John Irving - The Hotel New Hampshire

“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.”

How tantalizingly great is that line???


I find it hard to review a book that I love—nearly impossible, in fact. What can you say except ‘fuck Farewell To Arms; make this required high school reading’? So maybe I’ll just talk about the author.

More than any other novelist I know (excepting Steinbeck and Faulkner) John Irving exemplifies the maxim of ‘throw what you know’, which is, in no particular order: circuses, bears, rape, motorcycles, Eastern Europe, tragedy, anarchists, weightlifting, love, dwarfism, poetry, adultery, opera, prostitution, incest, and hotels— he writes about them all constantly. The dwarf (Owen Meany) who became the lovable movie character Simon Birch was not the first dwarf to populate Irving’s fictional universe. Nor was the Hotel New Hampshire, namesake of this novel, the first hotel. Earl was not the first (or last) bear, and the 1937 Indian, with which this novel begins, is certainly not the first motorcycle. These things and ideas permeate any Irving novel, resulting in a ridiculous pastiche of familiar themes presented in unbelievable and, ultimately, moving ways, which I think is his biggest strength. Not a single plot from any Irving novel I have ever read (most of them, not all) is remotely believable, yet all of them feel deeply rooted in the real world, and are populated by real people.

I’ve tried three or four times to write a quick synopsis of The Hotel New Hampshire as an example, but it just doesn’t work. Nothing makes sense without copious explanations—not Freud, Chipper Dove, or Iowa Bob; not Fritz and his circus or the toilets at the Stanhope; not Screaming Annie the prostitute, and certainly not Miss Miscarriage, the Gatsby-loving revolutionary. Even the family needs a novel’s worth of explanation: weirdo Frank, half-deaf Egg, little Lily, the relative buoyancy of Sorrow, the tangled relationship between a sister and a brother. Susie, the smartest bear of all, makes less sense than anyone in the book, yet she feels more authentic than every character combined in whatever novel Oprah is pimping this month, guaranteed.

The only criticism I have is that the final chapter—the self-proclaimed ‘epilogue’ (“because there always is one”) goes on for far too long. It gets caught in weird tangents explaining the future happenstances of every character as if it somehow mattered, as if the story on its own was not enough. Take Fred—the late-arrival deaf handyman. He’s not quite Egg, but he’s supposed to resemble Egg, and the comparison is half-assed and entirely unnecessary. Egg already broke your heart; Fred just confuses you for the 10 pages of his existence.

But another way to look at it is this: given that ‘it’s a little long’ is the easiest criticism to make, what is far more impressive is that in 400+ pre-epilogue pages, there aren’t a dozen expendable words. The Hotel New Hampshire is a triumph of making every line count and every description matter, of making every character distinct and every situation work.

Plus, I can’t read this book without crying at least six times. Maybe that’s the only acclamation it needs.