A Widow for One Year

Rating:
Summary: Three times a lady
Review: Dysfunction is in the blood of the Coles in John Irving's remarkable "A Widow for one year". His novels reads like a patchwork achievement copying with many characters in three different periods in the life of the protagonist Ruth Cole, when she deals with things like grieving, lost and tragedy.

We first meet the Coles in the Summer of 1958, when she is only four and her mother Marion is dealing with the death of her older brothers in a car accident. The woman, always described as `a difficult woman', believes she cannot be a good mother to her daughter, who, by the way, was planed as a way of replacing the dead boys. Depressed and unable to lead a normal life, Marion embarks in a love affair with her husband's teenage assistant.

The tale moves fast to 1990, when Ruth is a famous writer who is unable to have relationships with men. Again, she comes across her mother's ex-lover, Eddie O'Hare, who is also a writer, albeit less successful than her. Both they discuss Marion and what may have happened to them. The final part of the story is set five years later, when Ruth seems to be finally ready to fall in love.

However difficult it is to say that Irving's novel has a plot, it is easier to believe he has written a chronicle of many years in Ruth's life. In this case, there are the recurrent people who surrounds her -- like her alcoholic father (who is also a very famous children writer), her friends (notoriously the delightful Hannah) and Eddie (who is on and off her life from time to time). In this fashion, the novel is a great achievement, once the characters are very believable.

Of course, the most interesting character is Ruth who shares many resemblances to her mother -- mostly psychological. It is easy too see how her childhood experiences --many from when she was four -- affect her throughout her life -- mostly when it comes to being in love or men in general.

The supporting characters are very human as well -- an achievement that not many writers can reach nowadays. Marion, for instance, vanishes from the novel for about 200 pages, but we still can feel her presence and influence (mostly in Ruth and Eddie) all the time. Not only her daughter wonders what may have happened to her, but so does the reader.

Not only is Irving able to write a great story but he also has a great command of the language building beautiful sentences that have a dramatic effect without being corny. His talents make it worthy to follow three different periods in the life of this lady. A novel recommended to those who like a great storytelling.


Rating:
Summary: Overall Worthwhile Read
Review: I've always really liked John Irving--but I've never been a part of his "do no wrong" cult following. Sometimes I find his work to be bizarre to the point of alienation.

Maybe that's why I enjoyed "Widow" so much--a very real, very believable slice of life story with sympathetic characters that I found myself easily relating to.

Incidentally, the movie based on this book was truly amazing.

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: 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: 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: 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: Excellent effort by Irving
Review:
I'm reading the Irving books all out of order, and so I am robbed of the sense of progression that I might get if I read them chronologically. But that might not be a bad thing; for many writers, their masterpieces come early (when they still have something to say), and their less notable works come late in life, when the world is most receptive.
I'd generally put Stephen King in this category, but the jury is still out on Irving. A Widow For One Year bears all the hallmarks of classic Irving-quirky characters, riveting and humorous episodes, development of a "theme," and nods to literary giants who have come before.
In this case, the characters are, mainly, the family of Ted Cole, a philandering children's author who is more concerned with keeping his daughter than his wife. His wife, Marion, who is described as one of the most beautiful women on the planet, is grief-stricken by the death of their two sons, Timothy and Thomas. Their daughter, Ruth, conceived after the tragedy in an effort to make a new start, starts the novel as a four year old, but spends most of the book as a rather tough female novelist. The other main characters are Eddie, also a novelist, whose love affair with Mrs. Cole at the age of sixteen leads him to a lifelong interest in dramatically older women; and Hannah, a friend of Ruth's who is mainly described through her promiscuity.
The plot is difficult to convey, because the most traditionally sensational events of the book, involving a murder in the red light district of Amersterdam, are secondary to the character development, and indeed seem more like a device to introduce Ruth to a future lover.
Irving is at his most entertaining when he is describing calamitous events befalling innocent people, and we get this in spades when Eddie, acting as chauffeur to Ted, and the gardener of a Mrs. Vaughn, get caught up in the violent fallout of a love affair between Mrs. Vaughn and Ted.
The theme is distracting, because there is a tremendous amount of focus on the degree to which a fictional novel is taken from the lives of the author. Ted, Ruth, Eddie, and Marion are all writers; they all draw from their lives to a different degree, and write for different reasons. I get the feeling that Irving is conveying his own views on the subject, but they are so intensely involved that they become boring. The average reader is not so interested in the real-life inspiration for characters and plot devices that he or she would like to read hundreds of pages inundated with that theme, I think. I didn't really care about whether Ruth used incidents from her real life or not, and I also was reading under the impression that Irving was using this as an opportunity to give voice to his own pet peeves with regard to book tours. Ruth hates signing autographs; does Irving? She tires of certain fan questions (where do you get your ideas?)' is this Irving telling us directly? Maybe the issue isn't even so much boring as distracting; I found it impossible to read about Ruth being irritated with an interviewer for not having read the book (for instance) without wondering if this is a John Irving experience. And this is because, at the same time, Ruth and the others debate how much of their real-life experience comes out in their writing. Overall, I thought that this was not in full service to the reader's interests, and may have even crossed into the realm of self-indulgence.
And so, this interfered with the book becoming a slam-dunk; in my mind, this and a slightly less-likable cast of characters keep Widow from overtaking the other favorites of mine in the Irving canon.
For the record, here is my ranking to date:
First, A Prayer for Owen Meany, which also ranks on my list of best books ever read
Second, The Cider House Rules
Third and Fourth, a toss-up between The Hotel New Hampshire and The World According to Garp, which is tough because I've read Hotel twice, and more recently, while Garp was my first Irving novel and is fuzzy in my mind.
Fifth, A Widow for One Year, which is still an excellent book
Sixth, The Fourth Hand, which was the least enjoyable so far of the Irving books I've finished


Rating:
Summary: The widow according to Irving.
Review: I had such high hopes for this book as I'm an Irving fan, but the characters were so flat and the pages just drag on. I've not had the experience of being in love with the same absent person for 40 years but it makes for very dry reading, I must say. I agree with the other reviews that the first part grabbed me but then it just fell apart. The Hannah character was just plain irritating.
I got about 60 pages from the end and I just didn't care what happened anymore.