Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, the Berry family "dreams on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel...The lives of the Berry family members are seen through the eyes of John, who reflects upon his often chaotic existence as son of a hapless dreamer, a brother to eccentric siblings...
Reader from Los Angeles, CA
Tragi-comic farce about the implausible adventures of an eccentric family of hotel owners. Irving creates some memorable scenes, and the book is at its edgy best when depicting the incestuous sexual tensions...The worst of this book are the heavy-handed literary references, and the over-the-top exotica and tragedy, which sometimes seems to be created for shock effect at the expense of the reader's willingness to see the fiction as real.
Reader from Seattle WA:
I loved this book and finished it within a week by putting aside all my other reading. I enjoyed the humor as always, the dark twists of fate that befall Irving's characters. Each Irving book contains main themes; the big ones here are rape, incest, and the family unit. How someone could conceive of incest as a way to help a rape victim heal their wounds sounds incredible, but Irving pulls it off. There are several characters in the book that I couldn't help but chuckle at, like Iowa Bob and Egg. One reason I like his books so much is because of the comic relief his characters provide.
CRITICS' REVIEWS:
John Leonard
NY Times
We are told that even a child can understand The Hotel New Hampshire, and that critics will resent this because they prefer unintelligibility; that the novel is a fable and will therefore disappoint the low American appetitie for realism; that the three hotels - in New Hampshire, in Vienna and on the coast of Maine - represent childhood, adolescence and responsible maturity; and that Mr. Irving has been influenced by everybody from Donizetti to Turgenev to Freud to Carl E. Schorske. Tireless explainers.
As if that weren't enough advice, the characters in The Hotel New Hampshire are tireless explainers. "Everything is a fairy tale," says Lilly. "There are no happy endings," says Father. "You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed," says Iowa Bob. "Happy fatalism," says Frank. "If Father could have bought another bear," says John, "he wouldn't have to had to buy a hotel.: "What?" says Egg. "Keep passing the open windows," they remind themselves and each other.
"Keep passing open windows" is repeated over and over again, and it is excellent advice, especially if, like the Berry Family, you spend most of your life in hotels. Stop at a window and you may jump out. The Berry Family is on intimate terms with violent death. "Sorrow floats" is also repeated, far too often. Sorrow, in this case, is a stuffed dog; love and doom otherwise float. "Thus the family maxim was than an unhappy ending did not determine a rich and energetic life."
Of course, these is a rape. This wouldn't be a John Irving novel without a rape or a bear or Vienna or body-building or social privilege. There are, in fact, two rapes and two bears, as there are two Freuds and two blind men and two faces to the stuffed Sorros. "Retrieving Sorrows is a kind of religion, too," we are told. A child I asked didn't understand the sentence...
