A Widow for One Year by John Irving

John Irving's A Widow For One Year is the epic story of a family, dysfunctional at best, unable to cope with tragedy--or with each other. We first meet Ruth Cole in the summer of 1958 when she walks in on her mother having sex with 16-year-old Eddie O'Hare, the assistant to Ruth's alcoholic father. The death of Ruth's older brothers (years before she was born) turns her mother, Marion, into a zombie who is unable to love her surviving daughter. Ted Cole is a semisuccessful writer and illustrator of disturbingly creepy children's novels. His womanizing habits prove he's "as deceitful as a damaged condom," but he remains the only stable figure in Ruth's life. The tempestuous tale fast-forwards to the year 1990 when Ruth's soaring writing career is faring far better than her lackluster love life. The final segment of the novel ends in 1995 when 41-year-old Ruth is ready to fall in love for the first time.

You have to love John Irving. He has a rare ability to draw you right into a world populated with oddball characters acting in such extreme ways you just know it can't be so. And yet there is something authentic and profoundly moving in the straightforward prose and emotional upheavals.

This book is almost three separate books, in the way perhaps Ian McEwan's Atonement was. The first third was the basis for the movie The Door in the Floor, and concerns, as the synposis says, the life of Ruth Cole as a child, living in the shadow of her dead brothers. The second and third parts are set thirty years later when Ruth is all grown up and in her 30's.

Irving's sense of time passing and the loss that comes with settles like a fog over the reading experience. It's so strong it hurts. And, as with his other major works like Garp and Cider House Rules, one is left shaken at the end. That said, it's also very funny and a gripping page-turner.

I have to say that it would be hard to class this as a great literary book, though it certainly lifts itself above the usual popular fiction. In the end, it's entertaining fun with a dash of something more. But it's highly recommended.

As a matter of interest, The Door in the Floor is also a fine movie with Jeff Bridges. It ably and accurately tells the first part of this story and even reaches emotional depths which the book does not. That's also essential viewing I think.

Buy this book online at Amazon, Amazon UK, Kalahari or Loot