The narrator, a once successful author, finds himself without much to show for it. And he isn't writing much either. My idea was to keep moving. But moving, all those years, only got him so far. Now, instead, he settles down, taking a position as manager of the second-rate Hotel Honolulu.
Hotels are odd places.
The narrator is stuck in place. And that in isolated, insular Hawaii. The novel spans almost a decade, and yet there is little sense of time moving at all between the beginning of his tenure at the hotel and the end. People come and go. Which is certainly part of the point, as in many of Theroux's voyages to what is ultimately nowhere.