Enders Hotel

Enders Hotel
Brandon R. Schrand
University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London
$17.95

Reviewed by Charlotte Rains Dixon

This new memoir, the winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, is dear to my heart for reasons beyond the book itself.  My ancestors walked across the Oregon Trail and homesteaded in Warren, Idaho, which is so remote that even today it is difficult to get to (and I'm pretty sure its not possible in the winter, unless you fly in).  My great-grandfather was killed by the Sheepeater Indians in the famous Rains Ranch Massacre (its famous if you've ever read an Idaho history book) and subsequently my grandmother moved into the town of Grangeville and ran the Imperial Hotel there for years.  Until his dying day, my father swore the hotel was a brothel, and until her dying day my aunt swore he was wrong.

Perhaps it was this Idaho connection that led me to live and work in the resort town of Sun Valley for one semester during college.  Many years later, my daughter moved to Sun Valley and lived there for one miserable winter.  The town figures prominently in my own novel, because I wrote part of it while visiting Annie there. 

All these connections to Idaho and my father's enduring love for it make me eager to read any book that has to do with Idaho, and so I snatched up Brandon Schrand's new memoir immediately.  Schrand tells the story of growing up in the Enders Hotel, located in the small town of Soda Springs, which I believe is near Idaho Falls and Pocatello.  I also have this thing for hotels, motels, inns and B and Bs.  I love them.  I would adore to live in one and growing up in one would have been the best thing ever.  So I've been quite enthralled with this book.

Schrand has a way with words, no doubt about it, and the book is full of beautiful descriptions and compelling characters.  He's a master at evoking the desperation of the broken-down men who pass through Soda Springs and the Enders.  One of the most haunting of these portraits is about one of the few women who got waylaid at the Enders.  She was the woman named Maya, a recovering alcoholic who "was unlike anyone I had ever seen.  All the girls I knew wore their hair large like frozen storms.  Maya, though, wore straight black hair cropped at her sharp collarbone. Fair complexion, glasses, dark sweaters, and jeans. Her eyes were two buttons of watery turquoise, and I remember how she always worked a wadded tissue in her hand, how she always seemed sick."

He's also very good at showing his own slowly dawning realization of his own differences from the people of Soda Springs, and the reality of his own family: "The generations move with a force all their own, and the patterns seem to oblige.  It seems fitting, inevitable perhaps, that we eventually bought a hotel, a place outfitted with so many exits and entrances, and a place that seemed itself a beacon to far-farers, to people, ultimately, like us."

(Note to self: I really, truly want to be a far-farer some day.)

One thing I appreciate about the book is the flow of it.  There's a nice balance between relating specific episodes and showing the overall arc of the story.  Too many memoirs that I've read lately are entirely episodic in nature, with little attention to the plotline that ties it all together and makes it interesting.

Schrand is the head of the MFA in creative writing at the University of Idaho, the home of such luminaries as Kim Barnes, Mary Clearman Blew, and Robert Wrigley, and he does the program, and my beloved state of Idaho, proud with this memoir.