The Hotel New Hampshire (1981)

"So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone's older brother, and someone's older sister - they become our heroes, too. We invent what we love, and what we fear. There is always a brave, lost brother - and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on; the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them."

I have started writing this review four, five times? I can't remember anymore. Each time, I get a few lines into it, and realize I'm falling terribly short of what I really want to say. This novel broke my heart. It is beautiful and lyrical and warm and funny and it broke my fucking heart, with each and every paragraph, every word. That's really all I can say about it. Read it.

"You have to keep passing the open windows."

john irving and tom robbins - how do these guys come up with this stuff?? a lot of interesting stuff (and bizarre stuff) going on, plenty to think about. ( )

A great, involving novel from John Irving. It's a family saga set over many years of running hotels in New Hampshire and Vienna. The characters are so well drawn that you feel like part of the family, and so laugh and cry along with them. It's a very funny book despite some very dark episodes, and carries you along despite the absolute ridiculousness of some situations in it. ( )

A family saga told by John, the third child of the Berry family, covering forty years or more. The Berry family is no ordinary family, but a family headed by a father with a vision, the vision of running a hotel; it is a vision that takes the family from New Hampshire to Vienna and back again, and brings them into contact with an array of unusual people.

However it is not father's vision the marks the Berry family as out of the ordinary, it is the extraordinary love that abounds among all its members, and love in many forms including incestuous desires. And one is bound to fall in love with them too, from Frank the eldest and gay son to Egg the youngest who lives in his own world of dressing up, and in between Franny, beautiful and fearless, John our narrator, and the undersized Lily who writes 'to grow'. It is a family that sticks together and pulls together even when in time they move apart geographically.

While consistently funny it yet swings between being moving, occasionally tragic, and at some hilarious for whole episodes, and it is always involving. A most imaginative and engaging novel filled with an array of unlikely yet believable characters - whether those of the Berry family or those of the numerous individuals who become a part of their lives. ( )

The Hotel New Hampshire tells the story of the Berry family. In the first chapter, we learn one of the family legends - the story of how Win Berry met Mary Bates when they were working at a resort hotel in Maine. The first sentence of the book carries a lot of the weight of this chapter, introducing the Berry kids (who are really the focus of this book) and letting us know that this book, like Irving’s others, will be filled with unusual characters and surprising events:

“The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born – we weren’t even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg.”

That deceptively simple sentence makes me heart break as I re-read it after finishing the book because in the next 400 pages Irving has made me care deeply about this family (and even about the bear). As they grow up in a series of hotels, life is difficult for the Berry kids. But the tragedies that happen are no match for the strength of the Berry family and their friends (including my favorites Junior Jones and Susie the Bear). The Berry kids are equipped to deal with tragedy by the wise words of their father and his father Coach Bob (aka, Iowa Bob):

“The way the world worked was not cause for some sort of blanket cynicism or sophomoric despair; according to my father and Iowa Bob, the way the world worked – which was badly – was just a strong incentive to live purposefully, and to be determined about living well” (p. 149).

It has to be said – there are some events in this book that would sound bizarre and unbelievable if I described them here outside the context of the story, but as I lost myself in the story, they seemed to fit. As our narrator John observes, “to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family.” And that is what The Hotel New Hampshire is all about. Irving hasn’t written a story; he has written a family – one that is eccentric to be sure, but one that brings the idea of family to life. ( )