Based Upon Availability by Alix Strauss

Review by Mayra David

Harper Paperbacks, 2010

A hotel is the perfect setting for Strauss’ characters; eight women passing through the lobby and rooms of an impressive and impersonal hotel. Like hotel rooms, bodies may come with standard fixtures, and one can never tell who is living inside. The characters in this book feel free in their own heads, as they do in their hotel rooms, to wallow in their neuroses, fetishes, and poisonous feelings just as long as the outside world doesn’t notice. A hotel room can always be wiped clean of a person’s presence, their mess; nobody cares about their pain.

Strauss’ doesn’t flinch at all when taking first one, then another woman under a magnifying glass. While I think it is brave to tackle such psyches head on, I quickly felt disinterested in her main character, Morgan, the hotel’s manager, who gets the first few chapters of the book. Morgan, bereft by her sister’s death nearly 25 years ago, is a dispirited, destructive person – monotonously so. She regularly enters occupied hotel rooms and tries on guests’ clothes, takes their beauty products and prescription medication. It’s not a simple case of sticky fingers. Rather, it seems she is trying to penetrate their privacy, getting to know them in the way she wishes somebody would do with her, force a connection with her, and bring her back to life.

The succeeding chapters each deal with one of the other seven women and we don’t get back to Morgan till the very end. Here, Strauss hits her stride. The other characters are just as richly developed, if not more so. They have more interesting quirks and stories. Anne, for example, a borderline (she confirmed online) obsessive-compulsive concierge, was both frightening and entertaining all at the same time. Not entertaining in her OCD ways, but entertaining in that she goes beyond the walls of the hotel: into the city, on a date arranged online. And Trish: The back of the book will tell you she is consumed with envy for her newly skinny, newly engaged best friend. But that hardly begins to describe the bundle of pain and aspiration this woman seems to be.

With a plot, this could have been a great novel. The elements are there: great characterization, crisp writing. But instead the book is really a collection of short stories that uses Morgan as a thread to function as a novel. Generally this works very well, though at times it feels forced. The strongest thread through these stories is really the uniformity in their voices. Though heard from different points of view, it’s the same voice whether it’s being told from the first person or a close third person. Even the unusual second person perspective is an ill-conceived notion in this case.

The other women are well-developed in varying degrees. Strauss is a skilled writer, that much is clear. She knows how to create a person on a page. If only she had given them room to breathe, perhaps asked Morgan to move over a little and make some room for the other lovely, lonely, damaged women.

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