Christina Reviews *The Hotel New Hampshire*

          The Hotel New Hampshire is a saga about an eccentric family.  The narrator is John Berry.  Like the rest of his family, you could say that he is a dreamer.  He is also a weight-lifter and can crush a man to death with his bare arms.  He has five siblings.  The oldest one, Frank, is kind of the odd one out.  He is the odd duck in a family of odd ducks.  The sister Franny is a loud mouth who has little patience for her younger brother‘s penchant for whispering.  The younger sister Lilly is small for her age.  And the little brother Egg is just Egg.  The father wants to start a hotel and he uproots his family in order to pursue his dream.  Along the way, they meet a bunch people who are just as crazy and eccentric as they are.  There’s Susie the Bear who was raped by men who put a bag over her face and so, now, she hides her body in a bear costume.  There’s Screaming Annie the whore.  There’s Ronda Ray---the older woman who seduces the protagonist when he was 14 or 15 years old. 

        The story is a bit perverse.  It deals with subjects like rape and consensual incest.  It also deals with death, despair and terrorism.

        But, for the most part, I appreciated the quirkiness of The Hotel New Hampshire.  John Irving writes about characters who stay in your mind for a long time after you put the book down.  The only problem is he tends to over-explain things.  This book is full of sentences that the typical author would have edited out by the second draft.  But there are so many brilliant lines in here as well.  John Irving is a master at taking situations that are dark and disturbing and finding the humor in them. 


         I rate this an N, which means "Not for everybody".  I watched the movie first, and I liked it, mainly because it starred Rob Lowe.  The movie was just weird, and a bit sappy, whereas the book worked because it had this special Irving flair to it.