Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: It is the summer of 1958, and 16 year old Eddie O'Hare takes a job as writer's assistant with the womanizing and calculating author Ted Cole. Ted's wife Marion, is deeply grieving the tragic death of her teenage sons, and is emotionally unavailable to both her husband and her 4 year old daughter Ruth. Eddie is cast adrift intot this complex household, and begins a passionate love affair with Marion. He unwittingly becomes a pawn in her abandonment of her family.
Fast forward 35 years, and Eddie meets Ruth, who has become a writer herself, and who is searching for clues about her mother, whom she hasn't seen since that fateful summer. The story is told in Irving's cynical voice, and abounds with stock characters who only help to make the protagonists more real. From the first few moments of reading about Ted, Marion, Ruth and Eddie, the reader begins to care about what happens to them. Irving takes us deep into the novel, and does not disappoint.
Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary, complex novel
Review: John Irving is one of my most favorite "serious" authors because, in addition to telling a story in which both the plot and the characters monopolize your attention from the first paragraph -- as this one certainly does -- he also tells you things about the world in general and the people in it that require you to think. But his plots and characters definitely are complex, many-layered constructions, impossible to summarize in a review. But what the hell.
Ruth Cole is a critically and financially successful novelist -- far more so than her father, Ted, a writer of rather creepy children's books and serial seducer of young mothers. The story begins in the summer of 1958 when Ruth, age four, is about to be deserted by her mother, Marion. The Coles had lost their two teenage boys in an automobile accident five years before (Ruth was an ill-advised attempt to replace them, sort of) and Marion is afraid to love another child. Ted makes it easy for her by hiring sixteen-year-old Eddie O'Hare from Phillips Exeter Academy as his "writer's assistant" for the summer. Eddie falls in love with Marion, they have a torrid three-month affair, and Eddie's life pattern is fixed. And the way Irving lays all this out, it's completely convincing, even though many of the other characters themselves raise their eyebrows at Eddie's fixation on older women.
But that's only the beginning. Other major themes include squash as a metaphor for more profound psychic competition, and the nature of bravery and "domestic heroism," and the nature of sexual accountability and of prostitution, and the connection between justified anger and revenge, and the life and fiction of Graham Greene (of whom Irving is a noted admirer). The author delves deeply into how a writer becomes a writer and what that does to perception of other people and of the world in general.
It's been my experience that women authors generally do better with male protagonists than male writers do with women. Irving seems to be the exception, though, because Ruth Cole is so convincingly portrayed -- as a woman -- that you tend to forget the gender of the author.
One of the most fascinating parts of the story is the genesis of Ruth's new novel during her book tour at the Frankfurt Book Fair and in Amsterdam: The gradual growth of the main plot in her unconscious, her search for the right protagonist and the best motivation for her actions, her understanding that she won't have a choice, in many ways, about how the book comes out. "I'm a comic novelist," she thinks during one of her readings. "Half the audience will take this to mean that I am not a serious novelist. But comedy is ingrained. A writer doesn't choose to be comic. You can choose a plot, . . . you can choose your characters. But comedy is not a choice; it just comes out that way." Notwithstanding that perceptive statement, this book contains some very comic scenes. Ted Cole's panicked flight on foot from his latest conquest in her big black Lincoln, which ends with him signing books, tattered and bleeding, in the local bookstore (a sanctuary reached by way of a privet hedge) verges on slapstick. And Ruth's careful dismantling of a violent lover with his own squash racket will have the women in the audience cheering.
However, something else comes of her visit to Amsterdam and her tentative research for a new novel, which ends in one of the most baldly-narrated scenes of horror I've ever read.
Foreshadowing is a useful technique for heightening tension, but it's difficult to do well, without giving away too much too soon. Irving, though, is a master of foreshadowing. There are perhaps a half-dozen major plot points in the story and while in each case you're aware that something is coming, you won't know what until you get there. Except for the Amsterdam section of the story. That one caught me completely off-guard.
Almost everyone in this book loses someone. Even before the story opens, Ted and Marion have lost their sons. Ted loses his wife. Ruth loses her mother. Eddie loses the only woman he will ever love. Sergeant Hoekstra loses both his friend and the witness to her murder. Then Ruth loses her husband. Almost everyone, male and female, is in some sense a "widow." This is one of those novels that will sit quietly on my shelves from now on, waiting for a periodic rereading -- which I promise it will have.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning depth of character, almost all the time
Review: The first thing that struck me about this book was the heart-stopping beauty of Marion, a central character near the beginning of the book. It's tough to get images that concrete in written words, but Irving handles it without strain. Its not just a physical description, its the way that the rest of the image is a bit darker, a bit fuzzier when Marion is in the picture, like Irving is using the depth of field in a photograph to highlight the subject, like her physical brilliance is so overwhelming that everything else is dimmed.It's not that Marion's beauty is exactly central to the story, but the skill that Irving uses here seems to pop up all through the book. It's a carefully written book, in plain language, that competently and subtely handles overlapping undercurrents of the story. It feels like the characters drive their own actions, in their own voices, and intersect becuase they should, not because Irving is using them to move a plot forward. He's clearly writing on a different level than than anything I've read recently. I thought this was most apparent in the first section, and less so as the story went on. In a way, the more external elements drove the plot, especially the mildly outlandish ones, the less jaw-dropping the book was for me. There were a few bits that detracted from the flow for me, things that I think editors let Irving get away with because, well, he's Irving. He dwells an awful lot on a lead characters chest, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, and everyone is both a writer and a reader so voracious that they've all independently read every book relevant to the story. I left it at 5 stars, even with the flaws, because the good parts were so overpowering for me. In all, the flaws as I saw them were not enough to detract from the elegance of the story. I put this book down only because I didn't want to take it all in at once, didn't want it to be over. Recommended without reservation.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Novel
Review: This is the first novel I have ever read by John Irving, and I cannot wait to read another. Regardless of plot, one can get lost in his prose style and simply enjoy living with the characters he creates. The book is divided into three equal sections and the harshest criticism I have is that the last two thirds are not as good as the first.
There really is no plot to the book. In the first section, we meet Eddy O'Hare. He is sixteen-years-old and he is sent for the summer to be the writer's assistant of novelist Ted Cole. Ted and his wife Marion have lost two teenage boys in a car crash, and this has left the wife irreparably damaged. She begins an affair with the teenager as a means of saying goodbye to her sons. Ordinarily, I would not be sympathetic to such subject-matter, and it is a testament to how good a writer Irving is that he pulls it off.
However, as the narrator explains, the story is really about the Cole's daughter - Ruth. In the following two-thirds of the novel, we jump ahead thirty years or so to take up Ruth's story, leaving Eddy on the periphery. However, this is a minor complaint. Irving has such command of his craft that the reader is willing to follow him wherever he will lead - to the red-light district of Amsterdam and beyond.
Rating: 
Summary: A solid novel, but not as good as my usual Irving . . .
Review: This novel didn't stack up very well to some of the other books I've read by Irving. Although I loved Owen Meany, I am less than thrilled with A Widow for One Year.
For me, the first part of the book was more interesting than the second half. The story of Ted, Marion, and Eddie was touching, and I felt empathy for the characters at that point in the story. The idea that Marion would have photos of the boys throughout the house rang true to me, as did the concept that Ruth would be carefully schooled about each image and when it was taken. I was enthralled by the wife who couldn't get past the deaths of her sons and her philandering husband, how their grief about the tragedy they'd faced had impacted their marriage. I also felt for the gangly teen-aged Eddie, who had unknowingly walked into the situation.
Once the novel moved further along in the characters' lives, though, I just became frustrated with them. Why does Ruth feel the need to maintain a friendship with Hannah, who is a no-show for her readings and has sex with her father? Why does Eddie continue to hold a torch for Marion, who hasn't made contact with him in decades? Why does Ruth pick up a young boy herself on the streets of a foreign city and bring him back to her hotel room? I just didn't feel as though Irving gave his characters enough personality/motivation/whatever to justify these actions. I felt as though I didn't understand the older versions of some of the characters, and I didn't particularly like them, either.
Rating: 
Summary: What Ever Happened to John Irving?
Review: What a major disappointment to see that John Irving has written an autobiographical novel that should have been better placed in the setting of a private journal for his eyes only.
Nobody cares about Ruth, a whiny and bratty child whose breasts are sure nice, as were those of her mother. Nobody cares about the men in the novel, a bunch of elitist men who scramble for property and whose biggest fear is losing at squash and conquering sex with women be it through rape, fantasy, or prostitution. In fact, everybody in the novel is a whore and a complete wastrel.
What a complete bore and utter waste of my time and money. After 537 pages, the novel has a slightly clever denouement, but that's about it. Since when has prostitution been so novel?
Who cares about a dead prostitute whose daughter died in childbirth? Nobody.
In addition, the non-stop italicized words which I imagine are added for superfluous and not-needed empahasis feel like being hit over the head again and again with a frying pan. The non-stop stuffed prose into parentheses belie Irving's ability to trust his educated and somewhat loyal audience to read a book.
Blech! DO NOT READ IT.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully crafted tale; indelible characters and images
Review: Widow is the best John Irving book since The Cider House Rules, and in my opinion, ranks as one of his finest efforts to date. Irving always has a full, complex, and engaging tale to tell--a tale that may give the impression of being sprawling, overly broad, perhaps somewhat disjointed. His creative genius lies in the fact that he is always in complete control of his richly chaotic worlds, that every element he chooses to include in his tale is essential and integral, and he orchestrates these elements with such skill and subtlety (yes, subtlety), and with such a remarkable sense of dramatic arc that the reader is led to experience a literary crescendo of sorts, where characters, plot, language, memory, images, and seemingly disparate elements come together in a deeply satisfying, inevitable, and transcendent way. This tale of an extended "family" of writers is itself an example of the incredible gifts we as readers can receive from writers of imagination, ! intelligence, and heart.
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