The Pink Hotel

May 30, 2022
Jacobs (The Worst Kind of Want) returns with an amusing if over-the-top satire of the überwealthy. After a chance meeting at a hospitality conference, small-town newlyweds Keith and Kit Collins befriend the tony Richard and Ilka Beaumont, who invite the couple to honeymoon at their renowned Beverly Hills establishment, the Pink Hotel. Once Keith and Kit check in, Keith, who works as the general manager of his uncle’s restaurant and hotel, is enamored of the elite scene and agrees to help Richard attend to guests in hopes of securing a job offer, leaving Kit to spend time with a hard-partying young socialite who’s also staying at the hotel. Complications arise when Keith develops a crush on Richard’s mistress, Coco, whose cousin Sean (a construction worker helping with an expansion at the hotel) takes a liking to Kit after she faints from heatstroke and lands in his arms. Then things go off the rails as encroaching wildfires and rolling blackouts stir up angry mobs outside the hotel gates, while, inside, a guest’s exotic cats go on the attack, shots ring out, and tensions boil over. The chaotic climax is something to behold, but thinly drawn characters water down the satire’s potency, and the class commentary is a bit predictable. Readers who can look past a few wobbles will be easily carried along by the rollicking madcap sensibility.

May 15, 2022
Two newlyweds honeymoon in a Los Angeles hotel for the uber-wealthy while fires ravage the city. When Kit and Keith Collins arrive at the luxurious Pink Hotel, Kit has no idea their stay is doubling as an extended job interview. Although the couple has met success--the restaurant at which they both work, he as general manager and she as a waitress, has recently earned a Michelin star--it's still in middle-of-nowhere Boonville, and Keith has greater ambitions. Kit feels sidelined and disillusioned, spending her days drinking with the ruthlessly extroverted Marguerite instead of with her new husband. Keith, who "liked watching Kit transform from this unsure girl, an orphan really, to someone whose dreams matched his own," grows increasingly frustrated that she isn't enthused by this opportunity. "Had she expected they'd live in Boonville forever?" Meanwhile, fires destroy thousands of homes, and working-class people are rioting in the streets. A slew of bored billionaires flock to the hotel "for comfort," and suddenly the hotel is understaffed and needs Keith to help--uncompensated, of course, except for the flimsy promise of future employment. Tension mounts, Veuve Clicquot and Dom P�rignon flow, and the hotel descends into chaos. "The ennui of the elite wasn't some abstract concept," Jacobs writes. "Their boredom can shift landscapes, collapse entire economies." At a sentence level, the novel sings. The prose is pithy and precise, and one imagines Jacobs can summon any image with unsettling swiftness. The social commentary that underpins the story, however, is a little obvious. Out-of-touch billionaires are low-hanging fruit as far as social satire goes, and one wishes that Jacobs used her powers to nudge the story into more fruitful and nuanced territory. A sharply written satire with somewhat heavy-handed social commentary.

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June 1, 2022
The Monday after their September courthouse wedding, Kit and Keith trade their provincial Sacramento existence for a honeymoon at Los Angeles' Pink Hotel. When Kit realizes Keith will be too busy angling for a job at the luxurious establishment to relax in its poolside cabanas, she at first takes it in stride. But a lot can happen in a week. While the city burns with wildfires and police protests, the Pink Hotel is an oasis for elites. Plied with steady streams of top-shelf cocktails and the hotel doctor's IV ""infusions,"" they're kept wanting for nothing and cool among the grounds' dripping-wet tropical gardens. Jacobs' (The Worst Kind of Want, 2019) third novel is over the top in pretty much every way--there's a literal luncheon for couture-clad dogs--an orgiastic quasi-dystopia so sensuously described you might be watching it unfold on Instagram. Buzzing among Kit, Keith, and a slew of hotel staff and mostly eccentric and clueless guests, Jacobs tells us over and again what these characters look like, if not who they are, which might be precisely her point.

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