A Widow for One Year - ISBNLookup.com

LA Times Book Review

Deeply affecting...The pleasures of this rich and beautiful book are manifold. To be human is to savor them.

San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle

John Irving as at the peak of his considerable powers in A Widow for One Year, his most intricate and fully imagined novel.

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, 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.
—Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles

The New York Times

Irving's most entertaining and persuasive novel since his 1978 bestseller, The World According to Garp.

Peter Kurth

A Widow for One Year, the enormously entertaining new novel by John Irving, is all narrative, all character, all author. This is to be expected from Irving, a writer who describes his fiction as "old-fashioned" and looks to 19th century novels as the model for his work. It's the measure of his achievement here that in a book spanning 40 years and nearly 600 pages, you feel when it's over that you've spent your time wisely, not just with the story and its protagonists, but with their creator, too, whose voice remains as forceful and distinctive as his characters' without once intruding where it doesn't belong.

The "widow" of Irving's title is Ruth Cole, just 4 years old when the novel opens in 1958. "This is Ruth's story," says Irving slyly, though anyone who's read his books before will guess that Ruth's story quickly becomes many stories. Ruth is the child of a stupendously successful children's book writer, Ted Cole, hard-drinking and a "womanizer," and his beautiful, distant wife, Marion. Before Ruth's birth, the Coles had suffered the loss of their two teenage sons, Thomas and Timothy, in a car wreck on Long Island. Ruth is the boys' wary replacement, born to a house of grief and relentless memories, instructed in the lives of her dead brothers from her first moment of consciousness and surrounded by their photographs until Marion suddenly leaves Ted, taking all the pictures with her and disappearing forever from Ruth's life. The immediate instigator of Marion's departure is Eddie O'Hare, a 16-year-old Exeter student employed as an assistant by Ted one summer with the express idea that he will have an affair with Marion; that Marion will see in Eddie the image of her lost sons; that divorce will ensue and that Ted, finally, will have custody of Ruth.

But be warned: This is only the set-up for the tale. As usual with Irving, A Widow for One Year is an epic tragedy told in madcap terms. Ruth grows up to be a bestselling novelist; Eddie also writes books, though not as successfully; Ted carries on drinking and seducing other men's wives; and Marion — but to tell about Marion would be playing unfair. It's familiar Irving territory, wildly comic, ruminative and spread all over the globe. In the end, however, this is a novel about biography and the nature of fiction, a well-known theme of Irving's that doesn't suffer in the retelling.

"Ruth Cole's credo amounted to a war against the roman à clef," Irving writes pointedly, "a put-down of the autobiographical novel ... She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one — for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story — not necessarily what did happen or what had happened." A lot happens in A Widow for One Year, of that you can be sure. It's a welcome and robust roar to life from one of our finest storytellers.
— Salon April 28, 1998

William H. Pritchard

...[S]eems to me the best story John Irving has yet contrived.
— The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Irving's latest LBM (Loose Baggy Monster, that is), which portrays with serio-comic gusto the literary life and its impact on both writers and their families, is simultaneously one of his most intriguing books and one of his most self-indulgent and flaccid. Though it's primarily the story of successful novelist Ruth Cole, the lengthy foreground, set in Sagaponack, Long Island, in 1958, is dominated by Ruth's parents, Ted and Marion, both minor novelists (though Ted later becomes rich and famous as a writer and illustrator of children's stories), both mourning the deaths of their two teenaged sons in an automobile accident. Ted copes by seducing younger (often married) women; Marion, by bearing a daughter (Ruth) whom she'll later abandon following her affair with 16-year-old Eddie O'Hare, a prep-school student hired by Ted as a 'writer's assistant.' Later sections, set in 1990 and 1995, dwell melodramatically on Ruth's painstaking progress toward romantic happiness (including a European book tour that involves her with a prostitutes' rights organization) and the lingering effects of their adolescent affair on Eddie, who's now a middle-aged novelist and 'perpetual visiting writer-in-residence' with a lifelong passion for older women.

A grieving widow, offended by one of Ruth's novels, pronounces a curse on her. Eddie accidentally learns that the fugitive Marion is living in Canada, writing detective novels (by now the bemused reader may have anticipated the question later put to Ruth: 'Is everyone you know a writer?'). The story moves sluggishly, and overindulges both Irving's (Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, 1996) love of intricate Victorian plots and his literary likes anddislikes. On the other hand, his characters are vividly imagined, insistent presences who get under your skin and stay with you. A thoughtful, if diffuse, examination of how writers make art of their lives and loves without otherwise benefitting from the process.

From the Publisher

"[As] satisfying as one of Shakespeare's romances ... rich in perfect details [and] ... miraculous events, the sort that are longed for and cherished, the sort that sustain the imagination when reality becomes too disappointing."
—The Financial Post

"Full of the antics of scorned lovers and infatuated youth, of madcap chases and boisterous lovemaking ... He offers ... a faith in patient storytelling and the conviction that narrative hunger is part of our essence."
—Carol Shields, The Globe and Mail

"Powerful and sophisticated ... A stunning narrative ... wonderful, sumptuous, entertaining."
—The Ottawa Citizen

"[Irving's] storytelling has never been better... engaging and affecting ... old-fashioned and modern all at once."
—The New York Times

"[A] rich, great new novel ... profoundly engaging and lively ... Irving unearths [the] departed beauty in our lives."
—Quill & Quire

"Irving is at the height of his considerable literary powers. His novels burst with stories, characters, arguments, oddities and images that help us define the world we live in."
—Playboy