Enjoy Your Stay at the Shamrock Motel by Andrew Kaufman
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
Room Service
Page-turner and punch-liner, Andrew Kaufman’s assembly of short tales or flash fiction, Enjoy Your Stay at the Shamrock Motel, is enjoyable and memorable. A sentence from Sigmund Freud’s Sexuality and the Psychology of Love aptly serves as epigraph: “The behaviour of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.” Freudian fantasies recur in the Shamrock Motel, which is meant for sleep and sex, though not necessarily in that order. The Freudian key and lock on the book’s cover, as well as the interior design of phallic vegetable and fruit mesh with the meaning of the stories where fainting couch and mattress decorate rooms of fiction.
“Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges also inhabit the absurd and transformative rooms of the Shamrock Motel.”
The first story, “Sixteen All-True Facts About the Shamrock Motel,” points to the recurrence of the number sixteen throughout the book, and also questions the relationship between truth, fact, and fiction. The Shamrock doesn’t accept reservations, which means that the characters stumble upon this motel in the middle of nowhere purely by chance, like Alice in Wonderland. Contingency and spontaneity are part of the entry into the sixteen rooms of the Shamrock. The owner of the motel, Rosemary Liszt, is so named because of the musical qualities of the guests’ nocturnes, as well as the narrative listing throughout episodes of nocturnal encounters. The fifth fact signals the spontaneous randomness of finding this utopian motel: “Arriving at the Shamrock isn’t a matter of lefts and rights but of mishaps and doubt. Of fate disguised as accident and accidents disguised as fate.”
Absurd accidents, Freudian fate, and disguises guide reader and character inevitably toward the pink-and-green neon sign of the Shamrock. Characters get lost so that they may find themselves in the chiasmus of person and place: “You don’t find the Shamrock Motel. The Shamrock Motel finds you.” Similarly, “You don’t pick your room at the Shamrock Motel, the room picks you.” In addition to these uncanny reversals, there’s a sense of duende in and around the motel: “an idea, an inspiration, a spirit.” And Rosemary directs this animating spirit. Her Shamrock “is a tiny oasis of permission, a two-acre spiritual preserve that allows people to find their better selves, break patterns, and gain wisdom” through sex. In other words, it is a liminal space for libidinal rites of passage.
We begin with Derek Wilson who is one of sixteen pedestrians stranded by construction at the corner of Bloor and Spadina in Toronto where he spots a woman wearing a large men’s watch. He loses sight of the woman in the crowd, and the watch points to the function of time in these tales of dislocation in temporal and spatial spheres. In his quest for this mysterious woman, Derek leaves the city, “compelled to drive on roads he’s never heard of, two-lane highways to concession roads and rural routes, as if something is pulling him forward.” Kaufman maps the urban-rural divide in his impulsive, propulsive force field. His utopian motel “comes out of nowhere” and is “the heart of the world” for cardiac arrest and transplant of valves and arteries. Rosemary gives Derek the key to Room 16.
Instead of heart surgery, however, Derek undergoes a penis replacement: “his dick is gone, replaced by a long construction-yellow electrical cord with a two-pole, three-wire, twenty-amp black plug at the end of it.” Kaufman’s numbers game is orgasmic, as the power goes out in all sixteen rooms of the motel. When his wife May enters the picture, their sex is floral -- daisies, daffodils, lavender, violets, lilies: “There are flowers everywhere.” The title of this story, “Pick Me,” suggests not only the choice of flowers, but also the choice of room and fate, so that the Shamrock Motel sur-realizes fantasy against the routine of May’s career back in the city. Kaufman’s timing is impeccable in Ontario’s bush garden.
Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges also inhabit the absurd and transformative rooms of the Shamrock Motel. After her divorce, Bonnie is invited to a cottage for the July long weekend where she partners with a bear in the fable, “If the Bear Makes You Happy.” The directions to the cottage suggest that she will eventually end up in the Shamrock Motel: “Their directions were eccentric, things like ‘first left after the big white rock’ or ‘when the hydro lines switch from the east side of the road to the west’.” Kaufman’s compass is eccentric, his North Star pointing to the Shamrock, his electric switchback manifest in Derek Wilson’s floral sex. Before we know it, Bonnie and her Bear cohabit Room 12 at the motel: “One thing led to another and there he was in the passenger seat of her car as she drove back to Room 12 at the Shamrock Motel, and the next thing Bonnie knew, she’d fucked a bear.” Marion Engels Bear meets Bonnie’s. Eventually their affair fizzles out after thirteen weeks, and they leave the motel separately, each headed in a different direction.
“Kindling” is one of the shortest stories in this collection. It opens with Julie trying to replace the battery on her smoke detector: “The dining-room chair is part of Julie’s inheritance, hand-made by her grandfather, a well-crafted but well-used antique, a veteran of overweight uncles and late-night life-changing decisions.” This hand-made hand-me-down forms part of Julie’s genealogy within the Shamrock Motel’s life-changing decisions. Like other characters in this book, Julie loses her balance, and the chair tumbles down the stairs to become kindling. Five weeks after the chair shatters, Julie and her husband Brian drive to Chesley, “a nowhere village in the middle of nothing,” which prepares for their arrival at the Shamrock Motel. She loses her sense of direction: “Nothing like this had ever happened before; it’s like someone’s whispering directions to her at every corner.” Kaufman whispers directions at every corner of his nowhere landscape with its muted motel of sprouting shamrocks. Instead of entering the motel, however, Julie reverses direction toward her destination: “In sixteen minutes she reaches her sister-in-law’s.” She doesn’t look back, as she collects “twigs and fallen branches that she’ll later use to build a fire.” The fate of the chair is the fate of the family, for you can’t take the kin out of kindling.
Julie’s sixteen-minute drive leads to the next story, “All Sixteen Rooms of the Shamrock Motel, Briefly Described.” After listing the contents of each room, the narrator turns to their intangible aura or duende: “It’s this intangible part – some call it an energy, others a spirit, and some truly believe each room is a living organic thing – that makes the Shamrock different from every other motel in the world.” Rosemary and the narrator are the custodians of this spirit or duende, and Kaufman brings it all to life. Room 1 expresses depth of character via a mirror on the ceiling. “Room 2 is not spoken of.” Room 4 has been vacant for three years, four months, and sixteen days because of “the horrible thing that happened.” Room 7 “gives the answer, but not the question.” Room 12 is the only room available for rent on a long-term basis.
“Sally Tells the Time” fills in the mystery of the man’s watch from the first story, “Pick Me.” Sex worker Sally Temple finishes with one of her clients in the Royal York Hotel who leaves his watch in the room after he leaves. “It looks expensive, but more than that it looks like an antique, an heirloom, something handed down from generation to generation,” like the chair in “Kindling.” Sixteen minutes pass, but her client doesn’t return. Although Sally “knows what time it is for everyone,” her watch doesn’t work. She leaves the hotel and arrives at the Shamrock Motel where Jesse fixes her watch, the mechanism of his index finger circling the dial which causes her orgasm. After the repair, Jesse ascends skyward, while her watch “ticks and ticks and ticks.” Sally Temple turns tricks and listens to time.
Magic realism flourishes in the Shamrock Hotel. Women grow like plants from the carpet where they are eaten. Marina becomes a river that keeps flowing out of her. In “The Credenza” Rosemary liberates her daughter Lily in Room 4, and she grows to gigantic proportions from a Lilliputian out of Gulliver’s Travels. Mother and daughter watch several giants walking toward the Shamrock Motel, speaking the Giant language. In “ ‘eady and Willing” penises fall from the sky to satisfy Melanie’s passion. In “Best Friends Forever” an army of miniature females overtake Molly’s entire body and satisfy her carnal cravings.
All of this surreal passion is held in check by an ironic narrative intrusion that comments on fantasies within the book when room mirrors are turned into self-reflexive fiction: “Think of everything that had to happen so you could read this sentence. You had to buy, borrow, or steal this book. The printing press, the publishing industry, and story-telling had to be invented…. Can it really be a coincidence that you’re reading this very book at this very moment?” Kaufman’s very book contains many truths about the Shamrock Motel. There are no vacancies in his imagination: his rooms of fiction are filled to overflowing.
About the Author
Andrew Kaufman splits his time between downtown Toronto and the shores of Lake Huron. His work, including the cult-favourite novel All My Friends Are Superheroes, has won the Relit Award, been nominated for the Leacock Medal for Humour, and been listed among the best books of the year by the Globe and Mail . He works part-time at the Epiphany Detective Agency and in the office of the ShamrockMotel.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : Coach House Books
Publication date : June 24 2025
Language : English
Print length : 152 pages
ISBN-10 : 1552455017
ISBN-13 : 978-1552455012