An absurd look at life | The Hotel New Hampshire (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Welcome to The Hotel New Hampshire | The Hotel New Hampshire (Ballantine Reader's Circle) | John Irving

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	• The Hotel New Hampshire (Ballantine Reader's Circle) John Irving Ballantine Books, 1997 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 93 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Sorrow Floats

John Irving is a master of his craft. The Hotel New Hampshire is easily one of his greatest works. Your feelings will be going through a roller coaster. One moment the story is hilarious and at the next it's sad. Then we're treated to heartfelt moments. The book has everything. From a dysfunctional family to all the strange and bizarre happenings that occurs throughout their lives.

The Hotel New Hampshire is told from the perspective of John Barry. The son of a hapless dreamer and laid back mother. John is the middle child in a series of five children. There's his brother, Frank, a homosexual. His attractive sister Franny who he becomes attracted to, and then there's Lilly, his younger talented sister and then there's Egg. To compliment the cast of characters are also a handful of supporting characters. From Freud (not THAT Freud) to a series of prostitutes. The story is told from the view point of John Barry. Who chronicles the lives of his family as they live in three hotels throughout their lives.

There's nothing quite so complicated about The Hotel New Hampshire. Despite the bizarre happenings in the novel, Irving manages to make all his characters entirely believable and lovable in their own way. Each character is distinct. The novel is filled to the brim with humor, both light and dark. When characters meet their end or when something terrible happens to them, you care.

In the midst of his excellent character development, the narrative flow of the story is just right. Because of how bizarre some of the events in the novel are, you won't be able to put it down. It is not a book, however, for those easily shocked or offended by sexual themes. The book has it all.

Never the less, John Irving's "The Hotel New Hampshire" is a fantastic story filled with just about every emotion possible. But most of all, it's full of heart. When you're finished with the book, you'll find it hard not to flip to the very first page and begin reading it again.

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An absurd look at life

"Hotel New Hampshire" a great read. It looks at the life of an anything but normal family. An impulsive often harebrained yet passionate father, an incestuous brother and sister, etc. The story also contains several family friends like Susie who runs around in a bear suit, the old man Freud who is blind and uses a Louisville Slugger as a cane, and whores and bomb-chucking revolutionaries. Since it is a lengthy story that covers practically the entire histroy of a family, to describe the plot would be too much for here. However, it is a beautiful story of a family and their honorary members.
At times is seems to drag a bit due to it being a lengthy tale, later you'll probably find that it is necessary to set up the next part of the story. Some of the symbolism is heavy-handed and some of the changes that happen come across as abrupt and jarring. For some reason though, this works. It was frustrating, but when it comes down to it, it brought a uniqueness and charm to the writing. It almost seems like Irving reigned in his editors, instead of the other way around.
It is absurd, surreal, hilarious and most of all full of love and has passion for life. It looks at all the things that make us human, love friendship, loss, failure and joy.

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Welcome to The Hotel New Hampshire

Like many Irving novels, The Hotel New Hampshire interweaves growing up in Austria, the inevitable loss of a parent, dancing bears, american lit, and the need to "keep passing the open windows."

How can you put down a book about rape and forbidden love, about long-lost brothers - and a long lost sister too, - about a boy so vividly american that it makes you wonder if you, like he, are a realist in a family of dreamers, doomed to never be adult-enough for the world? Bildungsroman and Irving in its highest yet in 20th century lit, each and every reread brings something different to the table. The Hotel New Hampshire easily sits in the top ten of the best american books of the 20th century.

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Favorite Irving -- quite possibly favorite novel

I love this book. I've read about 1/2 of Irving's novels and this is my favorite, though I haven't been disappointed by any. This book is entertaining, compelling, devastating... I could go on and on. He mercilessly kills off characters the reader has developed a fondness for, but somehow keeps us reading. Irving writes with an often dry sense of humor and treads some odd line between realism and absurdity, and it simply works.

Common Irving obsessions pop up -- rape, prositutes, bears, motorcycles, Vienna. A lot of the same stuff from Setting Free the Bears, but he is a more experienced writer here and not afraid to be American and doesn't have the same young man's individualistic bravado that characterized that novel (my least favorite). He writes about the glory and the tragedy of the (inevitably thoroughly dysfunctional) family, which is really what he excels at, I think.

In short, read it. But don't see the movie if you loved the book; despite some perfect casting (e.g. Jodi Foster as Franny), it is horrid.

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It's Irving, who can ask for anything more?

As I mention many times over I'm a fan of John Irving and being a fan of John Irving you get to know his writing style and themes. So of course there's always the free thinking guy with strong women and there are the usual themes of circus animals, love, prostitutes, incest, families, and weird sexual desires. Hotel New Hampshire isn't the best Irving book but he sure knows how to tell a story to make you laugh and interested and totally be into the story. The movie with Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe couldn't compare for some reason even though it was oddly accurate and true to the book. I think it's because the book was just vivid and I loved the story of John and Suzie the bear. I mean there are bears, the opera, and blind men with bears and a brother and sister falling in love and midgets and writers and homosexuality and love and death and a dog named Sorrow which eventually became a stuffed dog which eventually would always follow them. The theme overall is one line... "Keep passing the open windows"... A perfect line to always say whenever there's sorrow following you.

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"The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels."

So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they "dream on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Widow for One Year and The Cider House Rules.

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