THE PINK HOTEL

Two newlyweds honeymoon in a Los Angeles hotel for the uber-wealthy while fires ravage the city.

When Kit and Keith Collins arrive at the luxurious Pink Hotel, Kit has no idea their stay is doubling as an extended job interview. Although the couple has met success—the restaurant at which they both work, he as general manager and she as a waitress, has recently earned a Michelin star—it’s still in middle-of-nowhere Boonville, and Keith has greater ambitions. Kit feels sidelined and disillusioned, spending her days drinking with the ruthlessly extroverted Marguerite instead of with her new husband. Keith, who “liked watching Kit transform from this unsure girl, an orphan really, to someone whose dreams matched his own,” grows increasingly frustrated that she isn’t enthused by this opportunity. “Had she expected they’d live in Boonville forever?” Meanwhile, fires destroy thousands of homes, and working-class people are rioting in the streets. A slew of bored billionaires flock to the hotel “for comfort,” and suddenly the hotel is understaffed and needs Keith to help—uncompensated, of course, except for the flimsy promise of future employment. Tension mounts, Veuve Clicquot and Dom Pérignon flow, and the hotel descends into chaos. “The ennui of the elite wasn’t some abstract concept,” Jacobs writes. “Their boredom can shift landscapes, collapse entire economies.” At a sentence level, the novel sings. The prose is pithy and precise, and one imagines Jacobs can summon any image with unsettling swiftness. The social commentary that underpins the story, however, is a little obvious. Out-of-touch billionaires are low-hanging fruit as far as social satire goes, and one wishes that Jacobs used her powers to nudge the story into more fruitful and nuanced territory.

A sharply written satire with somewhat heavy-handed social commentary.