The Hotel Neversink by Adam O’Fallon Price

Tin House Books, 290 pages, $15.95 (c2019)

“The Hotel Neversink” has been nominated for an Edgar Award for “Best Paperback Original.”

As may be obvious from the unusual title, “The Hotel Neversink,” this is an unusual story. Built around the core story of the doomed Hotel Neversink are the individual stories of the members of several generations of the Sikorsky family. Beginning with a starving, near death Jewish family from Europe and ending with the contemporary dissolute great-grandchildren of that family, Adam O’Fallon Price has written a touching modern novel.

Asher Sikorsky brought his family to America, but not content with making a comfortable living, he plunges his family into poverty again by buying a rocky, inhospitable farm in the Catskills. Luckily, his failing farm accidentally is turned into a hotel. Unluckily, years later, his daughter is host to the disappearance of the young son of one of the hotel’s guests. Luckily, years later, another young child disappears but is found alive, along with the bones of the first child.

The luck continues to bounce back and forth in terms of finding the killer, but that story takes to the background as the individual descendants of the Sikorsky family have their moment in the spotlight. Jeannie Sikorsky is the first one. She was the starving daughter of the starving Polish farmer, but it is her privilege to see the modest hotel grow to grand proportions. It hosts dignitaries, celebrities, and families who come back year after year.

Jeannie’s son, Len, is next up. He was the young, brief playmate of the boy who disappeared from the hotel. Len believes he is haunted by the boy in his family’s rambling, looming hotel. But he grows up to become the next manager of the property, to even greater success. He marries the woman of his dreams and has two children. But Len’s happiness and stubbornness combine to provide the next turn of fortune for the Neversink.

The irony of the name plays upon the remaining pages. More family members have their say, and even the mysterious deaths — oh, yes, more children from the nearby town of Liberty have died — come forward once more. The story strands wrap tighter around the Hotel Neversink until author Price reveals all.

It is not just the interesting individual stories of the family Sikorsky that propel the reading of this book, but also the writing. For instance, this is a description of a minor character:

“…Seth had gotten slightly fattish — not paunchy but a kind of white puffiness, like a piece of rice floating in dishwater overnight.”

Price has a quirky style that makes way for intermittent macabre humor. You know who should read “The Hotel Neversink”? If you like Wes Anderson’s movies — and I don’t say that just because he had a movie called “The Grand Budapest Hotel” — there is the same floaty feeling of characters moving toward their destinies.