A Widow For One Year
Irving, John
From Crotchety Rancher's Books, Dalton Gardens, ID, U.S.A.
AbeBooks Seller Since September 17, 2010
Quantity: 1From Crotchety Rancher's Books, Dalton Gardens, ID, U.S.A.
AbeBooks Seller Since September 17, 2010
Quantity: 1About this Item
Black boards with Black cloth spine with gold lettering on spine. Crisp, clean, bright and tight. Signed by the author on the title page under the author's name. Stated first trade edition. very good if not fine condition. A black line on the bottom page edges. The dust jacket has minimal if any shelf wear and is now in a protective clear mylar sleeve. "Twenty years after The World According to Garp, John Irving gives us a new novel about a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character - a "difficult" woman. Ruth's story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life.". Seller Inventory # aa001924
Bibliographic Details
Title: A Widow For One Year
Publisher: Random House Inc, NY
Publication Date: 1998
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: 1st Edition
About this title
Eddie spends the rest of his life obsessively writing novels like Sixty Times, his roman à clef about his 60 seductions by Marion. Ted is a failed novelist who gets rich and famous writing creepy children's stories based on tales he tells Ruth (such as The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls). Marion abandons Ruth, Ted, and Eddie and becomes a successful pseudonymous novelist. And Ruth becomes the most richly celebrated writer of them all because of her early training by Ted, who not only told her stories, but also helped her craft narratives to explain their home's many photographs of her brothers, who died in a gory car wreck the year before she was born. Grief over the boys is why Ruth's mother does not dare to love her.
Ruth, Irving's first female main character, works brilliantly, first as an imaginative, almost Salingeresque child coming to terms with her bewildering family, then as a grownup striving to understand her mother's motives--or at least to track her down. Ted is a mordantly funny caricature, interestingly sinister and plausibly self-justifying when most inexcusable. Eddie is a lovable schlemiel, yet not too sentimentally drawn. And what set pieces Irving can write! The story of the boys' death is horrific and effective in dramatizing the character of Ted, who narrates it. Ted's attempted murder by a spurned lover is as hilarious as the VW-down-the-marble-stairway scene in A Prayer for Owen Meany (which has been adapted by Disney Studios), though not quite on a par with the celebrated "Pension Grillparzer" episode in The World According to Garp (reissued in a 20th anniversary edition by Modern Library).
Irving has the effrontery to get away with practically any scene that comes into his head--Ruth winds up an eyewitness to a hooker's murder in Amsterdam, a Dutch detective starts tracking her down (just as Ruth is hunting Marion), and the multiple plot strands all converge in a finale that neatly echoes the opening scene. It's all done with the outrageously coincidental yet minutely realistic brio of Charles Dickens, with a sad, self-conscious jokiness like that of Irving's mentor, Kurt Vonnegut. --Tim Appelo
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