January 1 2007: Review: A Widow For One Year – John Irving
Filed under Reviews
I think this is my favourite novel by Irving of all the ones I’ve read so far. I think it’s mainly because this novel, when compared to his others, focuses much more on human emotions and interrelationships. There’s no focus on heavy issues like prostitution and abortion (‘The Cider House Rules‘), death, rape and incest (‘The Hotel New Hampshire‘), or feminism and male-hatred (‘The World According To Garp‘).
Rather, ‘A Widow For One Year’ is a simple story about one woman, Ruth. We track her life from when she was four years old when her mother abandoned her, to her thirties, when she’s a well-known novelist, to her forties when she’s a mother, a widow, and about to fall in love for the first time in her life.
Like all Irving’s novels however, nothing is ever as simple as having one singular storyline, one single protagonist. While Ruth can be considered the main character, there are arguably other peripheral characters that are just as important to the direction and point of the novel.
There’s the anguish of Marion, Ruth’s mother who was scared to love her daughter the way she had loved her two sons who had died in a car accident. She feared that loving Ruth would, like with her sons, lead to tragedy. Though she doesn’t appear in a good three-quarters of the novel after her departure, her spirit and presence still lives on in the people whose lives she dramatically impactd upon.
There’s Ruth’s father, Ted Cole, renowned children’s book author who has a penchant for seducing the mothers of his child fans. He’s sufficiently out of love with his wife to want to set her up with a teenage boy, to expediate the process of getting a divorce.
Eddie O’Hare has the most pitiful role in the book. He’s really nothing but the young teenage boy who is manipulated into having an affair with Marion. Merely sixteen at the time, he spends the rest of his life in love with Marion, and trying to find her in dozens of other women who are twenty years older than him. At age fifty-eight, he dates an eighty-one year old woman.
Surprisingly, I think this is the first novel of Irving’s that has a female leading character, rather than male. Irving seems to have tried to compensate for this however, by making Ruth as masculine as possible. Her only real defining feminine feature is her oversized breasts, in every other aspect, she is male. She thinks like a male, acts like a male, dresses like a male, and every so often, Irving mentions how had the misfortune of resembling her overly masculine father rather than her entirely feminine mother. Whether or not this is a complex of Irving’s, to make all his main characters as masculine as possible, it certainly is something to think about when reading his novels.
Overall, I think this is one of Irving’s best novels yet. It retains his distinctive shock value, as he’s unafraid of writing nonchalantly about controversial topics (child abandonment and younger man/older woman relationships in this case), but improves upon it as he places the focus on the people, rather than the situation and issues.
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