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. The cast of characters includes Buddy, the wealthy owner of the hotel, a practical joker who doesn't take too much too seriously, and his unlikely Filipino wife, Pinky, and her assorted relatives. But they do tell him their stories, and it is through them and through this that he does, eventually, find his way to writing again There are a wide variety of tales. Those of the guests, such as Roland Miranda, noisily working away in his room until he can lay himself to rest. Many of the women were taken advantage of in their youth.