The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving (1981)

This is the last of the books I read in 2007. I went on a reading binge this winter, so I've still got four to go. (Yes, I finished four books in one month ... for the first time since getting a day job in 2004.) Even so, I'm more caught up now than I have been in a long time.

This one has been on my shelf for years. I suppose that once upon a time I saw it at a used book store and I picked it up thinking of the movie. I've seen the movie (starring Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe) many times and liked it.

When I started reading the book last year, I assumed I had read it before and was rereading it. (That's how I had it noted on my list, too, leading to my erroneous claim that the only new books I read in 2007 were the Harry Potter ones.) If enough years have passed since the last reading, a book becomes unfamiliar enough that it's not that much different from reading it the first time, and familiarity with the movie blurred the distinction further. As a result, I had read more than half the book before I realized that I really hadn't read it before.

I was nearly to the end when I realized something else: I actually don't like this book. For one thing, it stinks of symbolism. I don't hate symbolism. It can be fun when it makes sense, or even if it only makes half sense. And I don't even mind if I have to think about it to figure it out. But in this case, I've read the book and thought about it and I still haven't a clue. There's the dog named "Sorrow" that keeps popping up, the little sister who can't grow and the little brother who is an egg, all that business about being a bear. Those have got to represent something, but damned if I know what.

And what's with that incest scene? Does it represent displaced narcissism, as Camille Paglia tells me incest in literature often is? Is it some sort of assertion of ancient power through familial purity, like in Wagner? Or is it just weird and icky?

That's the other thing about this book. It's icky. As I mentioned in the last review — because of the blog convention that the last shall be first, that's the one that appears after this — I do like reading stories about fucked-up people, and Boys and Girls Together has some nasty scenes, worse than anything in Hotel New Hampshire. But somehow HNH doesn't do it for me. I wonder if I'd still like the movie now. I think maybe the mysterious symbolism was more attractive when I could imagine there was some deeper meaning to be found in the book.

I remember finding it interesting that in the movie Chipper Dove and Ernst were played by the same actor. I thought that a clever and original way to show a connection between the two. In fact, the connection is explicit in the book, which makes a fuss about how identical they look. I'm still not sure what that means, though.

Inside the cover of the edition of the book I read is a color illustration showing all the main characters. I can't tell if it's a painting done in realistic style or a photograph altered to look like an oil painting. (I guess the former.) Most of the characters look very different from the portrayals in the movie, the one significant exception being John, the narrator, who does look a little like Rob Lowe. In every case, the illustration is closer to the description in the book.

It's not unusual for me to read a book without really visualizing every character at all. For example, though I've read the book several times, I really don't have a picture in my head for what any of the Karamazov brothers look like. That's even more true for plays or operas, where it's inherent in the genre that a character might be played by different actors in different productions. Can you really say what Hamlet looks like?

But for this story, with two sets of illustrations in front of me, I did visualize nearly everyone, and for most of them I stuck with the vision of the movie. The two exceptions are where the movie's depictions were just too far from the book's description to withstand the contradiction. Wilford Brimley is so implausible as Iowa Bob that it felt like I was reading about a completely different character. Worse is Susie the Bear. Central to her character is the idea that she is ugly, and there's just nothing ugly about Nastassja Kinski. Yes, I realize part of the concept is that she just believes she's ugly and John helps her to realize that she really is beautiful, but Nastassja isn't even that sort of unrealized beauty. In the movie, even all mussed up and cranky, she's still just hot. The book illustration captures it much better.

The book is narrated by John, the Rob Lowe character. It's not clear to me how much the movie tries to capture that. Are the portrayals of the other characters as seen through his eyes? That's especially an issue for Franny. I think Jodie Foster plays her a lot more attractive than the book represents. But the book has a double view. She is described by John, and John is in love with her, but then at the same time you can still tell that she's rather nasty.

My notes on this book are negligible. I neglected to note a correct page number, but somewhere around the discussion of the midget circus that buys the first hotel from the family it is mentioned that they have a dog and a pony. Or maybe it was a different circus; I don't recall. In any case, it was interesting to read of an actual literal "dog and pony show".

In another passage, one of the terrorists working on the car bomb is described as "smeared with grease from his fingertips to his bicepses." Bicepses is correct. Or at least it was. Contemporary use seems to be moving toward perceiving biceps as a plural, with the inevitable bicep emerging as back-formed singular. It's the same path recently followed by kudos, and longer ago by the words that gave us the now commonplace cherry and pea.

Postscript: After writing this I poked around a bit online looking for more information. This essay by the author sheds some light on both the book and the movie, though still not enough to make sense of it. Elsewhere I learn that The Hotel New Hampshire was not well-received by critics, and it seems its success was largely due to following so closely after the much more acclaimed World According to Garp.

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