Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9264 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 520 pages

Synopsis
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 peopled with characters - and bears - that you'll never forget.

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

Please can I have the last ten hours of my life back?
To start with I am a fan of John Irving: "Cider House Rules" was amazing, "Garp" less so but "Hotel New Hampshire" is an unmitigated disaster, a total mess. The frustrating thing is that there is a good book in here but it is submerged under layers of unecessary detail and periods of Dickens-style twee cuteness which really jar with some of the dark subject matter (anti-Semitism, rape, incest). There are too many characters here, a lot of them made unecessarily off-the-wall-wacky, and the plot suffers as a result. Moving the action to Austria is another misfire: the same scenario occurred in "Garp" and as a result one book feels like a rewrite of the other. Overall there is just too little plot to stretch over 500 pages, the plot slows down, the bizarre traits of the characters are repeated to an excruciating and tedious extent. In some writers' hands you can add to the atmosphere with extensive descriptions, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer achieve this, but Irving is just not in their class.

It has plenty of faults but...
For me, John Irving is a bit of a guilty pleasure. There's a lot of things wrong with his books, many of them being mentioned by a previous reviewer. He doesn't always give his characters a rounded personality (particularly in the case of the narrator, probably something borrowed from The Great Gatsby, a book mentioned a lot in Hotel New Hampshire) and some of the events are a little too bizarre and unlikely to be believable.

Despite this, I've enjoyed all the John Irving books I've read (this one, Garp and Owen Meany) the stories are ones I can get lost in and they're the sort of books I'll sit down to read for half an hour and still be reading two hours later without even realising.

If you pick at the Hotel New Hampshire, it falls apart, but it's a great read.

best entry book for John Irving
I think this is the best book to start with if reading John Irving, as it has his trademarks of love, sex (sometimes incestuous), comedy and loss. As it centres on a family, there are more characters to enjoy than some of his other novels which concentrate on one or two individuals. It's a bit of an epic, moving from the US to Vienna and back again. I fell in love with the family and their eccentric ways and strange associates. It won't make you cry as much as Owen Meany, but it will make you laugh more. Highly recommended.