About this title: A novel in three sections about the life of Ruth Cole: her childhood in the Hamptons, her success as an author, and her experience as a widow on the brink of falling in love. The story begins in the summer of 1958, during Ted and Marion Cole's rocky marriage when their two sons die in a terrible accident. Ruth grows up in the shadow of the memory of the missing boys, about whom the parents talk incessantly. In the second section, the story leaps forward into 1990, when Ruth is on a speaking tour, and the action moves ahead to 1995 in the final third. This disturbing yet humorous novel ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Good, In good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. Ex-Library expected imperfections. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. Ex-Library expected imperfections. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 05/1998
ISBN-13:9780375501371ISBN:0375501371
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 537 p. read more
"A Widow for One Year is a highly complex and reverting novel about fiction writers. Ted Cole; his wife Marion; their daughter Ruth; and Eddie O'Hare a family friend are, to varying degrees, successful writers. Hannah is the only principal character who is not a writer. Perhaps, she is too obsessed with sex and bad boy friends to write.
The title is well chosen as it highlights a significant theme that determines the novel's outcome. Ruth, the most successful writer in the family, and much more successful than Eddie, is challenged to decide between writing about imaginary events and people or what she has actually experienced.
Ted and Marion have three children two boys and one girl, Ruth. The boys were killed in a very grizzly car accident when they teenagers. Marion is obsessed with grief. Ruth is conceived after the accident somewhat as a replacement. Irving develops his characters' lives by dividing the book into three parts: the summer of 1958, the fall of 1990 and the fall of 1990.
During the summer of 1958, Eddie O'Hare, then 16, is hired by Ted Cole as a writer's assistant. Ruth at the time is four. Eddie and Marion become lovers and have sex at least 60 times. Marion abandons the family
Ruth in 1990 is 36 and a very successful writer. Hannah and Ruth attended Exeter Academy and are best friends. Ruth has not seen Eddie, a much less successful writer, since 1958. They meet and have long speculative conversations about Marion who is totally non-communicative and lives outside their lives. Ruth receives a critical letter from a widow complaining that Ruth does not know what she is writing about because she has not actually experienced the events. Ruth responds to the letter by creating an experience: watching, with a bad boy friend, an Amsterdam prostitute service a client. .
The issues raised in the earlier years are resolved in the fall of 1995. Irving's ending may be overly sentimental, to much like Hollywood, for some."
"John Irving's novels have a tendency to push the reader to the edge of their seat. There are no dramatic fight scenes or improbable scenarios. Rather, Irving understands what it is that makes the reader feel uncomfortable, what is just a little too much, but not so much that it becomes unbelievable.
If you read Irving simply for an entertaining story, you will absolutely get it with A Widow for One Year, but if you enjoy experiencing the writer's more subtle tricks, playing off of first sentences and pulling on scenarios from 200 pages earlier to tie together a plot line ever so gracefully, you will be thrilled.
Irving is a master of first sentences (one of his literary passions) and is incredible at pushing the reader to experience his characters in a personal way.
I take a rather long time to read novels, sometimes putting them down for weeks mid-read. But with this particular book, I couldn't put it down. In fact, I was late to more than a few events and dinners because of it.
""A Widow for One Year" doesn't get near joining the top group of John Irving's novels, but it's a decent read. Prostitutes, writers, New England, continental Europe, infidelity ... yup, it's another Irving novel, all right (what, no bears?).
It's understandable that the movie version ignores the last two-thirds of the novel. The first third - lonely, haunted wife who has an affair with the teenage boy hired to assist the author husband - is the best section, hands down. The rest of the action comes years later, featuring echoes and shock waves of what happened earlier. The middle of the book wanders; there's a murder (of a prostitute, of course), in Amsterdam, and lots of details on the writing life. Irving, as a successful author himself, must think it's pretty easy to get published. Let's see: husband, wife, daughter and wife's young lover all successful authors. Hate to tell you this, John, but it's not all that easy to get published. Oh, well.
"A Widow for One Year" has a pretty strong finish, and I wound up satisfied, but I think it might mark the cut-off point between good and bad Irving (I haven't read everything, but I'm going on general consensus). In any event, it lags behind (in order) "A Prayer for Owen Meany," "The Cider House Rules," "The World According to Garp," "A Son of the Circus" (underrated, that) and "The Hotel New Hampshire." Lower your expectations and give it a go."
"John Irving is not an author who leaves out too many details in a story. No stone is left unturn. The storyline begins with Ruth as a 4 year old child whose mother leaves her (and her carousing father)after the death of their two teenage sons. Ruth's life travels a bumpy path to being 40: she has a hard time getting dates, is physically abused by a date, authors popular books, witnesses a murder, marries her editor, has a child, becomes widow for one year, and remarries to the cop who had been on the murder case. Eddie (her mother's teenage lover) has an exciting life early on, but he ends up a rather dull character in his 40's who dates older women. Marion, Ruth's mother, does not resurface until the very end of the novel for a reunion with Eddie.
Favorite quote from Great Expectations, Dickens wrote..."Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.""
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