57 pages • 1 hour read
Elin HilderbrandThe Hotel Nantucket
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Online World
Online life permeates Hilderbrand’s novel and is an important motif, both in terms of Hilderbrand’s writing style and crucial plot points. The real space of an old-timey seaside resort like Nantucket, set in its architecture and aesthetic, is juxtaposed with content about it online, which ranges from TravelTattler reviews to Instagram and Snapchat posts. This gives the impression that the virtual space around the experience of The Hotel Nantucket is continually shifting in line with people’s views on it. The online space infiltrates the characters’ lives and threatens to change them irrevocably, especially in the sexual blackmail perpetrated by Alessandra and Edie’s ex-boyfriend. Even Grace, the ghost, becomes familiar with the new social media empire and haunts a bully’s phone with a holographic image of herself breathing fire, because she knows that this is the best way to spook a young, 21st-century woman.
The infidelity that propels Lizbet to change her life and become the Hotel Nantucket’s manager is virtual one, composed of sexually-explicit text messages and images sent between JJ and Christina. Hilderbrand juxtaposes the reassuring intimacy of Lizbet using JJ’s password—her birth date—to take the annual Deck end-of-summer picture with the betrayal lurking in the same device. The phone acts as a symbol of JJ’s private world. Ostensibly, Lizbet, with her birthday as the password, occupies this space with him. However, the presence of another woman’s body and sexual demands indicate that Lizbet is no longer the only one for him. Lizbet screenshots the messages, showing that she is gathering evidence to make a case against JJ. Although JJ and Christina protest that they were messing around and that Lizbet is overreacting to purely digital evidence, Lizbet experiences their misdemeanor as real infidelity, telling JJ that “you tossed fifteen years of my love down the drain because you couldn’t stop yourself from telling Christina that you wanted to tongue her nipples” (51). In Lizbet’s imagination, the digital cues are enough to provoke the same reaction as a flesh-and-blood betrayal.
Just as her discovery of JJ’s infidelity is digital, Lizbet initially turns to the Internet for solace after the breakup. She searches for inspirational quotes and memes to feel better and clear a new path for herself, and she considers that she has reached a new level of success when she begins work at the revamped Hotel Nantucket. With this, she crafts a new, streamlined image, as she “feels like a living, breathing inspirational meme” (47). The meme refers to the exalted, giddy nature of Lizbet’s self-satisfaction, but as an artificial construct, it has a superficial relationship with how she truly feels about herself. Hilderbrand shows that the Internet’s promise of transformation is limited, and Lizbet must go inward and confront her past pain to truly heal from her betrayal and learn to trust again.
The Haunted Hotel
Haunting is a key motif in Hilderbrand’s novel. While Grace, the vengeful, attention-seeking ghost, is the Hotel Nantucket’s chief haunter, the hotel is also haunted by various groups of people. Grace conforms to the classic definition of a ghost in being a soul with “unfinished business on earth,” as she feels that the truth of the wrongs toward her has never been reckoned with (25). The sentence describing how Jack was “ashamed about having a mistress, and so he let her burn” describes the visceral impact of these irresponsible, rich people’s attitudes toward Grace, with the word “burn” evoking literal incineration as well as the more spiritual sense of being damned to hell (25). Grace’s anger and healthy sense of entitlement lead her on a century-long mission of letting people know that she is there, even if she is limited to the confines of the hotel.
As a hotel ghost who can intimately observe guests’ lives, Grace also becomes haunted by the popular culture of the time. For example, in the 1980s, with its plethora of movies about paranormal activity, Grace hopes to take advantage of this interest by “properly haunting” the least honorable hotel guests as a means of seeking attention (25). However, the owner is so spooked by the haunting, that he merely sells the hotel, never investigating the phenomenon. A similar thing occurs with the partying high schoolers, who briefly Google the ghost but are too lazy to dip into the archives that would dredge up Grace’s story. Lizbet seeks to distance herself from the story of what happened to Grace for fear that it will put off guests, and she hopes that the hotel’s lavish renewal will distract from the tragedy. Ironically, the reverse becomes true: People come for the ghost and stay for the renovation. Meanwhile, Grace finds her salvation in Wanda, a little girl who is just as determined as her to discover and publish the truth of what happened a century ago. This allows Grace to be fully herself, haunting people happily or punitively according to what she thinks they deserve.
Grace is also haunted by people, feeling the impressions of a person’s soul and, by extension, the truth of their essence. She can see Alessandra’s rottenness behind her polish and Richie Decameron’s danger behind his “regular guy” front (141). While Grace is surprised at the feeling that overtakes her when she sees Richie’s benign appearance, she never stops being suspicious of him, even as others such as Kimber, Lizbet, and a local cop overlook evidence of his wrongdoing. This indicates that ghosts are better judges of whether a person will make trouble than humans.
Food
Food is a crucial motif in a novel where the heroine’s love interests are chefs. The elaborately prepared dishes that use local, seasonal produce are lavishly described, designed to whet the appetite and impart a sense of pleasure, luxury, and novelty. For example, after the tough day when Lizbet learns that Christina has replaced her as the new front-of-house manager at the Deck, she heads to the Blue Bar. There, Mario plies her with food and drink that immerses her in the present. For example, the Heartbreaker cocktail named after her has a multisensory effect, as “the strawberry and ginger and blood orange square-dance on her palate—spiraling out, reeling back in” (158). The metaphor of dance indicates how Lizbet is being transported out of the past to a merrier time in which anything is possible.
While the cocktail expresses the heightened aspects of Mario’s love, the accompanying food—“golden, crispy, paper-thin potato chips” with an “amnesia sauce” that looks like Thousand Island dressing—indicates that he will be a comfort and a companion (158). Mario’s cooking acts as foreplay to his performance in the bedroom, where he is equally passionate and careful; Lizbet feels that “Mario tends to her, he makes her ache” and waits for the next act of pleasure (183). This is akin to his delivery of surprising new dishes in the kitchen and presents a consistent picture of his personality.
The relationship between food and sex becomes firmly established in Lizbet’s mind when she begins to monitor Yolanda’s trips to the kitchen and sees how the comely health guru emerges with off-menu concoctions that suit her particular appetites, for example, an acai bowl. As Lizbet knows that Mario is sensitive to her own taste buds, she can easily picture that he is doing this for another woman, too. Lizbet discovers the truth about Yolanda’s lover (and private chef) in another food-based setting, the Proprietors of India Street. There, she finds Yolanda and Beatriz dining as a couple, a signal to her to disrupt the old-fangled partnership she is creating with JJ by sitting in a spot they favored in the past. Her refusal to finish eating her food indicates that she is leaving the past behind, as she leaves to be with Mario.
JJ, for his part, learns that good cooking is not enough to entice customers on its own. He finds that following Lizbet’s absence, “there’s no love, no magic” that can alchemize food into pleasure (285). This highlights that food is an experience as well as a composite of techniques, and Lizbet’s presence at the Deck was essential to its success, as was her presence in JJ’s life. The fact that Lizbet is now eating with the chef JJ admires indicates the full-scale nature of the upgrade to her love life.
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