In Hotel Theory, Wayne Koestenbaum presents two apparently disparate parallel narratives, running them on each side of the page. The left side consists of eight note-filled dossiers, the collective mission of which is to “refurbish the meaning of hotel.” The right side, a “dime novel,” tells the story of Lana Turner, Liberace, and their respective families at Hotel Women, a luxury resort situated directly across the street (i.e. page). Each text regards the other through windows and frames, theoretical and fictional, interacting like voyeurs performing from adjacent buildings. Together they function as yet another, ever-changing story. Consider them the right and left sides of the author’s brain: the left capturing the melancholic solitude of a certain itinerant state of mind; the right, using Sirkian strategies of melodrama, subverts that sensibility by articulating a frivolous, fictitious underbelly for it. Each arrives at roughly the same place, an unwritten, bittersweet loneliness located somewhere at the center of the book’s blank middle column.

“A deluxe hotel (five hundred rooms) contains five-hundred destinies,” notes Koestenbaum’s left side. “Some rooms shift occupancy, night to night. Others contain permanent residents.” As in the dossiers of Joseph Cornell’s legendary basement archives, figures from literature, music, and film make appearances in Hotel Theory, reconfiguring its conceptual geography by checking in and out of its rooms. “Each room in a hotel is a now,” writes Koestenbaum, “but each now disregards the next, nor is there a coherent point of view that can legislate the serial progression of now to now, of next to next, or articulate it as a sequence rather than a simultaneity.” The same could be said of the two texts comprising Hotel Theory, which are absorbed by the reader like the twin screens of “Chelsea Girls”. As with Warhol’s twelve-reel opus, originally intended to be shown in whatever order the projectionist chose, Hotel Theory is a Kama Sutra of possibility, in which the variables of interpenetration are endless. Koestenbaum’s meditation on hotel state-of-being, like that film, contains a series of walk-ons: Tennessee Williams and his surrogate characters—themselves rooms to hide in—Chopin, Tallulah Bankhead, and Joseph Cornell, whose boxes are themselves like rooms.

It’s not surprising that Koestenbaum admits (or boasts) to being a very sexually-preoccupied person, describing his work habits in terms of impulse and stamina. “I get kind of obsessed and manic,” he says, “and work daily on the process and just keep going until I run out.” A gleefully intense polymorphous perversity is on full display at Hotel Women, where Liberace’s “pampered yet manly organ” spends as much time in as out of his swimming trunks. Liberace caresses Lana’s breast. Lana fondles Liberace’s nipples. “Hard wet sand offer[s] pleasant resistance.” Deliberately flat, Hotel Women remains perpetually hot and bothered, yet, excepting suntan lotion, never quite reaches the exchange of fluids.

Koestenbaum thrives on such combustible abstinence, the illicit tension between the excessive and the incomplete. Restricting himself or his characters in some almost punitive way, he creates an order or a system from which they, and he, may enjoy a broad spectrum of deviation. Often, his characters are rehabilitating, trying to get some impossible urge, frequently libidinal, under control, or at least kept to a minimum. In Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, protagonist Theo Mangrove tries to curb his patronage of hustlers. In Hotel Theory, Liberace has been sent to Hotel Women by his parents for some unnamed impropriety, possibly involving binoculars. Discussing Model Homes, his book-length, ottava rima poem, Koestenbaum speaks of “allowed topics” and rules, those imposed by the dictates of the form, others by himself. In writing Hotel Women, he imposed restrictions on his “unruly syntax”; the words “a”, “an” or “the” could never occur, a strategy of omission he refers to as a personal salvation. “I’m totally into punishing narrative,” he explains.