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In ‘The Swank Hotel,’ a family falls apart, and so does the world

October 19, 2021 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

Books about a sibling’s mental illness proliferate in many genres — there are novels, such as Mira T. Lee’s family drama “Everything Here Is Beautiful,” and nonfiction books, including Robert Kolker’s medical mystery “Hidden Valley Road.” One of the latest is the moving and discursive experimental novel from Lucy Corin, “The Swank Hotel,” about a young woman named Em whose dull, stable life cannot withstand her anxiety about her sister Ad’s schizophrenia-induced peregrinations.

“The Swank Hotel” takes its title from the fairly luxurious Midwestern hotel where Ad is discovered in medical distress. Em drives by the establishment and remembers that her sister had once called it “swank.” The word takes deep root in Em’s consciousness. What do we mean when we say “swank?” she seems to be asking, at various points in the book. Since the novel takes place just after the 2008 financial crisis, “swank” seems to stand for a sense of ease that has disappeared for many.

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Em and her parents, a busy mother and a badly depressed father, wish for relief from their despair over Ad’s mental illness. “The usual suspense returned: When would Adeline’s condition and whereabouts become known, would efforts to locate her bear fruit, would messages left yield a reply, somebody finally thinking up something useful.” It’s a feeling with which Corin may be familiar — the events in the book are drawn from her real-life experiences with her own sister.

Part of Corin’s style involves bringing in unexpected narrative threads: While Ad recovers, Em has a strange, hostile yet intimate situation with her boss Frank and his longtime lover Jack. Corin also follows her characters through personal obsessions. Ad’s father coaxes her out of a coma with an incredibly long string of dead-baby jokes, and tent villages occupied by “the newly houseless” play a role in Em’s life.

We all have our preoccupations and distractions, Corin indicates, and sometimes they’re benign. Unfortunately for Em hers will take a darker turn and may finally alert her to the effect her role as caretaker of a mentally ill sister has had on her own psyche. But given the book’s several narrative voices, not to mention the pieces inserted in a sort of pastiche (including an episode of a TV show titled “My Strange Addiction”), some of Corin’s own preoccupations and distractions can make her plot difficult to follow.

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Telling a family story is always difficult, but telling a sibling story might be even more challenging because siblings supposedly exist on the same level of power within modern families. If a deeply troubled sister affects another sister, who gets to tell the story?

This past summer, Corin’s brother-in-law, a Berlin-based artist named Sebastian Meissner, published a letter on Medium deriding Corin’s fictionalized take on her sister Emily Hochman’s illness. Meissner claims that the book “breaches several ethical boundaries” and calls Corin out for “appropriation” of her sister’s story. He states, “When writing a book such as ‘The Swank Hotel’ it is of critical importance to work with the protagonists in tandem, on equal footing, and allow such individuals to represent themselves in a way that is comfortable and safe.”

“The Swank Hotel” suggests that siblings, who rarely share equal footing in life, certainly do not have to in art. Corin, whose previous novels (including “One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses” and “Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls”) have been well reviewed, has chosen to write fiction, not memoir. All else is a matter between sisters.

Bethanne Patrick is the editor, most recently, of “The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians and Other Remarkable People.”

The Swank Hotel

By Lucy Corin

Graywolf. 400 pp. $17

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