872 and saloon owner and photographer Bill Ogden.  Eventually, Bill turns up in San Francisco in 1980, but it's not clear what he's been doing in the interim.   Hop Alley answers those questions, and gives us Bill Ogden, now living as Bill Sadlaw, in the frontier town of Denver in 1878.  He's now running a photo studio near the Chinese part of town knows as Hop Alley, and carrying on an affair with Priscilla, a singer addicted to laudanum.  However, Bill's life isn't easy; he has to face the murder of his housekeeper's brother-in-law, Priscilla's increasing instability, and the riot that is simmering in Hop Alley.

Admittedly, I would not have picked this book up if it hadn't been part of a project I'm working on right now.   I don't usually read westerns (Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry is the exception).  The fact that this is a western written by an author who is known for his noir writing does make it more interesting.  However, I never warmed up to Bill, or really cared about him too much.  The fact that he has a lively sex life (not romantic life; there is a distinction) didn't really add much to the story for me.   What I found more interesting was that he is a photographer, and I would have liked a bit more about that in the story.

I'm not sure what kind of reader I'd suggest this book to.  It's not noir, but I don't know if it has enough appeal to readers who really enjoy westerns.  My suggestion, if this sounds like an interesting story to you, would be to read about it on Goodreads and see if it sounds like your kind of book.

Hotel de Dream

 

Hotel de Dream by Edmund White  228 pages

I picked up Hotel de Dream because I’d read that it was a great read and that it was a forerunner to the popular woman-behind-the-man novels that are so popular right now (think The Paris

Wife by Paula McClain or The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin). Plus it had an extra bonus of having a novel-within-a-novel (Margaret Atwood’s The Assassins). I just love those types of books. 

Hotel de Dream’s featured couple is Stephen and Cora Crane. Stephen is twenty-eight years-old and is dying of tuberculosis. Cora want to go back to England, but fears Stephen is too weak to make the trip. In part, they are trying to escape the gossip mill that swirls around Cora…after all, she is the former owner of a bordello in Florida.

The book jacket says that the Cranes “live riotously, running up bills they ca never pay.” Maybe it 

was because I read only to page 50, but they didn’t seem to be living the high life by any means.

Crane was often visited by his esteemed contemporaries, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Author White makes a huge mistake when he brings a people like James and Conrad by only using their last names. I had a hard time following when the characters first showed up, trying to figure out who they were.  By the time I reached page 50, I had the style figured out, but it still annoyed me.

Then there is the problem of the novel-within-the-novel. It seems that the Cranes are desperate for money, Stephen, in a rather delirious state, begins to dictate a novel to Cora.

And this is where White really lost me. I read the first excerpt, then the second, but by the time I finished, I was just grossed out. The “new” novel is about a very young male prostitute and his homosexuality. The graphic descriptions are what turned me off.

As a reader, I give Hotel de Dream, one star. The early pages of the story are confusing. As a writer, I give the novel four stars (out of five). Aside from the previously mentioned confusion, once I got past it, the book is well written; it’s just not kind of story though. White’s book has an audience, I’m sure, it’s just not me.