Hannah's Book Review: Grand Abyss Hotel
- petersenbri
- Aug 12
- 4 min read
Part intellectual biography and part introduction to critical theory, Grand Hotel Abyss was
written by the journalist Stuart Jefferies. Jefferies aims to provide a history of the Frankfurt School’s thinkers and their development of critical theory in a way that argues for the Frankfurt School’s relevance in today's world. The primary subjects of the book are Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann, and Jurgen Habermas; all leading members of the Institute for Social Research, known as the Frankfurt School.
Jefferies sections the book discreetly by decade, creating a linear framework for the reader
where the Frankfurt School thinkers ' lives, critical theory and the school as an institution develop in relation to the events of each decade. The immersion of the reader into one specific point in history simplifies the historical context, allowing the relations between the Frankfurt School thinkers' lives and the development of the theory to become more inherent.
Beyond this, I feel the structure of the book is unclear. Each chapter is more of a meandering
biography, peppered with tangents, than anything that clearly relates back to the author's stated purpose of vouching for the relevance of the institution and its theory. Almost every page has a stressful amount of expository details that often require prior knowledge to make sense of. This expository overload, if you will, works excellently at distracting the reader from the main point of the text. Consider this quote I found, genuinely, by opening to a random page in the book:
“This was in that brief era before the Soviet Union congealed into something monstrous - a
Stalinist tyranny of gulags and show trials, where avant-garde art such as Shostakovich's Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk was denounced in Pravada, the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, in 1936 under the headline ‘Muddle Not Music,’ as ‘tickling the perverted taste of the bourgeoisie with its fidelity, stealing neurotic music.’
These details were unnecessary. And, consequential in my tendency throughout the book to
question the credibility of the author. This book was not intended to be academic, but the scope of the research required to achieve the purpose of this book, with such detail, and in a credible manner, may have been out of Jefferies reach. The volume of references, many of which are secondary sources or from himself, indicate that vast research was done, but the cramming of details in the text indicates to me that it was superficial. The further I read, the more I felt these details to be along the lines of intellectual posturing.
Jefferies does not often explicitly tie these details and the examples back to the larger goal of the book. Rather, relying heavily on allusion and an assumption of reader background knowledge, he introduces various concepts in critical theory while inserting his interpretations of the relationships between sources texts and authors. There are, however, important insights to be gleaned from this book. Jefferies addresses the paradoxes of the Frankfurt school, explains various important concepts of critical theory, and introduces many of its foundational texts and people. And he introduces them in the context from which they arose, not as abstract definitions to be gleaned from a textbook. I found the pages spent examining thinkers' time in America, their opinions on American media, and on fascism in general to be particularly compelling and worthwhile. And while the microscopic expository details were distracting and irrelevant, I found some to be highly entertaining. Entertainment was not the purpose of this book, but I would argue it did achieve that.
But who is this book for? It is not clear. Someone familiar with the subject could walk away with a new perspective on the Frankfurt School or new knowledge of some very niche details about one of the thinkers' lives. A layman would walk away a little confused and looking to read some of the source texts; but with a general idea of how the Frankfurt School, and its thinkers with their theory, developed over time and why.
More pressingly for me, is that Jefferies' intended purpose for the book was not met. He makes his purpose clear at the end of the introduction, “We don’t live in a hell that the Frankfurt School created, but in one they can help us understand. It is a good time to open their message in a bottle.” And on the back of my copy of the book, the last sentence reads, “Grand Hotel Abyss shows that these ideas still have much to tell us about our age of social media and consumerism.” If one is willing to wade through the details and synthesize the implications of Jefferies' examples themselves, then maybe this is true of Grant Hotel Abyss. In the conclusion of the book, he should have doubled down on the relevance of the Frankfurt School in today’s world. Instead, he introduces more details and strong
assertions with little rationale to back them up. By the end of the book, he does not explicitly answer the question, “Why is the Frankfurt School relevant today?”
Despite the maundering and lack of fulfilling its purpose, this book is a fun introduction to the
Frankfurt School. Jefferies is very present as the author, inserting witty remarks, addressing the reader directly, and tantalizing the reader to stay engaged in otherwise dry material. His historical examples are repeatedly of pop culture and mass media. A subject that is easy for today’s reader to relate to their own life. I’d take his interpretations of the source texts with a grain of salt, but he introduces them well. The intellectual biography aspect was there, but nothing revolutionary; Jefferies failed to present the hot take that he intended to with his ‘relevance of the Frankfurt School today’ angle. But, with a little more editing and less allusion, he might have been there.
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