 best entry book for John Irving, 2006-11-08
I think this is the best book to start with if reading John Irving, as it has his trademarks of love, sex (sometimes incestuous), comedy and loss. As it centres on a family, there are more characters to enjoy than some of his other novels which concentrate on one or two individuals. It's a bit of an epic, moving from the US to Vienna and back again. I fell in love with the family and their eccentric ways and strange associates. It won't make you cry as much as Owen Meany, but it will make you laugh more. Highly recommended.
Eccentric and Entertaining. , 2008-12-30
I first read this book many years ago when I was a teenager and I loved it. It is completely off the wall and eccentric while having a great storyline which covers different countries, different hotels (more Twin Peaks than Travelodges) and has a unforgettable family who are extremely normal in many ways but utterly unique and entertaining.
What I remembered loving about this book was it seemed to echo real life. Childhood seems to go on for ages, uneventful and then BAM some lifechanging experience happens and you are off down a different road. The shocks and events keep happening and are really extreme in many ways but it is a great family saga.
This is the only book so far I've ever read twice - so many books, so little time but after reading some relatively turgid books ('The Hour I First Believed' and 'Northern Clemency') it was really great to read a book which actually entertains again rather than being 'worthy' and dull.
I don't think you could ever call this book dull and the adult characters who I found less interesting years ago are now what I most enjoyed about the book. This is a wonderful story which deserves to be read more than once. If you want an original read which packs in lots of characters, history, family life, and exceptional events in a higly entertaining way then this is the book for you!
If you are wondering why there is an odd looking black dog on the front of this cover to give you a taste of this novel that is the family dog Sorrow who is put to sleep in old age because of his flatulence, he is then stuffed in a taxidermy experient by the oldest son. He causes a death. He catches on fire, is remodelled and finally ends up in the Ocean floating. He is only a very, very minor character in the story and a lot more happens to everyone else including the bears,
Anyone looking at the cover and thinking this would be a black dog, depression type story would be completely wrong.
Highly recommended.
 Novel of ideas that fails to reach dizzy heights, despite its daring, 2009-01-17
"The Hotel New Hampshire", a novel ostensibly about a New England family who eventually relocate to Vienna, is really an extended experiment of ideas and subjects for Irving and despite the glowing reviews from others, it's not a book which really worked for me personally. Irving throws incest, homosexuality, suicide, disability, philosophy, sexual abuse etc into the mix but neither the plot nor the characters are compelling enough for it really all to hang together.
This is the story of the Berry family, relatively unsuccessful hoteliers who are less living, breathing characters who might just be related to each other, than a motley crew of individuals for Irving to hang all those ideas on and throw things at. A number of reviewers of the book note the merciless way in which youngest child Egg and the mother of the family are dispatched in a plane crash with little ceremony or resulting grief - for me, the starkest example of the book's failure to engage on any emotional level - but the truth is that all of these people could have gone down in flames and I wouldn't have much cared. Irving doesn't bother to develop his characters, and is content to gloss over the fallout from, say, that plane crash, or the gang rape one character suffers, in favour of upping the quirkiness quotient or moving on to the next "controversial" topic on his list.
Ultimately, the book can be enjoyed for the sheer audacity of Irving in his choice of subject matter, and I am giving "The Hotel New Hampshire" three stars because of what this writer tries to cover here and the verve with which he attempts the whole thing. The problem is that having introduced all of his various ideas, Irving doesn't seem to have very much of meaning to say about them, and nothing really rings true from the first page to the last.
As a side note, I can't be the only person to find the depiction of the romantic and sexual exploits of, er, John (interesting choice of name from this author...), this novel's hero, totally unconvincing, not to mention being laden with just that little bit of wish fulfilment. Two key romances in particular are plot points in the novel so I will gloss over most of the details but suffice to say that none of John's relationships with women are the least bit convincing and they all feel like very self-indulgent writing. In particular, the idea that romance or sex with John helps two women (who used to be in a relationship with each other) "get over" very particular issues they had did for me, nearly border on offensive. The love stories (such as they are) in this novel are by far its weakest aspect.
It has plenty of faults but..., 2006-12-29
For me, John Irving is a bit of a guilty pleasure. There's a lot of things wrong with his books, many of them being mentioned by a previous reviewer. He doesn't always give his characters a rounded personality (particularly in the case of the narrator, probably something borrowed from The Great Gatsby, a book mentioned a lot in Hotel New Hampshire) and some of the events are a little too bizarre and unlikely to be believable.
Despite this, I've enjoyed all the John Irving books I've read (this one, Garp and Owen Meany) the stories are ones I can get lost in and they're the sort of books I'll sit down to read for half an hour and still be reading two hours later without even realising.
If you pick at the Hotel New Hampshire, it falls apart, but it's a great read.
Please can I have the last ten hours of my life back?, 2007-05-28
To start with I am a fan of John Irving: "Cider House Rules" was amazing, "Garp" less so but "Hotel New Hampshire" is an unmitigated disaster, a total mess. The frustrating thing is that there is a good book in here but it is submerged under layers of unecessary detail and periods of Dickens-style twee cuteness which really jar with some of the dark subject matter (anti-Semitism, rape, incest). There are too many characters here, a lot of them made unecessarily off-the-wall-wacky, and the plot suffers as a result. Moving the action to Austria is another misfire: the same scenario occurred in "Garp" and as a result one book feels like a rewrite of the other. Overall there is just too little plot to stretch over 500 pages, the plot slows down, the bizarre traits of the characters are repeated to an excruciating and tedious extent. In some writers' hands you can add to the atmosphere with extensive descriptions, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer achieve this, but Irving is just not in their class.
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