The Bird Hotel
Earlier this summer, I came across a piece in the Travel section of the New York Times that caught my eye: “The Accidental Innkeeper: How an American Novelist Became a Hotelier in Guatemala.” It turns out that Joyce Maynard, a novelist whose work I didn’t yet know, happens to own and operate a hotel at Lake Atitlán, my family’s favorite vacation spot during my growing-up years. So when I discovered that Maynard’s new novel The Bird Hotel (Arcade) was largely inspired by her time at Lake Atitlán, I knew right away I’d want to read it.
The setting for the novel, we are told, is wholly imagined. It takes place at a beautiful lake in a country (checks notes) to the south of Mexico, where indigenous traditions live on, where tourists wear hemp and do yoga, where one might eat foods like pepián and papaya. The lakeside hotel in the story is called La Llorona and not, for example, Casa Paloma. Looming over this imagined lake is one active volcano; Lake Atitlán, on the other hand, has three sleepy ones.
So, no, this is definitely not Guatemala. And absolutely not Lake Atitlán. Wink wink.
The early pages of The Bird Hotel—set in New York and San Francisco and a number of places in between—are marked by one tragedy after another. Before Irene ends up in the country with the hotel by the lake, she has been through a lot. An awful lot. She’s eager to get away, to start over. And she most definitely doesn’t want to talk about it.
This puts her in surprisingly good company with the others she will meet at the lake. “With rare exceptions,” the narrator tells us, “they were people fleeing their past and trying to write a new story. Concerning who they had been or what they’d done in the country they came from, most said little, if anything. That was the point. It didn’t matter anymore, what had happened before.”
Only, the past does matter. It matters in our lives and I have a feeling it will matter in this novel.
I’m nearly 150 pages into the story and an inciting incident has just occurred. We’ll see how things unfold from here.
