Portia Elby, the protagonist of Genevieve Plunkett‘s debut novel, In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel, has an uncertainty problem. She can’t recall if the person who once helped her break into her locked car was her lover, Theo, or her husband, Nathan. Portia isn’t senile; she’s only in her early thirties. She just lives “nestled into that place between fantasy and truth.”
That liminal spot — not quite the Dream Hotel but its lobby, in the title’s metaphor — is a fair description of where Plunkett places her reader in this absorbing novel. Readers of the Bennington author’s first book, Prepare Her: Stories (2021) may recognize the uncertain atmosphere. In that collection, girls, surprised at their own fantasies, are caught between wishing their imagined scenarios were real and wondering if they actually are.
In Portia’s nonlinear story, filtered through her emotional understanding of moments and experiences, we learn that her recurring fantasy is to get away from herself. She dreams of becoming someone else — someone who would wear only dresses from the Salvation Army, say, or the woman depicted in a children’s book who lives in a room above a marketplace.
At age 20, a college dropout and diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Portia has thoughts of self-harm that land her in a mental hospital for three weeks. She finds institutionalization an unexpectedly freeing “exit of crisp linens and stainless steel.”
Fantasies of escape reappear after Portia’s son, Julian, is born. (The close third-person narrative shifts repeatedly between periods of Portia’s life.) She plays “the Bus Game” with Julian, narrating to the infant “in light, cheerful tones” how she will leave on a bus without phone or money and, over time, become “unrecognizable, impossible to rehabilitate.”
But certain realities can’t be escaped. In the present, Portia is married to Nathan, a lawyer with controlling tendencies who constantly finds fault with his much younger wife. Portia has fallen for Theo, the divorced drummer in Poor Alice, the band she and her friend Carrie formed as adults. And she has gone off her meds without telling anyone, including Dr. Shay, her longtime and frankly admiring psychiatrist. The medication was making her experience of music — of life itself — feel “strangely sterile,” the narration reads.
In Portia’s nonlinear story, we learn that her recurring fantasy is to get away from herself.
The novel is set in a small Vermont town, but the state is a subdued presence. Plunkett alludes only to leaf peepers and weather, like “the heaviness of midsummer in Vermont [which] could feel like a looming pregnant belly, the storms hormonal, the heat prickly and nauseating.”
Portia’s bipolar condition, presented from within her experience, is similarly muted; her mind has a lot more going on than a single diagnosis. (Some critics have commented that Plunkett’s portrayal of bipolar condition is inadequate.) In a rare scene in which Portia’s disorder comes to the fore, she bursts into Carrie’s house in manic mode late one night and performs a song that just came to her. When Carrie plays back her phone video of the moment, Portia feels humiliated: The song is worse than mediocre, though she had thought it an instance of genius.
More pressingly, Portia must deal with a passive-aggressive husband who leaves Julian’s care to her but questions her every move. Trying to anticipate his criticisms, she saves hand-washing the dishes for the moment he comes home from work in order to look busy. Nathan once caught her thinking while staring blankly at a wall and asked, “Is this what you do? … I hope you will not space out like that in front of Julian.” Portia learns that “his accusations came wrapped and shiny in confusion.”
Plunkett’s novel is rife with uncertainty. Portia remembers knocking a giant cup of lemonade to the floor in anger after giving birth to Julian by unplanned cesarean, but Nathan claims she threw it at the ob-gyn nurse. And did she actually have sex with another mental patient during her early hospitalization, or did she merely sympathize with him, tolerating his lewd language and gestures?
Theo’s character could use some development; though he is divorced, he seems too similar to Portia, with parallel difficulties parsing fantasy from reality. And Nathan reliably delivers hurtfulness couched in marital love but never quite acquires any complexity beyond being a stand-in for the patriarchy.
In the Lobby is, from one angle, a novel about a woman feeling stuck in the roles of stay-at-home mom and wife of a manipulative husband, wondering what her life might have been had she pursued music instead. Alternately, it’s the story — as the book jacket copy puts it — of a woman “caught between a love affair and the wrath of her husband, who will do anything to put an end to it — even use his wife’s bipolar diagnosis against her.” But these are reductive plot summaries of a book that is, more interestingly, a portrait of a distinctive female imagination navigating the world in which she finds herself, both by choice and not.
From In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel
Portia had been playing guitar for a band called Poor Alice for almost three years. The name had been her idea, based on a misconception that she had long held about the lyrics to the song “White Rabbit,” by Grace Slick. The original version of the song opened with a lengthy, serpent-like instrumental that felt to Portia like swimming down, down, through watery light. Slick’s voice came in at a low register, at the bottom of this imagined light pool, confident and grave. Portia had seen footage of Slick, standing erect while she sang, not snapping her fingers or swaying or tossing her hair. “Go ask Alice,” she commanded. Her presence was a stare-down.
The “Alice” in the song was, of course, Lewis Carroll’s Alice — swallowing pills, changing size, caught in a hallucinogenic whirlwind. And the lyrics were not “poor Alice,” but, for a long time, that was what Portia heard when she listened to the song. The poor girl, becoming too large and then too small, the telescoping of the character, being used again and again in pop culture. Everybody thought they knew Alice. Everybody thought they knew what to do with her.
In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel by Genevieve Plunkett, Catapult, 368 pages. $28. Genevieve Plunkett in conversation with poet Michael Dumanis: Tuesday, September 26, 5:30 p.m., at Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury. Learn more at genevieveplunkett.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Uncertain Someone | Book review: In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel, Genevieve Plunkett”
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This article appears in The Performing Arts Preview 2023.
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