The Hotel New Hampshire is probably Irving's best novel to date, although "The World According To Garp" was a masterpiece too and "A Prayer For Owen Meanie" still reverberates in my mind. The Hotel New Hampshire though, is absolutely the most emotionally gripping novel by Irving that I have read.
The story is way too complicated to explain here so let me just make a few observations. You can read the whole(very accurate) wiki-entry by clicking on the link above.
The book contains all the basic elements of a true John Irving story; bears, wrestling, death, incest, you name it, it's in there. It tells the story of the Berry-family(mother, father and five children) from the moment the parents meet each other until the father's death and everything in between.
The parents run a hotel, first in the U.S.A. but later on in Vienna(Austria). They have to deal with bears(and 'State O' Maine' is not the only one), with prostitutes, with left-wing terrorist bombers, and so on. And that is really just a small part of what the book is about, the mis-en-scene. Irving never loses sight of what I think the book is about; the impact of these circumstances on the Berry family.
As far as I can see the story Irving wrote tells the path from being pretty much a dysfunctional family - or at least a super weird one - to coming to terms with each other and accepting each other for what they are. One brother is in love with his sister, another one is gay, one of the sisters doesn't grow and is basically a dwarf, etcetera.
The book was made into a movie that starred - among others - Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe. I saw it by chance, way back in the late 80ies or early 90ies, in the loft of a local cafe, because a movie had been cancelled and they had replaced it with this one. I still distinctly remember expecting nothing and consequently being extremely impressed with Rob Lowe. I knew that Jodie Foster was a brilliant actress but at the time Lowe was considered to be an actor for 'bubblegum-movies' like 'St. Elmo's Fire'. Yet here he was, convincingly playing a gay teenager coming to terms with himself as well as the people around him. Of course I was wrong about Lowe; he starred in many a good movie and I just loved his acting in The West Wing. Oh well, it's great to be wrong that way.
For me personally, after all the books I have read through the years, the words "Sorry, just not big enough" can still move me to tears as they have done many times in the past.
Read the book and judge for yourself. And Keep Passing The Open Windows.
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