The Hotel New Hampshire
by John Irving
Summary
Win Berry, a genial dreamer who never stops chasing an idea despite ordinary evidence against it, drags his wife Mary and their five children from one failed scheme to convert a school building into a family run hotel to the next, first in small town New Hampshire and later in Vienna, where an old friend named Freud, who is not the famous one, promises Win a hotel already running rather than one still to be built. The children narrate their own overlapping catastrophes: Franny is gang raped by a football star named Chipper Dove before the family leaves for Austria, an assault that shapes her and her protective younger brother John for the rest of the novel; Lilly, the smallest and most fragile of the siblings, grows into a celebrated but deeply unhappy novelist; and Egg, the youngest, dies alongside their mother when their plane crashes en route to Europe. In Vienna the family gets tangled up with prostitutes, a trained bear, and a group of radicals plotting to bomb the opera house, a plot that costs Freud his life and Win his eyesight in the explosion meant to stop it. Back in America, Lilly eventually kills herself, unable to write her way past her own smallness, while Franny marries the teammate who once tried to protect her from Chipper Dove, and John settles into a life running the Maine resort where his parents first met as a rape crisis center with Susie, a friend who spent years hiding inside a bear costume rather than face the world as herself.
Irving writes with a comic, fable like exaggeration, absurd incidents landing beside real violence and grief in the same paragraph, and the novel reads quickly and unevenly by design, its darkest chapters deliberately undercut by jokes so that neither the humor nor the tragedy is allowed to feel like the whole story.
Historical Context & Significance
E. P. Dutton published The Hotel New Hampshire in 1981, three years after The World According to Garp had made Irving a bestselling novelist, and reviewers largely read the new book against that success; John Leonard in The New York Times praised the novel's comic set pieces, calling the book quite a good one, even while noting the novel asked a great deal of its reader's tolerance for tonal whiplash. No major prize marked its publication, and Irving's own recurring line from the book, keep passing the open windows, meant as a joke against suicide that becomes sincere advice by the novel's end, has outlived most of the specific plot around it as the book's most quoted phrase.
Tony Richardson directed a 1984 film adaptation starring Jodie Foster as Franny and Rob Lowe as John, condensing the sprawling family saga into a single feature that reviewers found far thinner than Irving's own telling of it.