John Irving has always been hit or miss for me. I enjoyed The Ciderhouse Rules and The World According to Garp, but bounced off A Son of the Circus. Amazon had a sale on A Widow for One Year, and at that price I thought I could take another risk.
John Irving's prose is transparent and flows very well in this novel. The words just carry you along and turns off your brain. The protagonist, Ruth Cole, was abandoned when she was 4 by her mother and the rest of the novel explains what happened, and why, and what other traumatizing events affected her. 4 of the other main characters in the book are novelists, and Irving even inserts chapters of their books into the novel, giving you the sense of a novel within a novel at times. The plot weaves along, with moments of tension and comedy, at times introducing certain characters, speeding up timelines, or even occasionally breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader directly:
There is no intolerance in America that compares to the peculiarly American intolerance for lack of success (pg. 570)
It is only after you've finished the book and read the author's notes that you start to notice the holes in the plot and the characters behaving irrationally (or perhaps even worse, out of character). Irving says he started the book from the final scene and then worked backwards as to how to get there. This meant that the novel at times just requires certain characters to do something even if it's not particularly in character. At other times, Irving just doesn't even bother to show you how someone is thinking but just tells you, because the narrator's voice can then override the implausibility of what the plot is about to do.
Nonetheless I don't regret the time spent reading the book, which means it was a good one.
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