Reviews
Writers Writing About Writers Writing Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid. How many writers in one book are too many writers? Read A Widow for One Year by John Irving to find out. Jokes aside, I really do enjoy books about authors, books about everything related to books. I generally find them charming. But, almost every main character in this book is a writer. The one character that wasn’t a writer was a journalist. A print journalist. It all got a little too much for me. The premise of this book sounded right up my alley. A Widow For One Year tells the story of Ruth Cole, a critically-acclaimed and popular fiction writer and picks up at important moments in her life. The first time is when she is four and walks in on her mother having sex with her father’s writing assistant. The second is when she is 36 and witnesses an event she should not have while on tour for her third book. Finally, the third time that the story picks up is when Ruth has just lost her husband. A story that chronicles the life story of a woman and writer sounds like a definite hit in my books. But this is where Irving’s writing came into play. Everyone has read those memes about how male characters take extra measures to ensure that the readers get an uncomfortable amount of details about the female character's appearance, right? Well, Irving is guilty of doing just that. At first it is forgivable as we are introduced to Marion Cole (also a writer), Ruth’s mother who never recovers from the death of her two teenage sons, through the eyes of the teenaged boy, Eddie (also a writer), in love with her. In-depth descriptions of her beauty, sex appeal and body though out of place, are understandable. But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination. But then the post-Marion scenes somehow become worse. The sheer number of times that Irving reiterates that Ruth has ‘great breasts’ goes from being funny to being downright annoying really quick. So much so that there is an entire scene dedicated to Ruth complaining about the fact that there is a man staring at her breasts. The scene is three pages long. Nothing of any importance happens during those three pages. Rom-coms have introduced modern audiences to the character of the best friend. The supportive, bitchy, witty and dependable foil to the main character, often introduced for some forced diversity. Irving uses this stereotype to give us Hannah (a journalist) Ruth’s best friend, or at least that’s what we are told even though nothing about the way Ruth talks about Hannah would hint at them being friends. From slut-shaming to jealousy, Irving does everything to make the relationship between Ruth and Hannah everything but friendly. The only redeemable qualities about this book, in my opinion, are the comic scenes. The gardener and the mistress dealing with Ruth’s father Ted Cole (also a writer) scenes, in the beginning, Eddie’s attempts to make it for the book reading on time and Ruth’s encounter with a man she absolutely did not have an affair with were great scenes. Irving writes some really interesting things about autobiographical writing, dealing with grief and the use of the semicolon in modern English. The manner in which the different stories by the various writers in the book are interspersed with the original story is done exceptionally well. The first quarter of the book is actually a pretty good read and I could understand why Irving’s writing is praised so often but then the latter part of the book just kept going downhill. All the characters do completely unforgivable things that make the readers dislike them, they find themselves in horrible situations where they make the worst decisions and they have particularly strange definitions of ‘love’. It is surprising that there is so much I have to complain about a book that in theory seems like five-star read for me. There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments.
I really like John Irving, and the first 100 or so pages of this book illustrate well what Irving is very good at. I really enjoyed this book at the beginning, it got slightly tedious somewhere in the middle for a while, but the ending was strong enough to redeem it.
This is the only Irving novel I've read so far, but I plan to read more in the future. I read "A widow for one year" about a year ago, and I picked it unknowingly in the bookshop without knowing anything about the author, his style or the story. To be honest, I picked it up just because: a) It was long and it was summer b) It began with the sentence "One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking -it was coming from her parents' bedroom". You can beat a beginning like that one, but it's gonna be hard. So I did what I'm not used to do: I entered a literary work without any clues whatsoever. It was great. John Irving is a story-teller, in the widest sense. He takes a character and builds a story around him, normally adding loads of special characters to accompany him. He tells the story with slow, careful writing, paying the right attention to details (the brother's stories and how Ruth memorises the stories through the photographs, just genious) and keeping the reader interested. His stories are long, and he might get a bit tough from time to time, but it's worth it. What I loved the most was how true, how honest, how real his characters were. Neither good nor bad, just people living hard situations and not always taking the right road. I preferred the first part of the book, which focuses on Ruth's parents relationship, rather than the second one (when Ruth is actually old enough to have her own relationships). That might have been because I liked the parents best, and I found both of them appealing and intriguing, I wanted to know what was wrong with them.
I just finished reading this for the second time and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was given it by a friend back in 1999 as I departed for Sochi, Russia. I read it whilst I was there and, if I remember correctly, it was my first John Irving novel. (I've since read The World According to Garp and The Fourth Hand). The story is about a writer, who gets a job with a writer as a writer's assistant and falls in love with the writer's wife (who, later, becomes a writer). The husband and wife have a four-year-old daughter, Ruth, who... yep, you guessed it, becomes a writer. Ruth writes books about a writer. But seriously though, it's a serious book about love and relationships. It's contains a lot of sadness but there's a thread of humour that runs throughout. The way Irving deals with characters and their relationships really draws you in. I like his novels for reading on holiday as they're not that demanding but they draw you right in and, to use the cliché, are hard to put down. This book seems superficial on the surface, but really it's quite deep and it stays with you. I'm afflicted with a terrible memory (which is why I can enjoy rereading novels so much) but I did remember a few things about this book, particularly about how the two brothers were killed. (They die before the novel beings and their presence is felt throughout the entire first part). I would highly recommend this for reading on the plane or bus or boat, or sat by the pool somewhere away from it all. But wherever, it's a great read.
