I’m not much of a Rick Moody fan, but I want to be—a fan for the Rick Moody I thought might appear after his first two novels, Garden State (1992) and The Ice Storm (1994). To the extent that we have a living example of an American writer who didn’t practice minimalism, but still emerged, thriving, from the literary culture of the 1990s, Moody is one of the most visible: the list poet as novelist, taking the known world and disassembling it like a child trying to understand how a clock works. To this end, Moody has for years deployed fire-hose sentences that repeat neurotically inward. He swings around on paragraphs like the chandelier you ride on at the end of a party.

I’ve told myself the problem, until now, is a disagreement about style, a longing for the succinct sentence quality I remember from his debut novel, Garden State, and have hoped for in any of his writing I’ve encountered afterward. But the baroque fears of a white man facing middle age have been Moody’s calling card for 20 years now; fears, which have been, if not well-documented, then over-documented by the Great American Novelists of the twentieth century. I sometimes wonder if it was the writing of The Ice Storm that changed him into the author he is now—as if the sad father in that novel, trooping through the suburban swinger parties of 1970s Connecticut, never left his head.

Of Moody’s five novels, three collections of stories and novellas, one memoir, and a book of his music criticism, all have in common an archly antiquated diction, whether fiction or nonfiction, satirical or straight, and his toughest critics have brought up his heavily wrought sentences more than a few times over the years. At this point we can say Moody likes writing this way. But it seems to me that Moody’s fear of death and fear of being a middle-aged white man—in particular, a sexually unattractive middle- aged white man—made him into the kind of guy who will say “alarum” instead of alarm, which is to me its own sort of alarm.

Hotels of North America is his sixth novel, and like The Diviners, The Four Fingers of Death, and Right Livelihoods, it is a satire. It positions itself as belonging to that long line of mysterious literary documents written by a forgotten author who produces one singular work of literature, which has been discovered by a publisher and comes with an introduction or epigraph by a writer, who is, of course, also (secretly or not so secretly) the author. The novel’s conceit then is that it is the memoir of a man known only as Reginald Edward Morse—yes, R.E. Morse. A preface by Greenway Davies, the director of the fictional North American Society of Hoteliers and Innkeepers, or NASHI, tells us the memoir is conducted in online hotel reviews, collected and published by NASHI ostensibly as a tribute to Morse, a top-rated reviewer. Davies apologizes for not having had time to read it but assures us we’ll enjoy it. Since an afterword by “author Rick Moody” is promised in the preface’s title, we know right away the targets of this satire will be ostensibly the business of hospitality, memoir, online reviewing, the United States in general, and perhaps travel itself—the copy you’re reading, Davies assures us, is one of a series of titles placed in every room as a gift to guests, along with the Bible.

This is all promising. Travel in the United States has never been so miserable as it is now. “Luxury” is almost always in air quotes; the “misery index” is a feature on Hipmunk, the online travel discount site which helps to measure the inconvenience of a flight; and with Airbnb, hotels now compete with people’s homes. There’s a huge field to play in here.