Rarely in recent times has a voice so captured the imagination of critics and readers everywhere as John Irving in his internationally acclaimed novel The World According to Garp.
In Mr. Irving's newest novel, The Hotel New Hampshire, the reader is again seduced by the unfolding of a singular world. As John Berry, the narrator and middle son in a family of five children (and one bear and a dog named Sorrow), explains: We were a family whose favorite story was the story of my mother and father's romance: how my Father bought the bear, how Mother and Father fell in love and had, in rapid succession, Frank, Franny, and me ('Bang, Bang, Bang! as Franny would say); and, after a brief rest, how they then had Lilly and Egg ('Pop and Fizzle,' Franny says),"
That voice--at once nostalgic and direct--describes the Berry family growing up in three different hotels and on two separate continents. "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." What happens to Father's dreams (and to the children upon whom those dreams are visited) is the subject of John Irving's fifth and finest novel.
In Mr. Irving's newest novel, The Hotel New Hampshire, the reader is again seduced by the unfolding of a singular world. As John Berry, the narrator and middle son in a family of five children (and one bear and a dog named Sorrow), explains: We were a family whose favorite story was the story of my mother and father's romance: how my Father bought the bear, how Mother and Father fell in love and had, in rapid succession, Frank, Franny, and me ('Bang, Bang, Bang! as Franny would say); and, after a brief rest, how they then had Lilly and Egg ('Pop and Fizzle,' Franny says),"
That voice--at once nostalgic and direct--describes the Berry family growing up in three different hotels and on two separate continents. "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." What happens to Father's dreams (and to the children upon whom those dreams are visited) is the subject of John Irving's fifth and finest novel.