A Widow for One Year: A Novel

by John Irving

Hardcover, 1998

Call number

FIC IRV

Collection

Publication

Random House (1998), Edition: 1st trade ed, 537 pages

Description

Fiction. Literature. Romance. HTML:“A Widow For One Year will appeal to readers  who like old-fashioned storytelling mixed with modern sensitivities. . . . Irving is among the few novelists who can write a novel about grief and fill it with ribald humor soaked in irony.”—USA Today In A Widow for One Year, we follow Ruth Cole through three of the most pivotal times in her life: from her girlhood on Long Island (in the summer of 1958) through the fall of 1990 (when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career), and at last in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother (and she’s about to fall in love for the first time). Both elegiac and sensual, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Praise for A Widow for One Year “Compelling . . . By turns antic and moving, lusty and tragic, A Widow for One Year is bursting with memorable moments. . . . A testament to one of life’s most difficult lessons: In the end, you just have to find a way to keep going.”—San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle “A sprawling 19th-century production, chock full of bizarre coincidences, multiple plot lines, lengthy digressions, and stories within stories. . . . An engaging and often affecting fable, a fairy tale that manages to be old-fashioned and modern all at once.”—The New York Times“[Irving’s] characters can beguile us onto thin ice and persuade us to dance there. His instinctive mark is the moral choice stripped bare, and his aim is impressive. What’s more, there’s hardly a writer alive who can match his control of the omniscient point of view.”—The Washington Post Book World“In the sprawling, deeply felt A Widow for One Year, John Irving has delivered his best novel since The World According to Garp. . . . Like a warm bath, it’s a great pleasure to immerse yourself in.”—Entertainment Weekly “John Irving is arguably the American Balzac, or perhaps our Dickens—a rip-roaring storyteller whose intricate plot machinery is propelled by good old-fashioned greed, foolishness and passion.”—The Nation “Powerful . . . a masterpiece.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch.… (more)

Media reviews

Mit seinem neuen Roman "A Widow for One Year" steigt John Irving aus den literarischen Tiefen, die er mit "A Son of the Circus" erreicht hatte, wieder hervor. Verloren sich in letzterem die Charaktere und Handlungsstränge in einem Erzählwust, der den locker-beschwingten Erzählgestus Irvings
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vermissen ließ, so findet Irving mit seinem neuen Roman zu alter Souveränität zurück.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member cameling
Stories within a story ... this is really what this book amounts to. It's like getting a little surprise treat every once in a while along the way.

There's a house on Long Island where every room is filled with framed photographs of 2 boys long dead. A little girl of 4 grows up in the house
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surrounded by photos of her dead brothers whom she knows only through stories told around each photograph. Ted, the father, is a writer of 3 not very successful novels and successful children's books. He also has a penchant for drinking, playing squash and seducing women, preferably unhappily married younger women. Marion, the mother, is vague and distant after the loss of her sons. Ruth is their 4 year old daughter, conceived as an intended replacement for the sons they had lost. Marion and Ted decide to separate amicably, live in 2 houses and take alternate days and nights with Ruth at the main house.

Eddie O'Hare, a 16 year old, enters into this family, ostensibly as an intern to Ted, who lose his license as a result of multiple DUI charges and needs someone to drive him. Eddie thinks he's there to learn how to be a writer. Eddie ends up having a love affair with Marion.

And that's the start where our 4 main characters are introduced. From that point on, their lives start to unravel before us, Marion leaves Ted and Ruth and disappears for most of the rest of the book. We leave Ruth at 4 on the day her mother disappears and pick her up again when she's now a successful writer in her 20s.

Sounds simple but it's not. There's almost every emotion brought forth in this book. Anger, sadness, elation and humor. There are a few really funny moments in this story, Mrs Vaughn and the gardener over the drawings, Ted and the squid ink ice cubes, Eddie and 'sixty times' and even Ruth in Amsterdam's red light district.

While the story unfolds around the lives of our 4 main characters, all of whom are or become writers themselves, there are little side stories that seamlessly emerge about some of the people they come in contact with. The seamlessness with which these side stories slide into the main characters lives done with great skill. And if you don't think that's hard enough to do, we're also treated to the actual children's stories that Ted wrote, chapters of the novels written by Ruth, bits of Eddie's novels and later parts of Marion's books.

This book reminded me of a kaleidoscope, you're dazzled by the patterns and colors when you look into the eye-piece, but a slight movement of the wrist, and a new and different brightly lit picture appears before you. More twists bring more new dazzling patterns and you can't get enough of them. This is what this book was like for me. Every few pages introduced me to new pictures and new stories. I couldn't get enough of them.

I especially wish Ted Cole's children's illustrated books were real so I could buy and keep them for myself....they sound a bit like Lemony Snicket stories.
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LibraryThing member Renzomalo
Didn't care for it and wouldn't recommend it. It was a disciplined slog to finally reach the last sentence which had the singular benefit of indicating that my long, literary trek was over. Reading this, it occurred to me that Mr. Irving may be suffering from the curse of popularity which
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incapacitates editors to utter things like: "John? What the hell is this?" For whatever reasons, the book seemed self-aggrandizing to a fault, while the irrational and prolific use of italics and exclamation points eludes explanation altogether. Not my cup of tea I guess.

Undaunted, however, I am now in possession of Mr. Irving's latest offering "Avenue of Mysteries." We'll see.
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LibraryThing member LhLibrarian
I feel that this was more wordy than it needed to be - a compelling story but I could have cut back or cut out some of the descriptions that seem to go one forever.
LibraryThing member thatotter
Hmm...there were a lot of praiseworthy elements, but in the end the story just didn't really grab me. There were too many things that I found mildly implausible (especially about grown-up Ruth's fans and life). The writing was good, but not amazing, though I did really like the chapter titles. The
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tone shifts from genuinely funny to suspenseful to Lifetime Movie-sappy in different sections. There was a bit too much focus on the intricacies of Long Island and squash for me, as I'm not particularly interested in either.
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LibraryThing member Eily
Only the second of John Irving’s books I have read, the first being the wondrous The Adventures of Garp, A Widow for One Year is impressive in terms of ambition, detail and a witty ingenuity, especially towards the beginning and the later sections of the book. Less impressive, for me, however, is
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the tedious style of writing, where the narrator prefigures what is going to happen in his own asides. This makes the book far too knowing and is its chief detraction. Further problems are related to the wordiness and the sometimes pointless rehashing of previous events. The tone is verbiose and over-informative – there is throughout a surfeit of telling rather than showing.
The story is fairly engaging, though there is a sense of this overheated little group of people crowded together, in some cases, incestuously. Furthermore, far too many of them are writers. The father, the mother, the mother’s lover, the daughter – even the daughter’s best-friend is a journalist and her first husband is a publisher – and did all of the writers have to be successful (though some are more successful than others, they all manage to make a living from the art)? It is all very clumsily convenient and a closed little world. The clichéd ending is dreadful (nearly everyone lives happily ever after) and puts the jester’s cap on this interminable socio-sexual saga.
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LibraryThing member JimBrewington
Well written but seemingly without a plot. Most of the characters are interesting, but that's about it.
LibraryThing member AlisonY
This was my first John Irving novel, and whilst I strongly suspect he's another Marmite kind of author in the realm of Jonathan Franzen (at least for this book), personally I've found a new favourite author.

It's no doubt terribly maudlin of me, but I just can't resist a dysfunctional family saga.
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A Widow for One Year begins with a couple in The Hamptons whose teenage boys had been killed in an accident five years earlier, and as the novel unfolds and time moves on it examines the ripple effect of that tragedy on the couple, their young daughter and some other key players who come into contact with the family.

Despite the backdrop of the family tragedy, this is not a depressive book. There is a lot of black comedy woven throughout the book, with strong characters and an intricate plot. Perhaps at times it wandered a little bit, so for that I'm dropping half a star, but in all a read I enjoyed very much.

4.5 stars - a rollicking good read.
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LibraryThing member AliceAnna
One of his best. Great characters driving the plot. Even though the plot might have been unbelievable in places, the characters made you believe. Hard to explain, but the book just made me feel good. Ruth was a wonderful, strong, likable, complex character that you had to root for!
LibraryThing member Glorybe1
John Irving does it again! He really has to be one of my favourite authors. A Widow for One year is again an excellent story of a dysfunctional family, but he takes each character and makes you feel that you know them so well. You just have to fall in love with each and every one of them!
This book
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is primarily about Ruth Cole and Eddie O'Hare,and is in three parts, it starts in the summer of 1958 when Ruth is 4 and Eddie is 16, he comes to work for Ruth's father Ted as a writers assistant and falls in love with Ruths mother Marion, a love he will have for the rest of his life.
Ruths mother walks out on her family that summer and Ruth does not see her again for 37 years! she is brought up by her philandering father, who does love her dearly and does the best he can.
The next time we see Ruth she is a young unmarried woman who writes for a living. Her choice of men has been terrible so far and her books all reflect the fact. She has been damaged by her life so far, and you get the feeling that she is waiting for something.
The final part of the book we meet Ruth as a woman recently widowed with a child. She has a successful career as a writer and travels around the world. She has an idea for an extraordinary book and this ultimately brings her the love and security she so richly deserves.
I loved it and would recommend it along with every other thing that John Irving has written. You cannot help but get caught up in his characters
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LibraryThing member estellen
Good book, although the subplot towards the end surrounding the Red Light District was needless and took away from the strength of the book. Would have been much better if it just focused on the family.
LibraryThing member unlikelyaristotle
A great intertwining of crazy, dysfunctional people trying hard (I think) to be normal and survive in the world. Of course I mean this in the nicest way, because I truly believe everyone is like this at their core, at least in these days, I can't speak for the billions of people who have lived and
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died in the past!

The story centers around the life of Ruth, beginning very abruptly with a 4-year old Ruth 'overhearing the sound of love-making coming from her parents room', this being I believe one of the earliest memories of Ruth's childhood. The story moves on seamlessly to other seminal times in Ruth's life, all over the world. To me, it's sort of like a manual on 'How to write a good story' or at least 'How to create an interesting plot'.
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LibraryThing member aliciamalia
Irving is usually a sure thing--he writes well, and knows how to tell a story. That said, the subject of this book gets tedious. Try The Cider House Rules instead (which is better than the movie made of it).
LibraryThing member bnbooklady
This is John Irving at his very best. A funny, touching, mesmerizing book with all of Irving's hallmark tricks--multiple storytlines and stories-within-stories weave together for a brilliant, Dickensian ending. Irving's well-known themes are also present here as a young man explores and wrestles
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with his budding sexuality (and has a pretty hot affair with an older woman's clothing...) and deals with the identity crisis resulting from a weak, if not non-existent, relationship with his father. Also present are Irving's fascination with Austrian life and culture, a trip to Amsterdam that involves a murder and spying on a prostitute, and a heartbreaking story of one family's life-altering tragedy. This will be a fast favorite for existing Irving fans and a great introduction to his writing for newcomers.
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LibraryThing member rcooper3589
i like the fact this follows the main charcter through the majority of his life. although it's a little on the long side- and seems to be a bunch of stories in one!- it's really good!!
LibraryThing member gwendolyndawson
This novel is three stories in one beginning with a young man's affair with an older woman who has lost two sons. This story and its underlying themes remain oddly compelling, even though it's been years since I finished reading the book. Irving is a master of prose, albeit a twisted one at times.
LibraryThing member readaholic12
My favorite author creates my favorite character. Ruth is forever etched in my memory. I remember everything.
LibraryThing member debra47
I've been a longtime fan of John Irving. I would have to say this book is my favorite of his. I liked the fact that there were several stories going on at the same time.
LibraryThing member bekahjohnston
My favorite of John Irving's novels. Hilarious, yet tragic.
LibraryThing member scarey
My favourite Irving book. Great characters and more mystery than some of his other books. His books are so vast I think they are best enjoyed when you can immerse yourself in them fully. I read this one on holiday.
LibraryThing member ahgonzales
The book is written in three parts. It begins with the main character's (Ruth) childhood from the point of view of her mother's lover and then jumps to her in adulthood. The last part is from a separate character's point of view and felt disjointed. A majority of the characters are writers and the
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excerpts of their writing within the story didn't help the chunky feel of the novel. It literally feels like a different book is written into the middle. I appreciated the unique characters and gender themes. Strangely told, but an interesting read.
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LibraryThing member andafiro
(Adding this to my library now though I read it some time ago--this title just now showed up as a recommendation and I want to confirm that yes, it's a good recommendation. ;-)
LibraryThing member xmaystarx
I really enjoyed this book, very memorable with haunting images. The hooks on the walls...
LibraryThing member jettelandberg
A really sad and quiet story I can't quite remember, just that it filled med with a pleasant and sad feeling
LibraryThing member bagambo
Great book by Irving. I think the movie Door in the Floor is based on part of the book. Story is about the character named Ruth and her life as a child, writer, mother and lover. Unhappy childhood to loved adulthood. Interesting storytelling.
LibraryThing member JCO123
An excellent book. This is why John Irving has always been one of my favorite authors. This one is about a quirky family of authors. Very well written as usual.

Awards

Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2000)
Audie Award (Finalist — 1999)

Pages

537

ISBN

0375501371 / 9780375501371
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