“He’s my friend,” Jeevan said, pointing at the boat calmly and fearlessly. “I want to say hi to my friend.”
“Come here after Thanksgiving. Stay with us for a bit,” Tatiana says.
“Us?”
I process her silence while looking at my loafers, the loafers she picked out for me. “You never had the abortion, did you?”
“I’ve never been happier. Come.”
“I’m not sober,” I say.
“I know,” she says.
“What’s your son’s name?”
“Stathis,” Tatiana says.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SPECIAL THANKS TO PETER ALEXANDROU, Jonathan Burnham, Alex Cannariato, Aris Constantinides, James Connolly, David Cobb Craig, Tanmoy Das Lala, Stefanos Economou, Jennifer Farrugia, Makis Gazis, Brian Gerrity, Ozerk Gogus, Lisa Goldenberg, Christina Haag, Brian Hamill, Barry Harbaugh, Jonathon Irpino, Peter Jeffreys, Sofia Karvela, Alexia Katsaounis, Maria Koundoura, Eric Lee, John Lyons, Mick Malisic, Constantine Manos, Scott McCormack, Sandra Mintz, Ian Olson, Heather O’Neill, Marco Pinter, Jonathan Procter, Seth and Lauren Redniss, Marjorie Reitman, Celia Roniotes, Jody Rosen, Ira Sachs, George Samoilis, Eric Schade, Aria Sloss, Christy Smith, Blair Steckler, Alexandra and Judith Stonehill, Mickey Sumner, Karim Tartoussieh, Joshua Tierney, Lycourgos Tsirakis, Grigori Vyssoulis, Christopher Westley, Sallie Wiggins, Mauricio Zacharias, and—the most important person—my mother.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IOANNIS PAPPOS IS A MANAGEMENT consultant and writer from Pelio, Greece. He is a graduate of Stanford University and INSEAD business school, and he has worked in both the US and Europe. Hotel Living is his first novel. He lives in New York City.
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
HOTEL LIVING
“Ioannis Pappos’s Hotel Living could be The Great Gatsby reincarnated in a contemporary hell beyond even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination. It’s harrowing. It’s smart and sexy; it’s funny and tragic. It is, in short, a great and terrible beauty of a book.”
—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author of The Snow Queen and The Hours
“If Trollope were alive today and he wanted to write The Way We Live Now about New York’s élite consultants, he would have written Hotel Living. Really a terrific book.”
—Edmund White
“I read Hotel Living in an evening. Pappos is a first-rate storyteller and keen observer of our current moment. The prose here shimmers, and the narration drives hard like the hard-living lives in these pages. It’s a smart book that also happens to be entertaining and a damn bit of fun to read. I can’t wait for his next book.”
—Anthony Swofford, New York Times bestselling author of Jarhead
“What do you feel when somebody with no writing track record you know of hands you a manuscript? Profound misgivings? Right! Ioannis Pappos had asked me to read just a chapter of Hotel Living. My misgiving vamoosed on page one. Pappos delivers a fast-moving narrative set in the new model world of the international business culture. The sexual and social mores of a wired world are well and truly captured through sharp conversations and vivid vignettes that get you feeling, Well, yes. Of course! These are the ways of our world.”
—Anthony Haden-Guest, author of The Last Party, Studio 54, Disco, and The Culture of the Night
“Like a cross between The Wolf of Wall Street and Edith Wharton, Ioannis Pappos gets all the details right in this insider’s look at love and money in NYC in the postmillennial age. Pappos is such a good writer, it’s hard to believe he leads a double life in the trenches of Wall Street; but it is that combination that gives this moving story both its punch and density.”
—Ira Sachs, writer and director of The Delta, Keep the Lights On, and Love Is Strange
“Ioannis Pappos may be the F. Scott Fitzgerald of the wired postmillennial age. Hotel Living is an unforgettable debut—an all-night party, a race around the world, a dangerous high-stakes game played in the violently competitive world of international business. The novel’s urgent pulse, no-holds-barred pace, and heartbreakingly honest narrator will thrust you into a captivating story that is, all at once, about love, sex, class, greed, and the search for one’s humanity against the blinding light of the American Dream.”
—Julia Fierro, author of Cutting Teeth
“Ioannis Pappos’s Hotel Living is a social novel of remarkable breadth and depth. His command of narrative and his complex characters make for a fast-paced yet thoughtful story of one man’s experience in the rough-and-tumble world of high finance and the rougher world of failed love. Not only does Pappos make us understand, he makes us feel. This may be Pappos’s first novel but it reads like the work of a seasoned writer.”
—Pablo Medina, author of Cubop City Blues
“As he romps through the highs and lows of the global economy, Ioannis Pappos will make you laugh even as he lays bare the very real human costs of our recent—and current—economic troubles. Hilarious and heartbreaking, Hotel Living captures perfectly our own interesting times.”
—Scott Lasser, author of All I Could Get
“From the caverns of New York finance, first-time writer Ioannis Pappos bursts out with a fast-paced tale of an unblushing Greek Gatsby living the high life, a party skidding toward destruction. The pleasures are quick and voyeuristic, the bedroom cold, the banter knowing. His protagonist is diffident yet accessible, bold but aware, an unbruised stranger grappling with a world of little consequence until the bright nights turn bittersweet.”
—Edie Meidav, author of Lola, California
“In Hotel Living, Pappos delivers room service at its best and most corrupting. A searing and smart indictment of the players at the helm of today’s global economy, Hotel Living is also sexy and fun, as Stathis, the son of a Greek fisherman, navigates waters replete with treacherous men and women swimming or drowning and not knowing the difference.”
—Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn’t You Like to Know
“In between the words, sliding out into the margins and slipping into our consciousness, Ioannis Pappos’s devastating and engaging book Hotel Living reveals the dominant forces that have shaped the new millennium. Bold and insistent, this book is a creative response challenging us not to blindly accept the world around us as it appears but to see beyond the glib facade and discover what is real. With a sharp eye and inimitable worldview, Pappos has given us a work animated by the spirits of Bolaño through Pasolini to Edmund White. Blending clever prose with piercing socio-political investigation, this book draws the line, ultimately asking each of us if we embrace the spectacle (what separates) or choose society (what connects).”
—Antonino D’Ambrosio, author of Let Fury Have the Hour
“I came to regard each and every character as if they were real people, who deserved and provoked real emotional responses. Pappos’s quicksilver touch of the New World is never convoluted or heavy-handed, even when describing love in its most complicated manifestations. There is a penetrating sweetness even in the most bitter regret, and a handling of Greekness reminiscent of Eugenides in Middlesex: something at once looming at arm’s length and painfully unattainable. Hotel Living is nothing short of a masterpiece. It moved me and will continue to do so in more ways than I could imagine possible for a story told with such disarming clarity and plainness. Rest assured that we’ll be talking Hotel Living for years, as will its overawed readers and reviewers.”
—Auguste Corteau, author of The Book of Katherine
“Whew! I need to check into rehab for a week. I just finished reading Ioannis Pappos’s bold, painfully intimate novel Hotel Living. All that booze! And blow! And unadulterated fucking! Yet rendered with such insight, and crafted with skill and compassion. Every decade or so a novel comes along that utterly captures the Zeitgeist of our b
enighted times. I think of Less Than Zero, Bright Lights, Big City, and now Hotel Living. Kudos for Pappos. This is a writer to reckon with.”
—Richard Stratton, author of Altered States of America
“We’ve read and watched depictions of the reckless excess of our recent gilded age, but rarely do we get a glimpse into the inner life of one of its players. Hotel Living is The Wolf of Wall Street with a heart.”
—Mike Albo, author of The Junket
CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY GREGG KULICK
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BY RAYMOND DEPARDON / MAGNUM PHOTOS
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
HOTEL LIVING. Copyright © 2015 by Ioannis Pappos. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pappos, Ioannis
Hotel living / by Ioannis Pappos.—Trade paperback
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-06-237636-7 (trade pb)—ISBN 978-0-06-237637-4 (e-book)
1. Business consultants—United States—Fiction. 2. Single-room-occupancy hotels—United States—Fiction. 3. Luxuries—Morals and ethics—United States—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.A66H68 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014042023
EPub Edition June 2015 ISBN 9780062376374
15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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