Nothing is so erotic as a hotel room. So the narrator of Paul Theroux's powerful new novel, Hotel Honolulu, tells us. Theroux locates this sexual allure in rooms permeated with the presence of those who briefly call the place home, and, with equal clarity, he summons up the melancholy of hotels, their aspiring elegance, their improvised and impoverished encounters, their soulless bars, their loneliness.

Theroux's narrator is a writer who has stopped writing. On a whim, he goes to Hawaii and finds a new job as a hotel manager. Here, to complete the scenario of a full-blown, late-mid-life crisis, he marries a much younger local girl (the illegitimate daughter, he supposes, of J. F. Kennedy). He raises their daughter, incompetently learns his job, befriends Buddy Hamstra, the irrepressibly extravagant hotel-owner, and, above all, he bears witness to the lives of others. Like a modern Canterbury Tales, Hotel Honolulu is a compendium of travellers' tales, the unhappy life-histories of the hotel's workers and guests.

In this book, everyone has a hidden secret, but, unfortunately, it is the same secret. The answer to the riddle too often turns out to be sex. The variations in private sexual behaviour become increasingly tedious, so that when we learn, for instance, of the he-man who likes to wear little panties and be sodomized by his mistress, or of the hotel's owner who spanks his mail-order bride and locks her in a cupboard, all we can do is suppress a weary yawn. By the time Theroux confronts us with the titillating details of exactly how Wallis Simpson maintained her hold on the Prince of Wales, we are already becalmed in the terrible monotony of sexual desire. However, we soon learn that, after all, sex isn't the final key to the hidden life. For behind the dreary perversions lies an overwhelming and inert despair. At times, the novel seems to be setting out to confirm Quentin Crisp's acid aphorism: “Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.” The story of Pinky, the mail-order bride, is a modern “Clerk's Tale,” in which she makes her way through a world where women patiently suffer the cruelty of men. An abused child, she becomes in turn a lap-dancer, a victim of a crooked abortionist, a motel truck prostitute, and always the scapegoat for men's sexual desires. That this modern Griselda should end up inheriting the hotel and achieving the desirable goal of becoming American is perhaps fitting. But, as with Chaucer's tale, the end somehow fails to justify the means that took her there.

At times, Hotel Honolulu irritates and depresses with its knowingness and its harsh portrayal of purposeless lives. Yet Theroux's heart and mind are clearly in the right place. In the end, the book even feels innocent, the novel of a sensitive soul talking tough and masquerading behind a cynical detachment that he hardly feels. Even the narrator's egotism feels innocent, an example of boyish self-assertion that permits him to imagine himself as a peer of Henry James. (Leon Edel, a resident of Hawaii, is luckily on hand to confirm this apotheosis.) And behind the book's despair lies one more key to its meaning. Its real subject is story-telling, and the thread that holds the whole thing together is the writer himself. Unlike Chaucer's elvish invisibility that takes in everything and passes unnoticed, we have instead the narrator's insistent, self-regarding presence. Theroux's narrator is a voyeur of the human heart, incorrigibly “mele, as the Hawaiians said. Nosy.” This view of the writer's psychology, with his decision to stop writing, at first seems to be a literary way of attacking literature. Most of the characters never read, and they look on the narrator's past career and indeed literature itself as dull, alien and irrelevant. Again and again, the narrator's bookishness estranges him from his new companions. But this pleases him. At least he is saved from “my old indoor life among bitter writers and overfamiliar readers, the well-meaning bores of literacy.”

Theroux uses Hawaii as a symbol of a place and a culture that have left books behind. Only the tacky columns of the local newspapers mean anything here. There could be problems with this. Theroux might be suggesting that the Pacific island represents the absence of literary culture by being absorbed in the ever-new presence of nature. And more than that, it could be that the island's Americanization entails a pre-emptive eradication of the literary by a culture addicted to money and the pursuit of hedonistic pleasures. The narrator's mid-life crisis is therefore not just a personal loss of direction, but a symbol of a global breakdown in literacy. Theroux's writer has to justify his own vocation to himself, but also, by implication, to everybody. Perhaps such anxieties are superfluous; reading literature has always been a minority activity. None the less, the question that Theroux asks in this novel is a fundamental one. Why should anyone write, and, just as important, why should anyone read?

Above everything, Hotel Honolulu defends the literary, storytelling, that habit of mind that engages with endless and compassionate curiosity concerning the lives of others. Writing justifies a life. At the book's close, Theroux's narrator returns to his vocation as a writer. And when the narrator's daughter, Rose, chooses the path of her novel-reading father against the pragmatic, empty and contented silence of her mother, then we know a happy ending is truly in sight. Just as the writer is reborn, another reader enters the world.