Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #755785 in Books
• Published on: 1983-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 401 pages

From the Back Cover
Quirky, bizarre, tragic, fiendishly funny, The Hotel New Hampshire is anything but a conventional family saga, though a family saga it certainly is. The Berry family are different. Love abounds - both healthy and incestuous. It is the overwhelming desire of the Berry father to run a hotel, which he does, with dubious success in both a former girls' school in New Hampshire, and in Vienna.

It is the Berry children who grab the readers' attention, sympathies and love - all five of them: Frank (the eldest), Franny (the weirdest), John (the narrator), Lily (the writer) and Egg (the youngest). When Irving, or rather John, writes 'Frank's queer, Franny's weird, Lily's small and Egg is Egg' the initiated reader can do no other than shout a deafening 'yes, I know what you mean!'

From there on, the reader is held spellbound as the family Labrador, Sorrow, is first stuffed then becomes the cruel victim of a plane crash; and as John and Franny realise their incestuous desires.

Stunningly readable, mercilessly involving, The Hotel New Hampshire is people with characters - and bears - that you'll never forget.

About the Author
John Irving
John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a 'grim' child. Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. 'It was so simple,' he remembers. 'Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.'

In 1963, Irving enrolled at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, and he later worked as a university lecturer. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, about a plot to release all the animals from the Vienna Zoo, was followed by The Water-Method Man, a comic tale of a man with a urinary complaint, and The 158-Pound Marriage, which exposes the complications of spouse-swapping. Irving achieved international recognition with The World According to Garp, which he hoped would 'cause a few smiles among the tough-minded and break a few softer hearts'.

The Hotel New Hampshire is a startlingly original family saga, and The Cider House Rules is the story of Doctor Wilbur Larch - saint, obstetrician, founder of an orphanage, ether addict and abortionist - and of his favourite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. A Prayer for Owen Meany features the most unforgettable character Irving has yet created. A Son of the Circus is an extraordinary evocation of modern day India. John Irving's latest and most ambitious novel is A Widow for One Year.

A collection of John Irving's shorter writing, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, was published in 1993. Irving has also written the screenplays for The Cider House Rules and A Son of the Circus, and wrote about his experiences in the world of movies in his memoir My Movie Business.

Irving has had a life-long passion for wrestling, and he plays a wrestling referee in the film of The World According to Garp. In his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, John Irving writes about his life as a wrestler, a novelist and as a wrestling coach. He now writes full-time, has three children and lives in Vermont and Toronto.

Customer Reviews

VIENNA AND FREUD AND BEARS, "OH, MY"
I seriously don't think that John Irving is capable of telling a bad story. There are storytellers and then there are "storytellers." Irving is in that elevated category making each reading experience a memorable one. Right off the bat, you feel familiar with Irving's trademark themes. No story is complete without either a visit from a bear, a trip to Vienna or a romp with a prostitute. All these things might sound weird but Irving makes them seem so conventional.

Irving takes dysfunction and makes it seem normal. He talks about prostitutes yet it doesn't sound seedy. He gives life to a bear and makes the reader wish that perhaps they could have a bear for a pet. He just makes "pure idiocy sound logical."

The Hotel New Hampshire is the story of the Berry family living different stages of their lives at different hotels they manage to own. The love of hotel life first manifests itself when Win Berry meets Mary Bates at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea in Maine during a summer job in 1939. A series of events will find the Berrys opening up their first hotel in New Hampshire where they will attempt to raise their family which includes five children, a dog named Sorrow and a bear named Earl.

This is a family led by Win Berry, a true dreamer. As Irving, or should I say Freud, says, "A dream is a disguised fulfillment of a suppressed wish." In all, the family will fulfill the father's dream by establishing three separate Hotel New Hampshires with the one in Vienna being perhaps the turning point in all their lives.

This is an amazing look at an eccentric family made considerably more normal by Irving's words. They will experience life at its fullest while sharing their own measure of sadness as different family members pass on. Irving chooses to pass over these events more swiftly preferring to focus more on the life of the characters as opposed to the deaths because that's what Irving does...he writes about living life -- not about dying death.

When I think back over the years on some of the "characters" that I've read about and remembered like they were friends, it's Irving's characters who always seem to be at the top of the list...T.S. Garp, Owen Meany, Homer. This is the sign of a truly good book -- a book where the characters will last a lifetime in my fictional world. I have now added the entire Berry family to this list proving, once again, that Irving is a great "creator" of everlasting characters.

Novel of ideas that fails to reach dizzy heights, despite its daring
"The Hotel New Hampshire", a novel ostensibly about a New England family who eventually relocate to Vienna, is really an extended experiment of ideas and subjects for Irving and despite the glowing reviews from others, it's not a book which really worked for me personally. Irving throws incest, homosexuality, suicide, disability, philosophy, sexual abuse etc into the mix but neither the plot nor the characters are compelling enough for it really all to hang together.

This is the story of the Berry family, relatively unsuccessful hoteliers who are less living, breathing characters who might just be related to each other, than a motley crew of individuals for Irving to hang all those ideas on and throw things at. A number of reviewers of the book note the merciless way in which youngest child Egg and the mother of the family are dispatched in a plane crash with little ceremony or resulting grief - for me, the starkest example of the book's failure to engage on any emotional level - but the truth is that all of these people could have gone down in flames and I wouldn't have much cared. Irving doesn't bother to develop his characters, and is content to gloss over the fallout from, say, that plane crash, or the gang rape one character suffers, in favour of upping the quirkiness quotient or moving on to the next "controversial" topic on his list.

Ultimately, the book can be enjoyed for the sheer audacity of Irving in his choice of subject matter, and I am giving "The Hotel New Hampshire" three stars because of what this writer tries to cover here and the verve with which he attempts the whole thing. The problem is that having introduced all of his various ideas, Irving doesn't seem to have very much of meaning to say about them, and nothing really rings true from the first page to the last.

As a side note, I can't be the only person to find the depiction of the romantic and sexual exploits of, er, John (interesting choice of name from this author...), this novel's hero, totally unconvincing, not to mention being laden with just that little bit of wish fulfilment. Two key romances in particular are plot points in the novel so I will gloss over most of the details but suffice to say that none of John's relationships with women are the least bit convincing and they all feel like very self-indulgent writing. In particular, the idea that romance or sex with John helps two women (who used to be in a relationship with each other) "get over" very particular issues they had did for me, nearly border on offensive. The love stories (such as they are) in this novel are by far its weakest aspect.

Eccentric and Entertaining.
I first read this book many years ago when I was a teenager and I loved it. It is completely off the wall and eccentric while having a great storyline which covers different countries, different hotels (more Twin Peaks than Travelodges) and has a unforgettable family who are extremely normal in many ways but utterly unique and entertaining.
What I remembered loving about this book was it seemed to echo real life. Childhood seems to go on for ages, uneventful and then BAM some lifechanging experience happens and you are off down a different road. The shocks and events keep happening and are really extreme in many ways but it is a great family saga.
This is the only book so far I've ever read twice - so many books, so little time but after reading some relatively turgid books ('The Hour I First Believed' and 'Northern Clemency') it was really great to read a book which actually entertains again rather than being 'worthy' and dull.
I don't think you could ever call this book dull and the adult characters who I found less interesting years ago are now what I most enjoyed about the book. This is a wonderful story which deserves to be read more than once. If you want an original read which packs in lots of characters, history, family life, and exceptional events in a higly entertaining way then this is the book for you!
If you are wondering why there is an odd looking black dog on the front of this cover to give you a taste of this novel that is the family dog Sorrow who is put to sleep in old age because of his flatulence, he is then stuffed in a taxidermy experient by the oldest son. He causes a death. He catches on fire, is remodelled and finally ends up in the Ocean floating. He is only a very, very minor character in the story and a lot more happens to everyone else including the bears,
Anyone looking at the cover and thinking this would be a black dog, depression type story would be completely wrong.
Highly recommended.