The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian

The world is filled with horrible tragedies, terrifying calamities, even despicable people, but most of us learn of these truths through the long distance range finder of the evening news or social media.  Generally, I respond to the horrors of the world with sadness and despair, but the sad truth is that when the next news story is presented it whisks away my distress and I literally put the sadness out of my mind.  My "life" is unaffected.  In Chris Bohjalian's novel, The Guest Room, the main characters are not able to turn away from their real life crisis.  The storyline centers around a bachelor party that goes dangerously, murderously wrong.  The hired "strippers" arrive with bodyguards and it quickly is apparent that these two girls are willing to do much more than take their clothes off.  The party descends into total debauchery and then, chaos breaks out.  The girls suddenly and startlingly manage to kill both bodyguards, gather the men's wallets and money and leave.  From this point forward, nothing was ever the same for any of these people.  From this point forward, no one who reads this novel will be the same either.  Bohjalian uses the characters Alexandra, one of the strippers, to tell the story of the girls who were kidnapped when they were very young and forced into the sex slave "business".  He uses Richard, the older brother of the bachelor and host of the party, to tell the story of the men at the party and the women (wives, fiancés, daughters) in their lives.  Alexandra's story breaks the hearts of those who read it.  Richard's story angers, terrifies, exasperates, disgusts but generally leaves the reader with more questions than we can answer and more emotional turmoil than can easily be dealt with.  The novel forces us to think about the very real, very painful consequences that these characters must deal with but it also challenges us to think about how we respond to the realities of the world that are completely transparent but that we generally ignore.  I cannot say that I enjoyed this book.  I can say that I have lain awake at night thinking about it.  Perhaps, that is the result that Bohjalian was trying to reach in the end because each of us individually cannot fix the problems of the world, but each of us can recognize that we have a responsibility to speak up and stand up for what is right.