The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a love story with the power of legend. An unparalleled tale of charismatic pianos, invisible dance partners, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss. In a landscape like this, it takes great creative gifts to thwart one’s origins. It might also take true love.
Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1910. Before long, their talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing clown routines, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most extraordinary and seductive circus show the world has ever seen.
Separated as teenagers, sent off to work as servants during the Great Depression, both descend into the city’s underworld, dabbling in sex, drugs and theft in order to survive. But when Rose and Pierrot finally reunite beneath the snowflakes after years of searching and desperate poverty the possibilities of their childhood dreams are renewed, and they’ll go to extreme lengths to make them come true. Soon, Rose, Pierrot and their troupe of clowns and chorus girls have hit New York, commanding the stage as well as the alleys, and neither the theater nor the underworld will ever look the same.
With her musical language and extravagantly realized world, Heather O’Neill enchants us with a novel so magical there is no escaping its spell.
This book is unlike most. The few reviews that I’ve seen for it have compared it to The Night Circus, but I would disagree with that, because while The Night Circus relies on it’s rich and whimiscal writing style to set the atmosphere, The Lonely Hearts Hotel relies on it’s visceral emotional pull. Rose and Pierrot are the most misfortunate of all orphans — unparalleled in their misery, yet they seem to rise out of the ashes each time. You can’t help but feel for them, hope they’ll find a happy ending in all of this mess, but the blows keep on coming.
The difficulty with books like this is trying to sort out what I thought from the mess of things I felt. Heather O’Neill writes with an occasonally disturbing honesty — I had to close my eyes a couple times while reading the book — but she balances it with carefully written descriptions of mudane objects, her prose hinting that there may be a thin veil over this world; one that we’re supposed to see right through.
Perhaps it sounds as though this book is a romanticized version of one of the darkest times in Montreal’s history. Perhaps it sounds as though everything will be softened by the fadings of a jazz age, but I assure you, it’s not. O’Neill rose to promincence with her bold debut, Lullabies for Little Criminals, and though I have not read it, I gather she has never shied away from a difficult topic. You will both love and hate Rose and Pierrot. You’ll shake your head at the mistakes they make yet fitfully try and understand how they could still be upright after the cruelty they’ve gone through. You will want everything for them, yet nothing. You will see yourself in a dark Montreal and want nothing but to leave. At least, I did.
It’s bold and different and powerful, but sometimes it was exhausting. I went days without wanting to pick the book up because I’d seen enough suffering on the news that day without having to immerse myself back in these character’s pain. Powerful emotions were overused in the storyline, in my opinion, and it made some of the scenes ring like cheap gimmicks. Shock value. Rose and Pierrot are broken people who think they can fix each other, and it’s painful to try and understand because it’s so very hard to fix people. Maybe it’s impossible. I didn’t think that I would feel as much as I did when I picked this book up, but it’s stayed with me like a knot in my chest. I doubt I’ll ever read it again.
(I’m going to Montreal this weekend, on a completely unrelated note, and I’m definitely excited to be back in the city for the first time in a couple years.)
trigger warnings: everything. if you have triggers, please do your research, because I promise you that this one’s got something for everyone.
- from Quebec, Canada.
- read October 2017.
- published 2017, 391 pages.
- I checked out my copy from my local library.
Have you read this book? Any of Heather O’Neill’s other books? What did you think?
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