Suzanne
Rating:
Review
A Widow for One Year is divided into three very distinct parts, and my reactions to the parts are very distinct, too. The first section, which is the longest, is quintessential John Irving, full of infidelity and dysfunctional family life. Ted and Marion Cole have affairs and the failure of their marriage is witnessed by their four year-old daughter, Ruth. It’s well written, but after reading several of Irving’s books I’m a little weary of the same old subject matter. The second part cuts abruptly to Ruth’s adult life as a professional writer, and focuses on most of the characters’ emotional inability to move beyond grief or bad choices they made in the past. It does wander into interesting new territory when Ruth ends up in Amsterdam on a book tour, though, and this is when I started to really enjoy the story. Unfortunately I didn’t find Ruth to be a likeable main character – she’s a weird one, as her own best friend Hannah says - which made it hard to love the book as a whole. I did, however, really like the last part, when my favorite character, Harry (the sole non-writer of the bunch), becomes a major player. I’d rate the first half of the book a three and the second half a four.
Best Line:
“There is no intolerance in America that compares to the peculiarly American intolerance for lack of success, Harry thought.”
Kim
Rating:
Review
This is my favorite John Irving book, and even though it’s a long one, at 537 pages, I didn’t want it to end. I found Ruth Cole’s life fascinating. The first part of the book introduces us to Ruth as a four-year-old, living in a large house with her parents, her father’s writing assistant, Eddie O’Hare, and the memories of her two dead brothers. The second part concerns Ruth at age 36, a successful writer yet keeper of a tumultuous personal life. The third part of this book shows us Ruth as a 41-year-old widow and mother, who is about to fall in love for the first time in her life. Along with her mother, Marion, and father, Ted, both of whom I grew fond of, I loved every other character in this book, especially Ruth’s best friend, Hannah Grant, Rooie, the doomed prostitute in Amsterdam, and Harry Hoekstra, the cop with more than official business on his mind. Though a little graphic, I smiled big while reading what Ruth did to the strawberry-blond lawyer, Scott Saunders, with the squash racquet too. Served him right. Get it? You will when you read this book. Even though the ending was a little tidier than I usually like, I tell everyone I know to read this book.
Best Line:
“It had been Hannah to whom Ruth had made her vulgar remark about her father’s attractiveness to women – in which Ruth had said: “You could hear the women’s panties sliding to the floor.”
