Call number
Collection
Genres
Publication
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)
Subjects
Media reviews
User reviews
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
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.
Undaunted, however, I am now in possession of Mr. Irving's latest offering "Avenue of Mysteries." We'll see.
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.
It's no doubt terribly maudlin of me, but I just can't resist a dysfunctional family saga.
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.
This book
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
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'.