IN THE FAMILY
Irving, John
IN THE FAMILY THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE by John Irving Dutton. 401 pp. $15.50. Weak writers may repeat themselves in book after book, while great writers, often obsessed, reexamine their subjects...
...Irving has a dangerous tendency to preach...
...After The World According to Garp, John Irving's tragicomic treatment of New England schoolmasters, Viennese prostitutes, and performing bears will prompt nods of recognition rather than gasps of wonder...
...As a family, the Berrys form a virtually self-enclosed world...
...The family's heroic response to a terrorist attack in Vienna seems a clumsy plot device which gets the Berrys home and makes them famous...
...they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more...
...The family's closeness is a defense against the terrifying and tragic non-Berry world...
...He has written an uncompromising novel, for he refuses to sentimentalize or evade the most wrenching emotions, and he insists we must cry and laugh at a world we cannot control...
...A world which constantly threatens to inflict violence and sudden death is set against the saving virtues and emotional risks of the family and of art...
...The narrator, John Berry, describes himself as "the middle child, and the least opinionated...
...On one Halloween, Franny is gang raped in the woods near the first Hotel New Hampshire...
...Caryn Fuoroli (Caryn Fuoroli has taught contemporary literature at Brown University and is currently a free-lance writer living in New York...
...On Christmas the children's grandfather, Iowa Bob, is scared to death when the dog Sorrow, taxidermied in an attack posture, tumbles out of a closet...
...The Hotel New Hampshire is a compelling novel...
...The third Hotel New Hampshire becomes a platform from which his narrator tells us about the value of rape crisis centers, when Irving might have dramatized their importance to much greater effect...
...Franny explains, "We aren't eccentric, we're not bizarre...
...The novel's several tag lines, especially "sorrow floats," are overused, and quickly become aphorisms...
...F. Scott Fitzgerald returned to the very rich again and again, and William Faulkner to the psychological blood sports and themes of Mississippi, novel after novel...
...Usually viewed from the perspective of the victim, it is embodied in the icy arrogance of Franny's football hero rapist...
...Like the Berrys and their mentor, an Austrian nicknamed Freud, Irving brings to the surface our deepest dreams and fears...
...Irving follows the Berry family through three decades and their serial ownership of three hotels...
...And death, like violence, is always an imminent possibility...
...In the face of this constantly threatening world, the family finds what internal stability it can and explores its internal tensions...
...In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense...
...In his new book, he has become more articulate...
...Incest is not a subterranean theme or a repressed desire, but a fact in John's and Franny's lives...
...The novel is at times awkward...
...Frank, the oldest, is fussy in mind and body...
...To each other...
...And John agrees, "We were just a family...
...With its explicit fears, its atmosphere of inevitable, unpredictable doom, The Hotel New Hampshire is a dark novel, despite its humor...
...how Egg got his name...
...He is the even-handed reflector of his family—of Father's aspirations and Mother's gentle acceptance, and of his four siblings...
...Irving's old obsessions become disturbing, while illuminating new experience...
...The comedy is not a relief from tragedy but an increasingly desperate means by which the family endures and bounces back...
...Weak writers may repeat themselves in book after book, while great writers, often obsessed, reexamine their subjects persistently...
...Violence is one of those inexplicable horrors which strikes from without...
...We understand their logical eccentricities— why Frank preserves and stuffs the corpse of their old dog, Sorrow...
...we're as common as rain...
...Franny is vehement and outwardly sure of every move...
...Lilly and Egg, the smallest sister and brother, in their different ways remain childlike forever...
...While other families celebrate their holidays, the Berrys face new horrors...
...The plane carrying Mother and seven-year-old Egg to Vienna drops into the Atlantic as suddenly and senselessly as Sorrow fell out of Bob's overstuffed closet...
...That Thanksgiving, a visiting doctor announces that Lilly is a dwarf...
...Lilly writes a bestseller called Trying to Grow, but she is tormented by her own limitations as an artist...
...But Irving rarely loses his footing...
...why they encourage each other to "keep passing the open window...
...As readers we are absorbed into this insular family circle...
...John, next in line, is Franny's adoring ally...
...Similarly, the sudden deaths and physical disabilities which haunt Irving's world are our most frightening, rialf-conscious thoughts brought to life in his fiction...
...Each is called "The Hotel New Hampshire," although the second is in Vienna and the third in Maine...
...He has retained and refined his greatest strength—a narrative control so powerful that readers seem to surrender their will...
Vol. 46 • January 1982 • No. 1
