[In the following review, McCue offers a negative assessment of In a Hotel Garden, arguing that Josipovici fails to connect with his readers.]

What feels like a crisis of choice may actually be a needless piece of worrying, and yet the truly important changes in our lives may happen without our caring, or even noticing. The life of feelings, just beyond our grasp, is but a dance around the life of actions.

Some such elusiveness is the subject of Gabriel Josipovici's new novella [In a Hotel Garden]. The writing is calm, polite, reserved—all those things one learns to be as one grows older and puts out of sight the wild feelings that few of us can handle. Here, statement follows statement: these things at least we can be sure of. “Francesca puts the food away methodically, the bread in the bread-bin, the vegetables in the vegetable-rack, the butter and cheese in the fridge, the sugar and marmalade in the cupboard.” With its exaggeratedly perfect fits (“bread in the bread-bin”), this evokes the concentration with which a child puts the triangles and stars in the triangular and star-shaped holes. But fulfilling the task is a distraction from the shapeless question “Should I phone her?”

On holiday in the Dolomites with Sandra, his girlfriend, Ben has met and become intrigued by a Jew called Lily. He tries to decide how strongly he is attracted, and whether he should pursue her. But because they are grown-ups it has all to be done unnaturally, as though a matter of indifference: a cappuccino shared here, a walk there, a non-committal meeting back in London. And the prose reflects these feints. There is no mention of sex, for instance.

Lily and Ben go for a day's strenuous hike around a mountain. Fitter and better prepared, Lily leads the whole way. It is a circuitous kind of conquest but, unlike scaling sexual heights, it is possible without a daring presumption, simply by “putting one foot mechanically in front of the other.” As in Josipovici's Distances, walking allows a stranger to be forward without putting a foot wrong.

Meanwhile, Sandra is complaining more and more about the holiday she and Ben were supposed to be sharing. The day after the walk, she announces that she is going shopping, and the assumption of togetherness falters:

—Do you mind if I don't come with you? he asked her,

—Why should I mind? You do what you like, don't you?

—I mean I'd come tomorrow but today all I want to do is rest.

—Well I rested yesterday, she said. Today I want to go and do some shopping.

The feeling of slight here is painfully at odds with the apparent reasonableness. Under cover of an adult conversation about logistics, Sandra is withdrawing and accusing Ben of lack of consideration. First she snubs his question about feelings—“Do you mind … ?”—and then she flatly echoes him: “today all I want to do …”; “Today I want to go and. …” This is heartless, in pretending that repetition is reciprocation. Now, instead of sharing, they are taking their shares, using the car in turns.

Whingeing Sandra is an unsympathetic cypher; indeed Josipovici is rather bold to ignore her side of the story. On their return to England, she leaves Ben, who is well rid of her. “—I was rather cool actually. … I'm quite pleased with the way I handled it. I stood there for a long time, cup in hand, just surveying the scene.” What might have been expected to be a moment of anguish is reduced to a chore of clearing up her belongings, putting away the past.

Emotion in the book remains elusive, to characters and to author; but after their walk around the mountain, Lily shares some intimations with Ben. She has been to visit a hotel garden in Siena, where as a girl her grandmother had been attracted to another Jew. That attraction came to nothing—the man was not Lily's grandfather—and Lily even fears that she may have visited the wrong garden; yet, somehow, as she in turn wonders whether she should accept a proposal of marriage (to which no answer can be exactly correct), she is suffused with intense feeling: “feeling the place and feeling how it must have been all those years ago and feeling time sort of standing still before starting to flow again.” There seems to be no rack or cupboard for such intuitions. The experience was, says Lily to Ben, “Like a particularly vivid dream that leaves you with a strong feeling afterwards but there seems to be no way from the feeling to any account that will convey why it feels like that.” But literature can mediate between experience and feelings. By stating rather than confronting the difficulties, Josipovici concedes a defeat.