The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) - John Irving

Category: Adults, Classic, Contemporary, General Fiction
Language: English
Keywords: 1950's - 1960's Family Relationships Sexual And Physical Violence

Written by John Irving
Read by Kirby Heyborne
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 32 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Books on Tape
Duration: 19:57:26
Release date: March 24, 2020

“The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.”

So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry, a quirky New Hampshire family composed of a married couple, Win and Mary, and their five children, Frank, Franny, John, Lilly, and Egg. Win’s favorite colleague was a man called Freud who worked as the resort handyman. Freud owned a bear called State o’ Maine, which he eventually sold to Win.

Win bought the bear because he planned to tour the country, staging performances to raise money to study at Harvard. His bear act was a success, and he graduated from Harvard a few years later. Although he now has a good job teaching young boys at a Derry prep school, he feels incomplete and unfulfilled.

Win conceives the idea of turning an abandoned girls’ school into a hotel. He names it the Hotel New Hampshire and the family moves in. This becomes the first part of the Dickensian-style tale. The breadth of the novel typically goes through one generational span, but often you’ll get (at least) a few beginning chapters detailing the lives of the protagonist’s parents or grandparents, as well.

“For a book that at times features sexual violence, incest, underage sexual experiences and exposure, physical violence, attitudes to homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s, animal cruelty and more it’s quite a feat to maintain its darkly comedic feel throughout. What makes it standout is its hyper real look at a quirky family from within and from the perspective of a dysfunctional man (John) who himself sees himself ‘more normal’ than most of his family.”