A Widow for One Year : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: John Irving regains his Garp form with A Widow for One Year!
Review: A story of love, obsession, betrayal, and murder awaits the reader of John Irving's latest novel. The author of The World According to Garp (one of the best novels of the latter half of the 20th Century) and The Cider House Rules (an insightful look at abortion and adoption) seemed to have slipped lately. A Son of the Circus, especially, lacked Irving's trademark understated humor. But in "Widow" the author reclaims the blunt narrative, careful character development, and hilarious plot twists that have endeared him to readers.

This is very much a story of writers. The protagonist, a woman but nonetheless bearing autobiographical elements, is a novelist as is her mother, and her mother's lover. The father, chief rogue of the piece, writes and illustrates childrens books.

In an international romp engendered by book tours, we are treated to sex, prostitution, guilt, and redemption. All the while Irving keeps us guessing as to the ultimate fate of the several chief characters, all of whom are endearing in sundry ways.

John Irving has the ability to bring the reader (who may have been laughing out loud a paragraph or two ago) up short. He does so by confronting universal human fears: exposure, loneliness, aging. In A Widow for One Year, this exceptional modern writer shows once again that the "world according to Irving" is a place we all recognize, love, and hate.

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Change for Irving
Review: I am a huge John Irving fan and I always look forward to his latest book. I was pleasantly surprised by Widow as he has never had a female main character in any of his well crafted novels. Ruth was a wonderfully drawn woman, so much depth and richness to her character and the world around her.

This is the story of Ruth Cole, from her childhood thru her life as an adult and all the people that fill her life from start to finish. When Ruth is a young child she discovers her mother, Marion, having an affair with Eddie, the teenager hired to drive her father, a drunk and wildly popular children's author, around for the summer.

After this her mother disappears from her life. Both Eddie and Ruth become authors as well. Eddie, not quite a popular author, never quite got over his affiar with Ruth's mother and thus writes about it in every one of his novels. Ruth, on the other hand, is well known and loved. The book begins to take off when they meet again, after Eddie is asked to open a reading for Ruth. Their lives once again become entertwined as they both search for answer about Marion's disappearance and life. The novel also centers around Ruth's relationship with her father. The plot is engrossing and well rounded.

This novel is full of the things that Irving fan's have come to expect and love. Widow has become one of my favorite Irving novels - sitting next to Garp, Owen Meany and Cider House Rules. This book deserves to be savored like a fine wine.

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.