Orsi veri e finti, nani e giocolieri, puttane e terroristi, cani impagliati e topi ammaestrati, stupri e incesti, il Maine e il New Hampshire, Vienna e New York: i personaggi formano un incredibile guazzabuglio, ma allo stesso tempo affascinano con la loro umanità carnale, e mettono in scena una storia che non si riesce a smettere di leggere, e offrono un finale in qualche modo rasserenante e appagante.

This is the third Irving book I've read, and the third to frustrate me about 3/4 of the way through - I get impatient with how long it takes me to read his novels! They seem to bog down before the wrap-up. I do actually like them, though, which confuses me. This one made me laugh out loud. Irving's a weirdo for sure.

(This was the first book of my new book club).

John Irving is one of America’s great writers. Happy Days was one of America’s most popular television shows. (Don’t worry this will make sense later)

Happy Days was beloved, but everyone knows there was one episode where everything seems to start to go downhill for Fonzie and the kids; it was the episode where Fonzie drove his motorcycle over a ramp and jumped a shark. Now the phrase “jumped the shark” is utilized for that point whenever anything goes absurd, turns sours, declines, takes a turn for the worse, or generally decreases in value.

In Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving starts by writing a pretty affecting and darkly comic book about family and their commitment to each other. The Berry family follows the dreamer father Win and his ridiculous, half-baked schemes to relative ruin. Before the five children are born, Win buys a circus bear and motorcycle off of a Jewish performer. When the children are young, the family converts an old girls’ school into a downscale hotel – The Hotel New Hampshire. Later, they’ll follow the dad to Europe and back.

The book is well-written and easy to read. Also, there is some macabre humor with the bear, the family dog, and some misaimed taxidermy. However, the book also contains rape and incest. But THAT isn’t particularly where Hotel New Hampshire jumps the shark; it could have been handled in a sensitive and insightful way (it isn’t, but it could’ve been). The place where the whole story goes severely awry is half-way through the book with the reintroduction of the bear theme (and that’s what it feels like, a reintroduction of a theme, and not a natural or believable turn of a good story. It’s wholly implausible; I found myself actually loathing and disbelieving the idea and the character it was attached to).

Once the novel jumps the shark, you realize Irving has all along been cruel and insensitive on every page of the book – on the subject of rape, on the idea of sibling sexual attraction, on the adoption of feminist concept, on political dissent, on prostitution, and on the lives of little people.

One thing saves this book; for all his callousness, Irving can still – almost accidentally – write about the love of a mother in a way that is emotionally affecting. He can create the peculiar personalities of siblings that make you care for them and want to be related to them. He creates a unique and lovable grandfather, and even the dreamer dad is sweet in many ways. Especially affecting is the story of the old Jewish performer and his love for his adopted Berry family.

Still, there’s that major stumble exactly half-way through the book that makes me wince each and every time I think about it. Some writers jump the shark – others fall in the tank.

“Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you.” ~John Irving

It was fate that this book and I would eventually converge, I think. My writing program friends from school -- namely Kyle and the girl who started the extra curricular writing group I was a part of for two years -- frequently gushed about John Irving. My bookish aunt devoured all of his older works in high school. I made an attempt to read A Widow for One Year my freshman year of college and it left me cold, for as much as I trust those tastes. I felt little drive to ever pick him up again.

Then, in the span of a week: I found enthusiastic reviews of Irving's work on Ask Metafilter, my other go-to book recommendation source (really, read their book recommendation posts, so good). My friend Snotchocheez mailed me his copy, a blind response to my "send whatever you think I should read!" suggestion as an exchange for House of Holes (sorry, I think you lost on that one, bud). Shortly after receiving the book from him, I was out to a rare-these-days in-town lunch with smoreads, who said, "You know what I just read that was great? The Hotel New Hampshire." CREEPY.

So thank you, little world of friends and Internet, for conspiring to get me to retry John Irving. Tens of people can't be wrong! If I were the type to pound down the works of an author I discovered I love in succession, I'd probably do that right now.

The Hotel New Hampshire reminds me, in the best way, of Middlesex. It precedes that book by over two decades and doesn't have quite the uniqueness of voice of Calliope Stephanides, but it shares similar, uh, motifs. It's this big, bold, comic family tragedy that's so unbelievable, but not entirely beyond the realm of plausibility, that Irving has to keep reminding us that "everything is a fairy tale". It was exactly what I wanted to read right now.

And let me just say, Irving looks pretty normal and non-pervy in pictures, but this book is chock-full of uncomfortable sex in almost every way sex can be uncomfortable. It's kind of hilarious to me to flip back to the author's picture and think of what is swirling around in that brain of his to cause that smirky smile. (Spoiler: it's bear sex.)

Ίσως λάθος εποχή για μία καταβύθιση στο παράξενο σύμπαν του Ίρβινγκ και των ηρώων του.

Well,I give up on this, finally.Tried to read it again,after finding it boring earlier.Same result.

According to the blurb,it has been compared to the "great" American post war fictions,including Portnoy's Complaint,Catch 22,Slaughterhouse Five and Irving's own,The World According to Garp.

Well,I hated all those books.This one is even worse than The World According to Garp.And it even includes an incestuous relationship.Yuck !

I don't like throwing books away,even if they are bad ones.But in this case,I may have to reconsider.

Abandoned,I won't be reading John Irving again.

9/1/2015: John Irving published this novel in 1980 and I had a hardback copy. I would have been fourteen years old at the time, and there's no way I could have understood how much loss and misdirected lust drove the storyline. I didn't remember much, if anything, about the actual plot, especially the anarchists and prostitutes of Vienna. Yet I always had an abiding love for the book, like all the other Irving novels like Garp, Owen Meany, and Cider House Rules. So something in the novel's words spoke to a teenager, and they speak differently to me now, the empty-nest mother and middle-aged wife. The world's so much worse now than the world of this novel, which was pretty terrible, post-Holocaust and easily accepted rape and shame of women and gay people. It is a novel that fit into the 1980s, but might be too simplistic for the times we're living in now.

8/18/2015: Reading this again because it popped up on my tivo suggested movies the other day and I knew I'd rather read it than see the bad movie. I know I've read it at least three times since 1981, but couldn't tell you when, after the first go-round in a hardback edition. I'm excited to see how it holds up or if it does.

I really tried to give this a fair shake. At 200 pages though, I’m just done.

I am open to books with a meandering plot. If you can give me great characters, themes, motifs, etc. they can overcome a so-so plot. My problem with Irving’s work here is that it feels like he had 50 different creative writing prompts that he tried to mesh into something resembling a novel, and I’m not here for it.

Irving either couldn’t decide a on a tone (comedic or serious) or his idea of dramedy is FUCKED up. His idea of character quirks are either sexual in nature or actual disabilities. I am continually amazed by people who say they enjoyed the characters in this book, because they’re all just various shades of weird, whether they’re incestuous, novice taxidermists, or whatever. Rather than taking the time to explore the weirdness of his characters and what makes them tick, he just makes fun of them. Incest and rape are taboo for a reason and if all you’re going to do is use them as plot devices, you are a pretty crappy writer in my book. What a missed opportunity to portray a gay character (Frank) as someone as deserving of love and appreciation as the next person in the family. He’s no different than John and Franny in their incestuous relationship for Irving. He seemed to just think that by virtue of having him exist that it would be enough, but nope. That’s not good representation, dude.

I’m pretty sparing with my 1-star ratings/reviews because I know how hard this process is and how much work goes into making even the most garbage of novels. Unfortunately, Irving’s writing is just lacking in every sense of the word here and for the life of me, I don’t know why his editor didn’t make him go back and at least do some more drafts or just tell him to burn it and start all over. You cannot just make good characters quirky and expect that to pass as decent writing.

I’ve read plenty of books and works of short fiction with quirky characters and taboo subjects to know that you can have both exist in your work, but you can’t just half-ass it. In the end, it’s truly infuriating to see that happen here.

To describe the plotline of The Hotel New Hampshire to a questioning would-be reader is to realize that you’ve been enthralled with a plot that is, at its core, rather silly. Circus bears and run-down hotels, plane crashes (so silly!) and midgets, botched taxidermy and obsessive weight-lifting – these are what Irving novels are made of. This was an undeniably fun read that I sped through, and I picked up another Irving (A Widow for One Year) as soon as I was done (I just can’t get enough). It will be a sad day when I run out of Irving books and have to subsist on the memories of novels gone by.

Irving does an exceptional job of creating a story surrounding the lives of children without being trapped within the confines of a children’s book. The innocence of childhood is mixed with a healthy dose of sexual confusion, social angst, and slapstick comedy to engage the reader in the concerns of this young family as they grow and seek their fortune (or at least their subsistence) in the hotel industry.

'Classical' John Irving book.
Has a lot in common with Garp an The Cider House Rules: casual storytelling, sympathetic characters, ...
If you like these two books, definitely read this one too.

First line fever: The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born - we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Fanny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg.