In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel: A Novel

by Genevieve Plunkett

Overview

Finalist for the Vermont Book Awards

A young mother finds herself 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

When faced with newfound feelings for Theo, the drummer of her band, married young mother Portia must decide whether to follow her heart or question her sanity. Going off her medication feels like waking up for the first time. But could this clarity be harmless daydreaming, or a symptom of something more serious?

Portia’s husband, a well-respected prosecutor in their small Vermont town, is convinced of the latter. He retaliates, initiating an intervention, claiming that Portia’s behavior is proof of her bipolar disorder. With lawyer-like cunning, he uses elements from her past to break her resolve until she agrees to being committed to a psychiatric hospital. In the hospital, Portia’s sense of reality is tested, and hard truths about her marriage, her love for Theo, and her most vulnerable hopes and desires are revealed.

In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel is a potent and at times devastating story of stark tenderness. Written like a dream, this novel brings us toward new understandings of the flawed, yearning, multifaceted self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646220489
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	1,057,933
Product dimensions:	5.82(w) x 8.54(h) x 1.14(d)

About the Author

GENEVIEVE PLUNKETT is the author of Prepare Her: Stories. Her fiction has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best Small Fictions, as well as journals such as New England Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, and Electric Literature. She lives in Vermont with her two children.

Editorial Reviews

06/12/2023

In Plunkett’s perceptive debut novel, a young mother and musician struggles with bipolar disorder and her controlling husband. Portia Elby is 20 years old and a recent college dropout when she’s first admitted to a psychiatric hospital. After she’s discharged, and still wearing the hospital’s plastic ID bracelets, she meets Nathan, a prosecutor 11 years her senior, who initially seems fascinated by the “young and troubled” woman. Their relationship progresses to marriage and pregnancy within a few years, and Portia, whose rock group Poor Alice has developed a “small following” in Vermont, tries to balance motherhood and marriage with the “sacred” intimacy of being in a band. Nathan grows increasingly bothered by Portia’s need for affection and her tendency to daydream, and his frustration culminates when he finds out she’s stopped taking her bipolar medication because she’s worried it’s stifling her creativity—and has started an affair with Theo, the band’s drummer. Short, intense chapters reflect Portia’s mental state and preoccupation with finding what she really wants out of life (“Sometimes I feel like I have to choose myself again every day. From scratch”), and the story’s momentum dwindles and surges along with her moods. It adds up to an incisive portrait of mental health and the search for autonomy. Agent: Reiko Davis, DeFiore & Co. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

2023-05-24
An intimate, fractured case study explores the relationships and inner perspective of Portia Elby, who has bipolar disorder.

“A garish heap of self-loathing in her head” is one glimpse of how Portia characterizes herself in Plunkett’s first novel, a nuanced portrait of one woman’s years of mental and social struggle. Married to lawyer Nathan, with a beloved 7-year-old son, Julian, Portia currently spends her time playing guitar in a small rock band called Poor Alice and visiting her aging psychiatrist, Dr. Shay. Her nervous anxiety became acute at age 13, and by 15 she was in Dr. Shay’s care, although this didn’t prevent her from dropping out of college and spending time in a mental hospital, where she cut herself. Now, as a wife and mother, she’s found stability through Dr. Shay’s pills but at the price of “a fine, elusive layer of her spirit,” so for the last six months she has quietly stopped taking them. She has also fallen in love with band member Theo, who seems to reciprocate her feelings. But matters come to a head when Nathan—often a chilly, manipulative, critical presence—discovers the pill accumulation and stages an intervention. Plunkett’s presentation of Portia, her history, choices, feelings, and stranger notions, is far from linear. Instead, the novel unrolls scenes, moods, and events out of sequence, requiring some patience and unpacking, not least regarding various men in Portia’s life. There are also manic episodes and delusions regarding long-dead musician Alby Porter, all this delivered in slices interleaved with the intervention and its aftermath. Simultaneously sensitive to Portia’s perception and muddy in its chronology, the novel succeeds in accumulating a faceted psychological profile, but its indulgent length (including excursions into Theo’s point of view), the absence of plot dynamism, and the limited appeal of the characters leave it partially stranded.

Stronger on empathy than engagement.

Kirkus Reviews

Finalist for the Vermont Book Awards

"Plunkett applies a soft touch when rendering minds in turmoil, offering both reader and character relief through the escapes of music, love and small-town landscape." —Wadzanai Mhute, The New York Times Book Review

"[An] absorbing novel . . . [A] portrait of a distinctive female imagination navigating the world in which she finds herself, both by choice and not." —Amy Lilly, Seven Days

"Portia’s observations are nothing if not sensual, if not original offerings for the reader." —Geri Lipschultz, Atticus Review

"Bracing . . . Plunkett’s vivid narrative is an intense, dizzying exploration into elusive realities and volatile truths." —Booklist

"[A] perceptive debut novel . . . An incisive portrait of mental health and the search for autonomy." —Publishers Weekly

"A nuanced portrait of one woman’s years of mental and social struggle." —Kirkus Reviews

"Genevieve Plunkett's In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel is an engrossing read that takes readers into the heart of what it means to be a mother, a wife, a creative being, a human with a heart that longs for more. Plunkett's prose sparkles in every paragraph and kept me turning the pages long after my bedtime. Most importantly, her nuanced treatment of the decisions that people managing mental illness must make every day will comfort, inspire, entertain, and enlighten readers." —Christie Tate, New York Times bestselling author of Group

"In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel is a spellbinding novel, alive with feeling and discovery. Plunkett orchestrates an enrapturing story of a woman and mother tethered to a reality she would rather escape with bold jumps in time, nuanced observation, and flights of imagination. A book as much about the mundanities that trap us as it is about creativity’s promise of freedom, In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel is an absolutely brilliant feat. I can’t wait to see what Plunkett does next." —Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

"In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel is a beating heart of flowing paths and urgent questions: how do we tell the difference between our dreams, our fantasies, and our possible futures? How do we step from one life into another, not knowing if the earth under our feet will hold? In this sensitive, suspenseful novel, Genevieve Plunkett fearlessly dances between past and present, between wanting and having, between loves laced with cruelty and loves aching with tenderness and possibility." —Caitlin Horrocks, author of Life Among the Terranauts

"In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel is a truly brilliant novel. This is a story about madness and music, forbidden love, entrapment and escape–all written in Plunkett’s electric and propulsive prose. It’s the most compelling novel I’ve read all year; I couldn’t put it down. Stunning." —Anna Hogeland, author of The Long Answer

"In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel mesmerized me: the quicksilver music of its language, the keenness of its observation, the richness of its empathy. Plunkett has made her protagonist's interior world into a whole lush landscape and filled it with desire, loss, tenderness, humor, and tragedy. The result is a novel full of wild, irresistible life." —Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson

From the Publisher