The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving. (1981). Reader’s Circle Edition, published by Ballantine Books (2001). 401 pages.

Up to p. 287; reviewed 18 May 2008.

This book lost its thrill for me at about the same point that I started to understand what John Irving was up to. It was right after the character of Susie the Bear enters the book. We’re told that Susie is a homely American girl who patrols the Gasthaus Freud in Vienna (soon to be renamed “Hotel New Hampshire”) dressed in a bear costume. She keeps the hotel safe by growling and charging at anyone who gets out of line, especially those who are taking too many liberties with the prostitutes who work there. Except for the protagonist of the book and his family, no one ever sees through bear disguise. It took me a few moments of trying to fit this into my head (How could she see in the bear costume? How would anyone be fooled for more than a couple of seconds into mistaking a static bear mask for the real face of a living bear? What possible recompense could be enough to get this poor woman to live her life in this bear costume?) before I realized that you weren’t supposed to believe it was true. You were supposed to be swept away with the wildness of it all. There’s no way that Susie the Bear would ever exist in the real world, so obviously the bear is supposed to symbolize something. But what?
I’ve never read John Irving before, but I did see the movie Life According to Garp and I really enjoyed it. Not only did I enjoy it, but I felt that I agreed with it, as though it were a particularly insightful manifesto. Garp seemed to me to defend the importance of living a well-rounded life. The character of Garp is a wrestler but also a thinker. He’s artistic but absolutely unpretentious. He’s proud of himself but he also recognizes his failings. Most importantly, he is sensitive to literature, and he understands that symbolism exists not just on the page but in the world we live in. That’s why he buys a house that’s just been smashed by an airplane—because the house is connected now with an unforgettable event.
I know from experience that it’s easy to be exhilarated by the idea that life is rich in meaning and significance, but it’s hard work to hold onto this exhilaration for long. Life is complex and doesn’t easily boil down to a set of key thematic elements the way a really good novel can. Coming to terms with this fact is an important step in the maturation of anyone who loves literature.
In Hotel New Hampshire Irving tells the comic and tragic story of the Berry family. The family is supposed to be comic because it’s filled up with a bunch of quirky characters, and tragic because members of the family keep dying from heart attacks or train crashes. What’s really tragic about the family is that their creator never gives them the chance to be alive. Each one has been dealt a limited number of traits: the older brother, Frank, is homosexual and pessimistic; Franny is rude and mouthy; Lilly is small; Egg is deaf and loves dressing up in costume. Every time anything happens, we have to go through the same predictable cycle of each one of them reacting to it in his or her own predictable way. If there’s something small, Lilly is excited about it. If someone is enthusiastic, Frank immediately douses the enthusiasm by saying, “It doesn’t matter.” And if there’s someone who needs telling off, whether this someone is a prude or a feminist or a radical, Franny will tell them off with lots of cuss words.
This pattern of family quirks is monotonous enough before the family moves to
Vienna to take over Gasthaus Freud and turn it into the Hotel New Hampshire. As it turns out, they must share the hotel with a group of radicals and also a group of prostitutes. And each one of these characters has a similarly limited range of quirky attributes: Jolanta is the tough prostitute, Babette is the exotic prostitute, and so on ad nauseum. There are about two whole chapters that are basically nothing but a constant riff on this set of a dozen pseudo-characters.
But this is at least mildly amusing compared to the snowballing set of symbols that keeps building up as the book goes on. There’s the recurring motif of bears, and then the dog Sorrow who’s put to sleep because he farts too much, but is then stuffed and mounted. The first time that the mounted body of sorrow causes trouble (it’s put into an “attack pose” and when the grandpa sees it he has a heart attack) it’s clever and enjoyable. The grandfather was killed by an attack of sorrow—neat. But after that Sorrow keeps cropping up at every juncture of the plot until by the end of Chapter 9 he’s brought up on practically every page in close conjunction with other supposedly meaningful leitmotivs: whipped cream as a symbol of maternal love, the phrase “keep walking past the open windows” as a slogan of gallows optimism.
By making these symbols so obvious, Irving is trying to be accessible and unpretentious. All of them are supposed to be like neon signposts pointing the reader toward the melancholy truth at the heart of the Berry family’s existence. Good symbolism alerts the readers mind and allows it time and space to engage the imagination. But the symbolism in “Hotel New Hampshire” is nothing more meaningful or edifying than a string of billboards, a plethora of false advertisement cluttering the landscape and obscuring all that’s really worth looking at.

p. 287 to end; reviewed 26 May 2008


At one point the narrator of the book, John Berry, stands outside the apartment of his erstwhile crush and onetime lover (a radical who goes only by the name Fehlgeburt, meaning “Miscarriage”) and determines by the smell that she must have recently committed suicide. The scene ends with the observation that the scent of Fehlgeburt’s corpse is already worse than the stench of the dog Sorrow’s farts ever were. It’s at this point that I realized that Hotel New Hampshire was not only a disappointment, but that it would go down with Ahab’s Wife and Liam Callanan’s Cloud Atlas as one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
There are really four short stories at the core this book: The story of the Bear named State o’ Maine, the story of Frannie’s Rape, the story of the New Year’s Eve party and the story of the attempted bombing of the Opera in Vienna. Coming near the beginning of the book, the first three stories come off pretty well, but after that point Irving desperately contorts himself to link the first part of the book to the story of the bombing. By the time the bombing plot reaches is climax, Irving seems to be spending much more time luxuriating in the cleverness of the ideas and symbols he’s so far set forward that the events of the bombing seem entirely secondary. The bombers’ plot to take the Berry Family hostage and use them to destroy the Opera seems not only purposeless, but so poorly planned that it would only be feasible due to the absolute inability of said family to do anything but mope, sleep around with prostitutes, and insult each other in supposedly clever ways.
Whereas the book starts out with an enjoyably anarchistic spirit, it ends in this weird paralysis; not only does Irving seem paralyzed as a writer, but his characters more or less seem paralyzed. The narrator John Berry doesn’t seem ever to even consider taking on any sort of job whatsoever, and his father Win Berry retires into apparent dotage and senility at a ripe old age of 45. It’s difficult to reconcile Win Berry’s massive lack of ambition with daughter Lilly Berry’s claim that her father is essentially another Great Gatsby.