Fiction This article is more than 6 years oldReviewThe Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O’Neill review – descent into a fairytale underworld
This article is more than 6 years oldTalented, in love and separated, two orphans search for each other in a burlesque world of violence, lust and make-believeIt is said that every novel should teach us how to read it, school us in the particular conventions to which it will adhere; and that whatever those conventions are, they should produce an internally coherent world. When I reached the scene in The Lonely Hearts Hotel where Rose, who has just miscarried, puts her dead baby in her coat pocket and goes out for a bowl of soup and I didn’t bat an eye, I knew I’d been taught how to read this novel.
Heather O’Neill’s novel, longlisted for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, begins in 1914. Rose and Pierrot, each abandoned by a teenage mother, end up at a Montreal orphanage. Rose is a rebel, theatrical and introspective. Pierrot is happy, musical, acrobatic – either a genius or a fool. He falls in love with Rose the day she is made to stand on a chair as punishment for masturbation, the only girl to have earned the dishonour.
The nuns charged with caring for the two are envious, cruel, prone to perversion, and set about defiling their innocence. But one day, Rose and Pierrot impress a wealthy woman with their piano playing and dancing, and soon they are performing for rich people all over Montreal. Escape seems possible, happiness imminent.
As the mother superior knows, though, happiness always leads to tragedy, and Rose and Pierrot are farmed out as teens to separate homes, with no idea where the other has gone. Initially, Pierrot fares better than Rose, but he is someone to whom things happen, and a lack of street smarts means that his fall from grace is swift and hard. Pierrot never quite adapts to his loss of innocence. Rose, the more canny and more tragic of the two, can calculate exactly what she has lost.
Heather O’Neill’s 2006 debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, dealt with similar themes, some drawn from her own childhood. Abandoned by her mother, O’Neill was raised by her father in a rough neighbourhood in Montreal and had a closeup view of the streets. The experience seems to have left her determined to see wonder in unlikely places. There is violence in this novel and there is make believe, but the world is seldom simply either/or. A drowned mouse in a jar floats “about with its arms spread, as if it were truly amazed by life”. The book is full of such images, filtered through an off-kilter sensibility that charms and disturbs. After lustily bedding a gangster, Rose and her bad guy sleep peacefully: “That’s the way you got to sleep before you were born.”
This novel is neither gritty realism nor noir, not Commedia dell’arte nor dystopian fairytale, but a bit of all of themThere is surely a sweet spot where you place just enough obstacles in the path of your protagonists, and O’Neill comes close to missing it. For almost 200 pages, Rose and Pierrot are separated, yearning for each other. There is some wonderful writing along the way, but the innumerable near misses and thwarted meetings pile up to the point of feeling gratuitous. Still, we root for these two, and even as I grew impatient, I admired the novel’s big-heartedness, its defiant affirmation of the whole seedy, sad, beautiful burlesque that is the life of these characters.
In the end, I got something other than the love story I had been expecting. In fact, this is a feminist novel, with Rose ever reminded that biology shapes destiny. She is keenly, cynically aware of her currency as a woman, and eager to feel “the grandeur of being responsible for oneself”. O’Neill writes with frankness about female sexuality, here crude and hungry. Rose is an inversion of the chaste princess: “She liked the idea of being ruined. She was curious to see what would happen to her if no man would marry her.”
This novel is neither gritty realism nor noir, not Dickens nor commedia dell’arte nor dystopian fairytale, but a little bit of all of them. A lot hinges on a stolen apple. Pierrot and Rose descend to the underworld in search of each other. And if the novel’s excesses trip it up, this same promiscuousness results in a work of unusual generosity.
Molly McCloskey’s new novel, When Light Is Like Water, is published by Penguin on 27 April. The Lonely Hearts Hotel is published by riverrun. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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