On not getting better

A conversation with Stuart Ross about The Hotel Egypt

Stuart Ross’s second novel, The Hotel Egypt, was released this fall on Spuyten Duyvil Publishing. It follows the ongoing saga of Tyrone Rossberg, who first appeared in 2019’s Jenny in Corona. Ross’s novel arrived like a breath of strange, the sort of book that takes risks and doesn’t do what you expected because you don’t know what to expect. Which is why I wanted to chat with him about it. We caught up over email, and at Lonesome Rose in Andersonville, where the beer was cold.

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Vincent Francone: I liked the part early in the book about Ty not knowing what a pencil skirt is. I don’t know what a pencil skirt is either. Not a question, but I thought I could lend Ty some sympathy in that regard.

Stuart Ross: You know what a pencil skirt is, Vince! Picture a J. Crew catalog. Or a Sally Rooney photo shoot for a major newspaper, which is what this moment in The Hotel Egypt satirizes.

Male authors can get super serious when they describe women, and I like to mock that. There are passages near the end of The Hotel Egypt—included in the excerpt published at D.F.L. Lit—with beautiful descriptions of female hair. I stole them from Saul Bellow novels. Bellow certainly knew what a pencil was. The Europeans gave him the Nobel Prize for it.

Vince: “How can we be living in this bourgeois novel when the ice caps are melting?” is very meta, no?

Stuart: I believe that’s spoken when they’re about to have a threesome. So it’s not meta to the situation they’re in. Again, that’s how Sally Rooney sells books. Sex and climate change. That’s hot. Maybe I can sell books, too.

Vince: Jenny Marks is a very well-drawn character. She seems grounded in, if not realism—

because nothing ever feels totally realistic in your work—then a more concrete awareness that prevents her from being simply the quirky and charming stock female character, the authorial wish fulfillment and broad ideas about what a woman should be that you usually find in male-voice dominated books like The Hotel Egypt. Even when we see Jenny again, late in the book, she’s distorted, depressed, as if she’s in possession of a sort of pragmatism or something that could never allow her to “save” Ty.

Stuart: That’s very perceptive. I think this comes from a midcentury model. If you look at those Philip Roth PBS documentaries, you’ve got Nicole Kraus and Claudia Roth Pierpoint talking about how Roth is a misogynist, OK, but he writes great female characters. That’s debatable. (Another fuzzy way to think about this is the evolution from Nathanael West’s Betty in Miss Lonelyhearts to Matthew Weiner’s Betty in Mad Men.) It’s no use trying to escape it. Like most white ethnic men, I was raised by women. So there’s that. But also, it’s good when the characters breathe. A lot of modern art fiction sounds like it’s on life support. I don’t want to support my characters I want them to fall.

Vince: Talk about Ellory Allen, the other well-drawn female human in The Hotel Egypt, She’s, like, the manic pixie nightmare!?

Stuart: I love Ellory so much. She started from a story I first read in Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny about Steve Bannon choking his wife in their driveway. I’ve known men in my family who choke women, so that hit me emotionally. She’s also modelled, partly, on a Trump family woman. Or at least that’s one way in to understanding her. She’s attractive. She’s raped by her cousin and driven to private abortions by her uncle. She loves the thread count on the sheets at Trump International. She’s racist in a postracist way. High culture belongs to her; she cries in museums. She’s an outcast, so an American character, like her miserable father. She’s also sentimental, like her father: when things go sour with Ty, she tells him, “the best things happen when you’re dancing.” She keeps trying to tell people she’s hurt. Nobody believes her. Except Ty. So they fall in love.

Vince: There are great speeches in The Hotel Egypt, like I remember the one about Kathy Acker running away from Lena Dunham and Tao Lin. They make me wonder if you’re speaking directly to us rather than hiding behind your characters. In fact, Ellory has a lot of speeches that are quite hyperbolic, but I find myself… swayed if not a little aware of some intentional irony. It’s always a thing with readers—we know better than to assume that a writer’s characters speak for them, but there’s a bit of suspicion that what we’re reading are the true ideas and beliefs of the author. I know better than to ask about your ideas versus the things your character’s spout, but I’m doing it anyway.

Stuart: Do readers know better? I’m not sure we do. Professors teach us to know better, but do we listen? You know, readers are different from bookish people like you and me. They’re very open. They don’t think about books all the time, like you and me. Readers are like undecided voters. Readers are looking for authors to author, so authoring is what I try to do.

My theory of the novel is dramatic tension. My characters are dramatic personages. They wear rags, shields, pencil skirts, masks. I want it to be a beggar’s banquet. I’m sure your readers know the first sentence of Fielding’s Tom Jones: “An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.” In this economy, I disagree with Fielding. We’ve all got plenty of money, and there are hordes of great writers and AI generators keeping this public ordinary. I would rather give a private treat. That’s why I put ice cream on the cover of Jenny in Corona.

I like what you say about speeches. Speeches are like, at the end of pop songs, when the singer has run out of things to say and goes, “Nah nah nah, yeah yeah yeah.” If books are to be books, they need great speeches. There’s supposed to be big swaths of content the engrossed reader will get excited about, underline or bracket or make exclamation points, smiley faces. Or you know when you find a book in the stacks at Harold Washington, and someone’s written I HATE HIM in the margin? That’s usually during a great speech.

Vince: Jenny returns, and the story gets less surreal the closer Ty is to her, even in his dream(?). Even the birth of a child doesn’t ground Ty the way she seems to. An observation, not a question, but feel free to comment on this anyway.

Stuart: We were talking about this at the bar. I can think of the structure of The Hotel Egypt as the inverse of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. In those six stories, a man who can only define himself through a woman, like Ty Rossberg, is dating a grounded woman, like Jenny Marks. He meets a wild woman, like Ellory Allen, and goes through a wild time with her that makes up most of the film. But, in the end, he returns to the grounded woman. That’s Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. In The Hotel Egypt, the fragile man stays with the wild woman. It’s an immoral tale.

Vince: The book has the ultimate Restoration Era Drama give-a-character-a-name-as-a-way-of-telling-the-audience-what-they-represent character, the newborn child, Hope. I love that obviousness, the sort of sneer at the reader who demands more coded metaphors. Or am I guilty of some post-post-modern embrace of guileless sincerity here?

Stuart: I think it’s sincere. I think they’re very sad, sincere people, Ty and Ellory, so they name their child Hope.

Very early in the book, Ty tells the reader, “I mistrust stories that offer the reader hope.” (An echo of Hemingway’s immortal, ironic line, “I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together.”) Ty compares himself to sentimental books, and says there will not be, “twists in my next installment, that my emotional circumstances will untangle, that the backend of my story will offer the reader hope.” Even with a child named Hope, as you mention, Ty isn’t going to get better. Everyone these days is always getting better. I certainly got better.

Vince: Congrats on getting better. What are you working on now?

Stuart: I’m always working on a quicker way to get from Terminal 2 to Terminal 3 to catch an Uber home. Sometimes I take the Blue Line to Jefferson Park and get the 92 back east. In terms of books, I want to write about a very young man, one who doesn’t even know yet that he’s “not better.” With each book, you must become a new man. I love this quote from Friedrich Schlegel, “Isn't it unnecessary to write more than one novel, unless the artist has become a new man? It's obvious that frequently all the novels of a particular author belong together and, in a sense, make up only one novel.” I’d like to become a new man, but not in the way I’m thinking.

Buy The Hotel Egypt

Check out Stuart’s Substack