The Hotel New Hampshire

"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 show more and every paragraph, every word. That's really all I can say about it. Read it.

"You have to keep passing the open windows." show less

I'm a huge fan of John Irving, and this is my favorite of his books.

This review will contain SPOILERS.

The book involves almost all of the usual Irving tropes - wrestling, hotels, New Hampshire, bears, sex and death (if he'd thrown in some dwarves, we would have had a perfect set). There are laugh-out-loud moments and cry-out-loud moments.

This book essentially details the struggles of a family with a lot of children as they face some of the more difficult things you could imagine, including terrorism, gang rape and the death of a parent. The troubles they face are almost outsize, but the snide wit and perseverance the family exhibits in the face of these things is heartwarming and engaging. And beneath the somewhat overblown facade, the show more novel allows the reader access to the many real struggles of children forced to be the parents in a family while still young and the difficulties of wanting something you just aren't supposed to have. show less

It took me some time to think about why I loved this book so much. Parts of it were disturbing and hard to get through but in the end it was about an unconventional family that pulled each other through all of the things in life that they couldn't control, and managed to find happiness in their disfunction. I didn't love all of the characters but I loved their strengths and weaknesses and how they each identified with one another. Even though I sometimes find it hard to get through, I'm still a loyal John Irving fan :)

broad portrait of a family who decides to run a hotel. surprise, they are quirky and full of odd.

i think this might be my favorite book of Irving’s. it’s mythic. the characters of the story are ornate, autonomous, and alive. they inhabit vignette myths where they fight, run, have sex, taxidermy dogs, rape, lift weights, and so on in intertwined stories that they often result in unforeseen consequences causing them to grow in unexpected ways (or attempt to grow in the case of Lilly). but much of it feels like the forces of Gaia swooping down, like Loki or Zeus is having his way with them, propelling them onward often against their wills but to richer, better ends.

there are times when the quirk goes maybe a bit into the absurd but, show more even then, it’s charming and believable (sometimes just so) within the pre-cell phone, pre-internet world where people could pool up in islands of anonymous behavior that never saw the light of day in dozens of pics posted online or GPS tracking or public shaming escapades on social media. they also didn’t see other people from other walks of life on television each and every day in the wild diversity that we do now. so, yes, i can believe that a bear named Susie is the bellhop and bouncer at a hotel near downtown Vienna in the 1950s and 60s.

it also runs the gamut of human emotions and experience but does not neglect the intellectual. i cared about all of them and it was a shame to have the book end. i want to know more about their family. i had a friend who used to say she wanted to live in Stephen King’s The Shining. it might be the same for me with The Hotel New Hampshire- both the first and second. the third was awesome in it’s own right but missing much of the atmosphere and spectacle. show less

The Berry family is an odd mix of eccentrics who seem perfectly normal to each other. There’s Frank, the introverted eldest son, Franny, a strange extrovert with no concept of boundaries, our narrator John, Lily the youngest daughter who can’t seem to grow and Egg, the youngest son, who is hard of hearing and constantly changing costumes. Throw in a pet bear, a weight-lifting grandpa, a dog named Sorrow and a few more odd balls and you’ve got a story…. kind of.

The family lives in and runs two hotels over the course of their childhood. One is actually in New Hampshire; the other is in Vienna, Austria. Their lives are complicated by loss and inappropriate love. The author loves jarring readers out of their comfort zones when show more they’re reading his books. I feel like every time I read one of his books, as soon as I start relaxing into the story he does something awful and kills off a major character or throw in a disturbing twist.

Irving has a serious obsession with sex in his books, particularly young men with older women. This made a lot more sense to me after I read an interview where he talked about that being his own first sexual experience. Still it’s always slightly irked me because it often feels forced in the flow of the story. This book kind of takes the odd sex stuff to an extreme. There’s rape, incest and prostitution, yet somehow the book is not heavy or depressing because it’s all done with a jovial tone. Like I said, it’s really odd.

It’s also hard to explain how you can like and dislike a book at the same time. I thought parts of it were incredibly funny, but others just overwhelmed me with their dysfunction.

BOTTOM LINE: I want to like Irving’s work more than I do. I really loved A Prayer for Owen Meany and would recommend that one, but his other books don’t seem to work for me. There’s too much of an emphasis on sex, troubled relationships with older women or relatives, etc. However, his writing is incredibly entertaining and I found myself enjoying the book as I was reading it, but then it lost me somewhere along the way. I stopped rooting for the characters and became too distracted by their problems. I think after this, my third Irving, I’m done with him for awhile. I’ll try him again in 10 years. show less

After having several of my friends recommend Irving to me, I felt that the time had come to give it a go. I ended up with "The Hotel New Hampshire" simply because it was the only Irving novel currently avaliable at the airport bookshop. I brought it with my on holdiay to Greece, and I ended up almost spending more time reading than bathing in the Aegean sea. The story was so captivating already from the first pages, mainly due to the wonderful quirky characters that make up the Berry-family. I won't bother with a plot synopsis here, because I felt that the plot was secondary to the characters in this novel. The characters ARE the novel, and I especially fell in love with Lilly, the tiny little sister who's got a knack for writing show more novels. I also love the fact that the novel deals with important issues like rape and death in a playful, but alwasys serious and thought-provoking manner. And yet the novel never failed to entertain me. This is definitely a must-read! show less

All'inizio questo romanzo non mi convinceva affatto. C'erano troppi bambini, e un'atmosfera fiabesca, e a un certo punto ero convinta di aver sbagliato lettura, e che quello fosse un romanzo per bambini.
E invece.
"Hotel New Hampshire" è la storia appassionante di una famiglia stramba. Una famiglia che mentre cresce conosce la gioia, ma affronta anche il dolore e la rovina. John Irving è straordinario, e io lo amo senza riserve. È straordinario, in questo romanzo, il modo in cui Irving tratta temi tutt'altro che leggeri (lo stupro, l'incesto, la morte, il suicidio, la malattia), lasciando trapelare un'umanità perfettamente ritagliata addosso ai personaggi; una leggerezza che non è superficialità, ma che ci racconta di come le show more persone sopravvivono a tutto, anche alla rovina. Ecco, benché strambi i personaggi di Irving mi sembrano veri, reali, pieni di sfumature. Umani. show less