The Hotel New Hampshire
Kellman, Steven G.
THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE John Irving E.P. Dutton, $15.50, 401 pp. Steven G. Kellman WHEN The World According to Garp (1978) first swam into our ken, it was doing the butterfly-a form of aquatic...
...The Hotel New Hampshire is an animated cartoon...
...The basic rhetoric unit of The Hotel New Hampshire is the one-liner...
...Its onomastics are funky...
...When a dog waggishly named Sorrow is found drifting in the Atlantic, it almost seems as if the plot has been knocked out of shape by a punch line, as if events have been deployed around the narrator's stoical delight in repeating that "Sorrow floats...
...It would be churlish to say anything harsh about John, lover of bears and of a Sarah Lawrence dropout named Susie whom he convinces to discard the ursine outfit in which she has been hiding for fear of being too ugly...
...Even at his most sententious...
...So it goes...
...Salinger has been affixing to manuscripts in his New Hampshire seclusion...
...It is fortunate that the family is so remarkable, as this is a long book, and, throughout the vagaries of space and time, its members have made of mere kinship an exclusive calling...
...The hospice they operate first in New Hampshire, then Vienna, then Maine, is always named The Hotel New Hampshire and is conceived, like this earnest novel, as a sanctuary for decency and good will in a gruesome world...
...His own clear story is a straightforward, engaging testimony to the family creed of "happy fatalism...
...taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject...
...Steven G. Kellman WHEN The World According to Garp (1978) first swam into our ken, it was doing the butterfly-a form of aquatic locomotion whose frenetic strokes yield proportionately little in the way of speed, buoyancy, or grace...
...It is a sentimental and naive world which emerges in this chronicle of the remarkable Berry family as narrated by the third of the five children, forty-year-old John...
...The whimsical, enormously successful account of the life and works of T. S. Garp, author of The World According to Ben-senhaver, apparently provided narrative self-consciousness for the masses, a public for whom Beckett, Borges, and Cal-vino remain forbidding...
...the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet," or "the first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels"), John Berry, like John Irving, is so cheerfully and terminally innocent that it is impossible to find him overbearing...
...Garp insists that: "Autobiographical fiction is the worst kind.'' Yet there is much in the life of this author, born in New Hampshire in 1942, son of an instructor at Exeter, wrestler, student at the University of Vienna, and novelist, that would make not only Garp, but Setting Free the Bears (1969), The Water-Method Man (1972), and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974) as well into romans a clef were not, as Garp rightly contends, all experience just so much fictional clay...
...Perhaps John Irving is simply the nom de plume which a playful J.D...
...Stylistically, Irving, like Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins, suffers from morbus Vonnegutus, a pathological aversion to subordinate clauses whose etiology can be traced to an obstinate faith in sancta simplicitas...
...The Berry family, which has its own Franny, resembles nothing else in literature so much as the precocious Glass family...
...The Hotel New Hampshire recycles material from John Irv-ing's four previous novels: a New England prep school, an eccentric coach, a malodorous dog, a lovable bear, a circus troupe, Vienna, rape, prostitutes, a woman who inadvertently becomes a celebrity, and a winsomely self-conscious author...
...John Berry is reflexively defensive about "damn reviewers, with their dull, plodding cunning" and "bad readers" who "discover that absolute obscurity was not only publishable but seemingly identified with seriousness...
...The plot is carefully punctuated with the most appalling catastrophes, for which even assassination and castration in Garp are insufficient inoculation...
...an Austrian Jewish animal trainer is named Freud, a bear is State o' Maine, and a Viennese prostitute is Ffaulein Fehlegeburt (Miscarriage...
...Though The Hotel New Hampshire is spun out of such currently fashionable themes as terrorism, rape, homosexuality, incest, suicide, pornography, football, and the Holocaust, it reinforces the truism that culturally as well as politically we are reliving the 1950s...
...For those nostalgic over the traditional values of a family novel, here is a book about quaint characters whose lives outside the family circle are indeed tangential, in fact nonexistent...
...Winslow Berry, son of Iowa Bob, the football coach of the Dairy School, dreams of operating a fine hotel, and his children-Frank, Franny, John, Lilly, and Egg-organize their lives around that dream, of "the fabulous space for sympathy that a truly great hotel provides...
...Despite local variations for Franny's pervasive profanity or Junior Jones's eternal expletive "man," every character quips with an identically naive cynicism...
...And when John Berry walks the nocturnal streets of Vienna alone "crying not just for myself but for them all," he is an avatar of another prep school refugee, Holden Caulfield...
...Two of them become historians of the family romance, another reenacts it for television and film, and a fourth becomes the professional agent for the rest...
...It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious," declares Irving's blind Freud...
...If it is true that all writers revise a single book throughout their lives, The Hotel New Hampshire is the most definitive version to date of The World According to John Irving...
...powerless to efface all the blemishes in the world, each ends the night hugging his sister...
...An additional insight provided by this exuberant fairy tale is that it is considerably less difficult to make art not so serious.t so serious...
...Through it all, John's flippant but melancholy voice provides us with an island of stability in a sea of schmaltz...
...Phrases like "Everything is a fairy tale," " Screwed down for life," and "Keep passing the open windows" recur so often in the book that they acquire the force of incremental repetition, or of monotony...
Vol. 108 • November 1981 • No. 20
