Please can I have the last ten hours of my life back?
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To start with I am a fan of John Irving: "Cider House Rules" was amazing, "Garp" less so but "Hotel New Hampshire" is an unmitigated disaster, a total mess. The frustrating thing is that there is a good book in here but it is submerged under layers of unecessary detail and periods of Dickens-style twee cuteness which really jar with some of the dark subject matter (anti-Semitism, rape, incest). There are too many characters here, a lot of them made unecessarily off-the-wall-wacky, and the plot suffers as a result. Moving the action to Austria is another misfire: the same scenario occurred in "Garp" and as a result one book feels like a rewrite of the other. Overall there is just too little plot to stretch over 500 pages, the plot slows down, the bizarre traits of the characters are repeated to an excruciating and tedious extent. In some writers' hands you can add to the atmosphere with extensive descriptions, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer achieve this, but Irving is just not in their class.
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It has plenty of faults but...
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For me, John Irving is a bit of a guilty pleasure. There's a lot of things wrong with his books, many of them being mentioned by a previous reviewer. He doesn't always give his characters a rounded personality (particularly in the case of the narrator, probably something borrowed from The Great Gatsby, a book mentioned a lot in Hotel New Hampshire) and some of the events are a little too bizarre and unlikely to be believable.
Despite this, I've enjoyed all the John Irving books I've read (this one, Garp and Owen Meany) the stories are ones I can get lost in and they're the sort of books I'll sit down to read for half an hour and still be reading two hours later without even realising.
If you pick at the Hotel New Hampshire, it falls apart, but it's a great read.
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best entry book for John Irving
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I think this is the best book to start with if reading John Irving, as it has his trademarks of love, sex (sometimes incestuous), comedy and loss. As it centres on a family, there are more characters to enjoy than some of his other novels which concentrate on one or two individuals. It's a bit of an epic, moving from the US to Vienna and back again. I fell in love with the family and their eccentric ways and strange associates. It won't make you cry as much as Owen Meany, but it will make you laugh more. Highly recommended.
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Good stuff
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I loved this book. I've read a few Irvings and this is one of my favourites. I'm not good at long books, but don't baulk at an Irving; though I often feel they could be a bit shorter really.
In response to some of the more negative reviews here, I would say read "The World According to Garp" before giving up on Irving. If that doesn't do it for you, then Irving's not for you. If it does, you should find his other works make a bit more sense.
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A mess
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This is the first John Irving novel I have read and will most probably be the last. I am completely bewildered by the reviews on this site - are we reading the same book? As you may have gathered, it is a portrait of an eccentric family growing up in a hotel - first in New Hampshire, then in Vienna. There is a massive cast of peripheral characters revolving around five child protagonists (Franny, Frank, Egg, Lilly and the narrator) and their parents. Maybe Irving spreads himself to thin with this large cast of players as all of them - without exception - are merely two-dimensional cut-outs. Of the children: Franny is a bit sassy, Frank is gay and a bit weird, Egg is hard of hearing and says 'What' all the time, Lilly is tiny and the narrator lifts weights. Of the parents: the Dad is a dreamer and says 'Jesus God' alot, the mother completely obsolete in the narrative, an entirely characterless figure who is unceremoniously killed off with Egg in a plane crash half way through the book (the subqequent 'grief' of which is entirely underwealming and only lazily sketched out by the author). There is little greater depth to these characters than that I have outlined above. All these character traits are presented to us early on and are merely repeated to us as evidence of individual personality throughout the book. Each trait is used as an identifier for a cast of characters who are wholly unconvincing and essentially speak with the same, authorial voice. The dialogue is repetitive and contrived, a repetition of these 'quirks' punctuated by some self-conscious swearing. The emotional world of the characters is sparse at best: there are two emotional reactions throughout the book, with characters either 'shuddering' or 'shivering' at a thought or comment. Neither the 'characters' or the scenarios are nearly as clever or eccentric as the author wants us to believe, and there are frequent returns to early motifs ('State O' Main' the bear, 'Sorrow' the dog) that are tiresome and desperately unfunny. The narrative often tends towards to surreal but most of what happens is too strange to be considered drama but not strange enough to constitute the post-modern novel. There are several slapstick deaths that are neither sad nor funny (i'm not sure which they are meant to be) and are more Fawlty Towers than Hotel New Hampshire. There is so much interesting that could be written about life in hotel that the author fails to evoke. If you want a compelling portrait of the disfunctional modern American family read Jonathan Franzen's 'The Corrections' instead.
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