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'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.'
So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they 'dream on' in this funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
VIENNA AND FREUD AND BEARS, "OH, MY",
By Nancy Martin (Pennsylvania (orig. NY)) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Hotel New Hampshire (Black Swan) (Paperback)
I seriously don't think that John Irving is capable of telling a bad story. There are storytellers and then there are "storytellers." Irving is in that elevated category making each reading experience a memorable one. Right off the bat, you feel familiar with Irving's trademark themes. No story is complete without either a visit from a bear, a trip to Vienna or a romp with a prostitute. All these things might sound weird but Irving makes them seem so conventional.Irving takes dysfunction and makes it seem normal. He talks about prostitutes yet it doesn't sound seedy. He gives life to a bear and makes the reader wish that perhaps they could have a bear for a pet. He just makes "pure idiocy sound logical." The Hotel New Hampshire is the story of the Berry family living different stages of their lives at different hotels they manage to own. The love of hotel life first manifests itself when Win Berry meets Mary Bates at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea in Maine during a summer job in 1939. A series of events will find the Berrys opening up their first hotel in New Hampshire where they will attempt to raise their family which includes five children, a dog named Sorrow and a bear named Earl. This is a family led by Win Berry, a true dreamer. As Irving, or should I say Freud, says, "A dream is a disguised fulfillment of a suppressed wish." In all, the family will fulfill the father's dream by establishing three separate Hotel New Hampshires with the one in Vienna being perhaps the turning point in all their lives. This is an amazing look at an eccentric family made considerably more normal by Irving's words. They will experience life at its fullest while sharing their own measure of sadness as different family members pass on. Irving chooses to pass over these events more swiftly preferring to focus more on the life of the characters as opposed to the deaths because that's what Irving does...he writes about living life -- not about dying death. When I think back over the years on some of the "characters" that I've read about and remembered like they were friends, it's Irving's characters who always seem to be at the top of the list...T.S. Garp, Owen Meany, Homer. This is the sign of a truly good book -- a book where the characters will last a lifetime in my fictional world. I have now added the entire Berry family to this list proving, once again, that Irving is a great "creator" of everlasting characters.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Novel of ideas that fails to reach dizzy heights, despite its daring,
By
This review is from: The Hotel New Hampshire (Black Swan) (Paperback)
"The Hotel New Hampshire", a novel ostensibly about a New England family who eventually relocate to Vienna, is really an extended experiment of ideas and subjects for Irving and despite the glowing reviews from others, it's not a book which really worked for me personally. Irving throws incest, homosexuality, suicide, disability, philosophy, sexual abuse etc into the mix but neither the plot nor the characters are compelling enough for it really all to hang together.
This is the story of the Berry family, relatively unsuccessful hoteliers who are less living, breathing characters who might just be related to each other, than a motley crew of individuals for Irving to hang all those ideas on and throw things at. A number of reviewers of the book note the merciless way in which youngest child Egg and the mother of the family are dispatched in a plane crash with little ceremony or resulting grief - for me, the starkest example of the book's failure to engage on any emotional level - but the truth is that all of these people could have gone down in flames and I wouldn't have much cared. Irving doesn't bother to develop his characters, and is content to gloss over the fallout from, say, that plane crash, or the gang rape one character suffers, in favour of upping the quirkiness quotient or moving on to the next "controversial" topic on his list. Ultimately, the book can be enjoyed for the sheer audacity of Irving in his choice of subject matter, and I am giving "The Hotel New Hampshire" three stars because of what this writer tries to cover here and the verve with which he attempts the whole thing. The problem is that having introduced all of his various ideas, Irving doesn't seem to have very much of meaning to say about them, and nothing really rings true from the first page to the last. As a side note, I can't be the only person to find the depiction of the romantic and sexual exploits of, er, John (interesting choice of name from this author...), this novel's hero, totally unconvincing, not to mention being laden with just that little bit of wish fulfilment. Two key romances in particular are plot points in the novel so I will gloss over most of the details but suffice to say that none of John's relationships with women are the least bit convincing and they all feel like very self-indulgent writing. In particular, the idea that romance or sex with John helps two women (who used to be in a relationship with each other) "get over" very particular issues they had did for me, nearly border on offensive. The love stories (such as they are) in this novel are by far its weakest aspect.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It has plenty of faults but...,
By
This review is from: The Hotel New Hampshire (Black Swan) (Paperback)
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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