This is the seventh John Irving novel I've read since November 2004. That would be an average of 1 Irving novel a month, not counting the other books I've read in that period.
I know a friend who thinks I'm reading way too many of his novels, but when you've come so far, it is almost a matter obsession to finish all of them. I am a little tired of the depressing plot -- when in the middle of his long novels I think to myself that this will definitely be the last one I read -- but the stories end with such an oomph and a strong sense of hope that I think another one by Irving won't hurt. I now know the essential ingredients of a best-selling novel -- they are faith, hope and love, and that's all there is to it.
The Hotel New Hampshire is about a family who moves from hotel to hotel because of the father's big dreams for the future. There are four hotels altogether -- the Arbuthnot-by-the-sea where the parents fall in love, the Hotel New Hampshire they run in Dairy, the Hotel New Hampshire in Vienna where they spend seven years, and the fourth and last hotel, the hotel truly built on dreams, back at Arbuthnot-by-the-sea.
By the end of the novel, the family is ravaged by the father's need to dream. When Lily died, and Frank was blaming himself for her death, Win Berry said, "But who is the dreamer of the family? She just wasn't big enough to meet her own expectations, and she inherited that from me." Sorrow the dog was put to sleep for the plans of the very first hotel, and he returns to haunt the deaths of Iowa, Mother, and Egg -- all sacrifices on the altar of the father's dreams.
Despite the tragic effects of Win Berry's illusion, Irving in no way condemns this dreaming, but in fact endorses it with a kind of power to redeem. At the end of the novel, Win Berry becomes the best rape therapist on site, despite the fact that he is completely in his own world, blind to reality, subsisting on illusion. Irving seems to say that there is a power in dreaming, a power in stories from the past, and a power in fiction.
As Frank would say to John, "Keep passing the open windows." And somehow, things will work out.
Posted
on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 at 10:27 AM.
:)
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