The Weary Motel

This book, by Mark Spencer, is one of the best books I've read all year. Mark Spencer is a realist, who gives us characters weighed down by their pasts, by their personal failings, by their bad choices, by their surroundings. These are people who spy on their boyfriends, respond to chain letters, cheat, drink too much, neglect their children, and otherwise live up to the "trailer-trash" stereotype in every possible way. Spencer cracks open their bleak little lives - gives us such a deep, intimate look at them that we can't help feeling their pain and, after a while, starting to root for them.

The novel largely revolves around Dill and Jo Rene, siblings and survivors of a childhood marked by TV dinners and a father who disappeared repeatedly to indulge his fetish for crippled women. Adults now, Dill and Jo Rene are still stuck in grim Adams County – a place of sordid poverty and bleak prospects. Dill owns the Weary Motel, a place frequented most commonly for its hourly rate. Jo Rene cleans the rooms. Her young daughter, Kari, has been missing for five months, kidnapped by her father, and this Jo Rene can never forget for more than an hour. Spencer brings this suffering woman to life so vividly that you can almost hear her crying in the next room. Like her brother Dill, she is a tangled confusion of good qualities and bad; perhaps the word that sums her up best is human.

The surprising thing about this book is that there is humor in it. Dark humor, but humor nonetheless. This, for me, provided a needed counterpoint to the often poignant scenes that sometimes made me think about having a cry. Spencer pulls it off flawlessly and it actually gives the book a richness that I think might be missing otherwise. The characters and plot lines are quirky enough to keep things from descending into unremitting gloom.

The ending is satisfying and, though I won't give it away, I will say that Spencer avoids cleaning things up too tidily. It's a realistic ending and, as such, in keeping with the rest of the book.

This is a good book, a memorable book, a book that is by turns funny and bitterly sad, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.