Reviewed by D. W. White

It is a fortunate novel that can count among its achievements true innovation; it is an extraordinarily successful and fearless one that can innovate in multiple ways. Many books, including very good ones, are happy to redraw familiar patterns with a different pen, changing the shade but forgoing any fundamental shifts in the design. Looking at the current state of the novel, what one notices as mostly absent—and, depending perhaps on one's perspective, in need of reinforcement—is risk-taking at the sentence level: experimentation with the mechanics of point of view or the technical uses of language. Also, as nostalgia and culture move forward arm in arm, the 2008 financial crisis is only just beginning to be explored in fiction. And, long overdue, our society as a whole is finally evolving in the ways it discusses, thinks about, and reacts to mental health. These three monumental, disparate, yet equally urgent conversations come together to create the brilliant polyphony of literary innovation and social commentary that is Lucy Corin's The Swank Hotel.

Our heroine, Em, enjoys the external trappings of moderate success, while her inner life—and thus a large portion of the book's narration—is a turbulent wonderland filled with bolts of philosophical wisdom, temporal fluidity, and, above all, concern for and preoccupation with her missing sister, Adeline. We come quickly to learn that Ad has been struggling with unspecified mental health problems for at least a decade. Her "madness," as the narration ironically calls it, is an issue Em's parents struggle to deal with, and thus her wanderings, travails, and stays in psych wards are frequently handled by her sister. From the opening pages, Corin is in complete control of the gravitas Em's burden creates, layering her novel with verisimilitude and resonance.

The book proceeds in a loose interpretation of the classic linear plot. We come fully to know the stories of Ad, Em's boss Frank, her parents and the energetic cast that surrounds them, spending short bursts of rich pages with each in turn as the fictive world is expertly built. While the Great Recession serves as an effective temporal setting, it is more cosmic background than true focal point. Differing from Elizabeth Gonzalez James' Mona at Sea, another strong 2021 release looking at 2008 America, The Swank Hotel is more concerned with its characters' inner lives than society writ large.

As the book unfolds, Corin smoothly changes speed in her narration, and the movement from extended moments in a character's past to swift recounting of momentous weekends is almost imperceptible. The result is a work that retains its experimental creditability while giving full justice to an engaging plot. Em's search to find and reconnect with Ad has immediate emotional weight, not simply because of the surface level action, but because we see—via idiomatic language, accessed memory, and razor sharp prose—the love they share and the primacy of that relationship in Em's life: "The suicide note of a person resolved to action in the moments before suicide settles into plain speech. There is no sign of madness. There's a palpable absence of anger and bitterness, and without those things, an exhausted longing for beauty . . . [a] certainty that what was beautiful in her was inaccessible to others, that what was beautiful in others was inaccessible to her."

Fans of her previous work will recognize the elements of hysterical realism with which Corin is so adept as we hurtle through the complexities of Em's peripheral life. It is a testament to its technical skill and singular vision that The Swank Hotel, even while largely eschewing straight ahead exposition and navigating a wild, turbulent fictive world, never loses control or feels out of its depth. This fascinatingly inventive novel encompasses so much in so detailed a manner as to feel encyclopedic, combining plot-level ambition with sentence-level precision. Calling to mind both Rachel Cusk and David Foster Wallace, Corin expertly bleeds the narration into her characters' consciousness, histories, and perceptions:

As Em took the trash out to the curb—the very trash that held the remains of the catfight—she thought, here I go making a graph out of real life, that is just like me. It was tacky, no, it was shameful, disgusting, garbage, worse, it denied and belittled her mother's childhood, it was cruelly arrogant to make comparisons, like you have any idea what that must have been like, like you can ever imagine, even knowing a person like you know your mother, you can't know that, there are just some things that you can't know and if you think you can, well it's what you might call disrespectful, you might call it hubris, who do you think you are, seriously, get your mind out of—

She was going to go in to work at some point. It was unclear whether her absence had affected anyone, but up that hill could be a nice place to lay her brain.

This is risk-taking at the sentence level, moving between inner thought and external act—and fluidly across time and memory—at will. Corin drops authorial flags, confident that her audience will be able to discern dialogue from remembered speech, narrative action from free-associative thought. She at times even dips into the slippery underworld of autonomous monologue, the energetic running of first-person present tense found in James Joyce, Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport, and little else. 

Deftly aware and subtly evocative of its rich and varied literary ancestry, The Swank Hotel reads like a referendum not just on the 2008 financial crisis and the world it birthed, but on the state of the novel itself in the twenty-first century, an Infinite Jest-ian mad tapestry woven through tangent and aside, satirizing our modern age while managing to keep the focus on the immediate and the individual. When a book achieves so fully a cohesion of plan and execution, it is able to bend rules, break rules, make up rules on the spot, all without alienating its reader. Corin takes full advantage of the security of her position as unchecked artificer as Em's ongoing struggle to save her sister transforms into a bold, tenacious, and heartfelt analogue for the ills of the modern United States.

In a literary landscape where so much work is being done for the reader, and in a world unmoored from the promises of the new millennium, The Swank Hotel offers an admirable answer by plunging immediately and without hesitation into the eclectic, sporadic, and penetrating mind of her heroine. By running the risk of losing a few readers to choppy waters, Corin immerses the rest into the beautiful, brilliant madness of consciousness-forward fiction driven by a worthy protagonist, a timely reminder of what the novel can do in the hands of a skilled and fearless writer.