7/2/2023 0 Comments A widow for one year bookWhat if, to compensate for his many affairs, Ted hires a 16-year-old writer’s assistant, Eddie O’Hare, to help Marion out of her grief by seducing her? What if Eddie resembles one of the dead sons? What if, after falling in love with Eddie, Marion leaves her husband, daughter and Eddie, and vanishes for 37 years? What, then, if Ruth grows up to become a better writer than her father, and Eddie grows up to become a worse one – one who writes only of younger men forever searching for loving older women? What if a children’s novelist (Ted Cole) marries a beautiful woman (Marion Cole)? What if the Coles have two handsome sons (Timothy and Thomas)? What if the boys die in a car crash? What if Ted is a philanderer who has begun to turn away from his grieving wife? Add another child, Ruth. He has posed the most provocative question any storyteller can ask when he or she launches his people on a fictional journey: what if? But it is Irving himself – or Irving, too – who puts this proposition to the test in his rich, great new novel. “My novels aren’t ideas…I begin with the characters, which leads me to the problems that the characters are prone to have, which yields a story – every time.” The speaker here is Ruth Cole, one of the protagonists of John Irving’s A Widow for One Year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |