PDF Download A Widow for One Year: A Novel, by John Irving

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A Widow for One Year: A Novel, by John Irving

PDF Download A Widow for One Year: A Novel, by John Irving

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Amazon.com Review

John Irving fans will not be startled to find that A Widow for One Year is a sprawling farce-tragedy crawling with characters who are writers. In the opening scene, 4-year-old Ruth Cole walks in on her melancholy mother, Marion, who is in flagrante with 16-year-old Eddie, the driver for drunken Ted (Ruth's dad and Marion's estranged, womanizing husband). Eddie spends the rest of his life obsessively writing novels like Sixty Times, his roman à clef about his 60 seductions by Marion. Ted is a failed novelist who gets rich and famous writing creepy children's stories based on tales he tells Ruth (such as The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls). Marion abandons Ruth, Ted, and Eddie and becomes a successful pseudonymous novelist. And Ruth becomes the most richly celebrated writer of them all because of her early training by Ted, who not only told her stories, but also helped her craft narratives to explain their home's many photographs of her brothers, who died in a gory car wreck the year before she was born. Grief over the boys is why Ruth's mother does not dare to love her. Ruth, Irving's first female main character, works brilliantly, first as an imaginative, almost Salingeresque child coming to terms with her bewildering family, then as a grownup striving to understand her mother's motives--or at least to track her down. Ted is a mordantly funny caricature, interestingly sinister and plausibly self-justifying when most inexcusable. Eddie is a lovable schlemiel, yet not too sentimentally drawn. And what set pieces Irving can write! The story of the boys' death is horrific and effective in dramatizing the character of Ted, who narrates it. Ted's attempted murder by a spurned lover is as hilarious as the VW-down-the-marble-stairway scene in A Prayer for Owen Meany (which has been adapted by Disney Studios), though not quite on a par with the celebrated "Pension Grillparzer" episode in The World According to Garp (reissued in a 20th anniversary edition by Modern Library). Irving has the effrontery to get away with practically any scene that comes into his head--Ruth winds up an eyewitness to a hooker's murder in Amsterdam, a Dutch detective starts tracking her down (just as Ruth is hunting Marion), and the multiple plot strands all converge in a finale that neatly echoes the opening scene. It's all done with the outrageously coincidental yet minutely realistic brio of Charles Dickens, with a sad, self-conscious jokiness like that of Irving's mentor, Kurt Vonnegut. --Tim Appelo

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From Library Journal

The first half of Irving's ninth novel tells the story of Eddie O'Hare, a prep school student with literary aspirations who lands a job as a personal assistant to noted children's author Ted Cole in the summer of 1958. O'Hare spends most of the time in bed with Cole's wife, Marion. The second half of the book describes O'Hare's acquaintance, decades later, with Ruth Cole, Ted's daughter, who is also a successful writer. While researching her latest novel, Ruth witnesses the murder of an Amsterdam window prostitute. Irving tantalizes us with this promising subplot, then veers off in another direction. As in The World According to Garp (LJ 6/1/78), nearly every character in the book churns out reams of Irving-esque prose. It's hard to empathize with these dreary people, and their picaresque adventures seem to lack any thematic relevance. Instead of ending, the book simply runs out of steam. Still, there are legions of rabid Irving fans who will want to read every word he has written. For larger fiction collections.-?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los AngelesCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Hardcover: 537 pages

Publisher: Random House; 1st trade ed edition (May 5, 1998)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0375501371

ISBN-13: 978-0375501371

Product Dimensions:

6.8 x 2 x 10 inches

Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

3.7 out of 5 stars

448 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#2,096,969 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

A book that at times disgusted - then bored me to distraction; then excited me with anticipation.It's that bad ...&, that good. (&, maybe so on purpose?)Is it a triumph of contradictions, or a contradiction of triumphs? You have to read it to decide...if, you can.

I have read thousands of novels and this is one of my favorites. It is true, as other reviewers say, that John Irving is a scattered writer who often shifts story-lines and tone. But that is part of the charm of a John Irving novel, along with his humor and bitterness. There are at least 2 plots here and I thought both of them were interesting and entertaining. And there are four or five or six important characters, all of whom are interesting and flawed. I think most readers would enjoy reading A Widow for One Year. It is never boring.

I have read and loved Irving novels for years and especially like the ones where I can relate to the protagonist and other characters. This is one of those!Do not be put off by its length. It reads fast and can be one of those that keep you up at night. I found myself thinking of this book during the day and anxiously waiting to find out what the four main characters were up to next.It moves back and forth between these wonderfully drawn characters - while still moving forward through the years. The first quarter of the book takes place when Ruth is four years old. You can feel how that summer would affect her the rest of her life. It is also a fun read while going forward with the tragedy of the lives involved.This is the first Irving book that, I now realize, was made into a movie by another name. This film only took place in that first quarter of the book when she was four. Very unusual to discover. See if you can figure it out.Now to the ending. Don't read it ahead since it would make no sense without the whole book under your belt. However, I have never read a book where I gasped and sobbed at the last sentence.Mr Irving - you have completely gotten me on this one.Finally - it is about all the characters being writers of one kind or another. This is fun since Irving has the opportunity to talk about how different people write and succeed, or not.Enjoy this great read

If this were written by another author, I would say it was decent. But John Irving is an exceptional writer - one of my all-time favorites - and I was a bit disappointed. The story became more interesting toward the end of the book, but much of what preceded that seemed unnecessary and even self indulgent. For example, a number of passages seemed like independent short stories that just didn't belong (or had a tenuous connection). He's included such passages in other books, but not nearly as many.I'm glad I read Garp, Owen Meany and Cider House Rules first. Had I started with A Widow For One Year, I doubt that I would have been interested in those masterpieces. Indeed, I would not even have completed this book had it been written by just about anyone else; although it was engaging in many places, it dragged for long stretches.Perhaps Irving's other brilliant books created impossible and unfair expectations, but I just did not care for A Widow For One Year.

I absolutely love John Irving. A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules are two of my favorite books and definitely five star reads. A Widow for One Year also has its strong points, however it also has some weaknesses. I personally like Irvings writing style so that did not disappoint. The story was good and at times very engaging. I believe that Irving excels at creating unique characters that are not people that we come across very often and this book is no exception. My reasoning behind three stars instead of four is that in the two previously mentioned novels there seemed to be much more research put into the story. For example, cider house rules had characters that performed medical procedures and worked in Apple orchards to name a couple and Irving went into great detail about both which I can only imagine took a great amount time to learn to be able to convincingly write on the topic. Owen Meany had a lot of political history and ideology. A Widow for One Year had characters with unique backgrounds but it is a topic that is all to easy for an author to write about. The characters are writers. So I guess I am more disappointed that Irving possibly may have took an easy and in my opinion a much to often used route in this book. That being said I still enjoyed it and think that it was well written. Thanks for reading.

Every John Irving fan will doubtlessly once again get totally engrossed in the characters which he so masterfully creates. Not many authors are capable of creating a depth to his characters as John Irving does. It is patently clear that every detail of the fiction is planned by the author in detail before he writes his novel and there is no haphazard development or happenings that do not ultimately falls within the ambit of the plot. I do believe however that John Irving is better at writing from the perspective of a male than from a female, as is done in this book. He typifies female characters and fails to give them the depth that he gives his male main characters of his fiction. The story of Ruth (the widow for a year) and the main character fails to fully portray the feelings and thoughts of a female and so it does of her mother and her best friend, Hannah. He fails to give them the complexity of a woman. He can give Ruth the characteristics of an author, but as aforesaid, fails to give her the complexity of a woman. John Irvings main characters normally invoke a feeling of like and admiration however he does not make Ruth a very likeable persona.Normally when finishing a John Irving book I miss the main character, like a friend that has left my world but I did not feel like that about any of his characters he creates in this book, including her two best friends, Hannah and Eddie. Hannah is stereocast as a "woman always between bad boyfiends" and Eddie's character is confusing in that he is a real weakling at times and other times just "nice". There are however some very compelling parts to the book and a John Irving fan will enjoy this book as well.

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