Whilst reading Stephen King’s semi-autobiographical book On writing, I found a page that he recommended some books as “great reads”. John Irving’s A widow for One year was one of them. I was not surprised for I was not new to Irving’s work. I had read his National Book Award winning The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules that clinched him the best screenplay Academy award. So when I happened upon the book for sale, I was quick to make the purchase and instantly began to read.
From the first line, I was enthralled. The novel chronicled the death of two sons of a family and how various characters struggled to overcome their grief. The central character, Ruth, was conceived after the death of her siblings and the first part of the novel began absurdly with the four-year- old walking in on her mother and her father’s driver in a strange act of sex.
Very peculiar to Irving’s writings are characters as writers. In this novel, Irving went a little too experimental: every character that mattered to grand scheme of the plot were writers or involved intricately with writing: Ruth was a best-selling novelist; her father, Ted, resorted to children stories after he had written previous unremarkable adult novels; her mother, Marion, became a crime writer whilst she sought closure after the disastrous loss of her two sons in an unfortunate auto crash; Ed, her father’s driver, wrote several novels about young men falling in love with older women, numerous remakes of his circumstantial affair with Ruth’s mother; Hannah, Ruth’s best friend was a journalist liberal about her sexual relations; Ruth’s Editor became her husband. And so the waft welted into a hob of Irving’s imagination of writerly characters.
The first part of the novel, Summer 1958, introduced the key characters: Ted, Marion, Ed and little Ruth. Ed takes up a vacation job of being Ted’s driver and he is soon accustomed to Ted’s predilection for seducing young mothers using his fame as a children writer to lure them to pose for his children books. Gradually, he peels off their propriety and gets them to pose nude after which an affair usually ensued. However these affairs, usually short-lived and prolific, did not go unacknowledged by Marion whom Ed had found attractive. The webs of the story spun Ed right into the Marion’s bed and she exposed the virile teenager to sex, a tangible substitute for his habitual masturbations.
We are introduced early to a defunct family system. All the values that characterized family lacked and a young daughter was perhaps the sole reason against actual divorce. Both parents handled their grief in separate manners: Ted became a drunk and perpetual womanizer and his beautiful wife grew cold and steely almost frigid until her sexual encounters with Ed, who easily was her dead son’s age mate.
Memories of the boys were preserved as pictures hung around the house and one is often a tourist offered privileged information about the reasons that occasioned the snapshots and the typical familial circumstances involved. This novel in this way is quite psychological; it helps to discover how people cope with blunt pain, grief. Toward the end of first part, Marion leaves home, leaving her young daughter to her husband’s care; Ed returns home and Ted employs a Mexican couple as gardener and nanny.
The second part of the book teleports us to the fall of 1990. We meet Ruth, an accomplished best-selling novelist with two efforts pegged to her belt; Ed, 48, had written more novels but had less success and still had not outgrown his obsession for Ruth’s mother.
The second part is mostly about Ruth’s life as a writer: her sensibilities and prejudice, if you may. The creative process involved in coming up with what her friend, Hannah, described as “autobiographical” novel. This, Ruth objected until an idea struck her to write a novel about such a delicate themes as sex and depravity. Her research led her in close contact with prostitutes; where she witnessed the murder of a prostitute while “researching” in the prostitute’s closet. It’s in the phase that Africa gets a mention by the way of fleeting Ghanaian prostitutes in a brothel landscape, perhaps that makes Women Trafficking registered in the minds of Africans and Non-Africans alike.
Ruth proceeds to give vital information that helps a police officer apprehend the murderer and she also wrote a novel about the experience. She had earlier been having second thoughts about getting married to her editor but after her experience, she got married and forgave Hannah who had warmed her way into her father’s bed. She unfortunately lost her husband in circumstances I found “questionable”, and she became a widow like one of the characters in her previous novels. Her father also committed to suicide in the circumstances I have wanting in clarification.
Resolution of themes occurred in the final segment of the book when Ruth discovers her mother was a crime writer who wrote novels that had psychological undertones and always alluded to “two missing kids”. Ruth bore a son, Graham, whom she named after Graham Greene, one of her favourite writer’s whose biography held her interest and got numerous mentions in the novel. She also by chance met the police officer, who was also a fan of her novels, had they fell in love in circumstances I find “questionable”.
Irving’s succinctly raised themes and matters of discourse which he made relevant to his novel: of loss and how people handled Grief; of the novelist and the creative process; of how earlier events predispose individuals to reoccurrence and perhaps the unpredictable patterns of fate most especially love and death.
If it serves as any consolation, the denouement after a torturous course of the novelist involved Ruth finally finding love in the arms of a retired Dutch police officer and Marion’s return to Ed’s life in a nick of time to prevent his belated mid-life crisis. And the ending bore unmistakable resemblance to the beginning, when Ruth sights Ed and her mother again together and Marion said, “Don’t cry honey, It’s just Eddie and me”.
From the first line, I was enthralled. The novel chronicled the death of two sons of a family and how various characters struggled to overcome their grief. The central character, Ruth, was conceived after the death of her siblings and the first part of the novel began absurdly with the four-year- old walking in on her mother and her father’s driver in a strange act of sex.
Very peculiar to Irving’s writings are characters as writers. In this novel, Irving went a little too experimental: every character that mattered to grand scheme of the plot were writers or involved intricately with writing: Ruth was a best-selling novelist; her father, Ted, resorted to children stories after he had written previous unremarkable adult novels; her mother, Marion, became a crime writer whilst she sought closure after the disastrous loss of her two sons in an unfortunate auto crash; Ed, her father’s driver, wrote several novels about young men falling in love with older women, numerous remakes of his circumstantial affair with Ruth’s mother; Hannah, Ruth’s best friend was a journalist liberal about her sexual relations; Ruth’s Editor became her husband. And so the waft welted into a hob of Irving’s imagination of writerly characters.
The first part of the novel, Summer 1958, introduced the key characters: Ted, Marion, Ed and little Ruth. Ed takes up a vacation job of being Ted’s driver and he is soon accustomed to Ted’s predilection for seducing young mothers using his fame as a children writer to lure them to pose for his children books. Gradually, he peels off their propriety and gets them to pose nude after which an affair usually ensued. However these affairs, usually short-lived and prolific, did not go unacknowledged by Marion whom Ed had found attractive. The webs of the story spun Ed right into the Marion’s bed and she exposed the virile teenager to sex, a tangible substitute for his habitual masturbations.
We are introduced early to a defunct family system. All the values that characterized family lacked and a young daughter was perhaps the sole reason against actual divorce. Both parents handled their grief in separate manners: Ted became a drunk and perpetual womanizer and his beautiful wife grew cold and steely almost frigid until her sexual encounters with Ed, who easily was her dead son’s age mate.
Memories of the boys were preserved as pictures hung around the house and one is often a tourist offered privileged information about the reasons that occasioned the snapshots and the typical familial circumstances involved. This novel in this way is quite psychological; it helps to discover how people cope with blunt pain, grief. Toward the end of first part, Marion leaves home, leaving her young daughter to her husband’s care; Ed returns home and Ted employs a Mexican couple as gardener and nanny.
The second part of the book teleports us to the fall of 1990. We meet Ruth, an accomplished best-selling novelist with two efforts pegged to her belt; Ed, 48, had written more novels but had less success and still had not outgrown his obsession for Ruth’s mother.
The second part is mostly about Ruth’s life as a writer: her sensibilities and prejudice, if you may. The creative process involved in coming up with what her friend, Hannah, described as “autobiographical” novel. This, Ruth objected until an idea struck her to write a novel about such a delicate themes as sex and depravity. Her research led her in close contact with prostitutes; where she witnessed the murder of a prostitute while “researching” in the prostitute’s closet. It’s in the phase that Africa gets a mention by the way of fleeting Ghanaian prostitutes in a brothel landscape, perhaps that makes Women Trafficking registered in the minds of Africans and Non-Africans alike.
Ruth proceeds to give vital information that helps a police officer apprehend the murderer and she also wrote a novel about the experience. She had earlier been having second thoughts about getting married to her editor but after her experience, she got married and forgave Hannah who had warmed her way into her father’s bed. She unfortunately lost her husband in circumstances I found “questionable”, and she became a widow like one of the characters in her previous novels. Her father also committed to suicide in the circumstances I have wanting in clarification.
Resolution of themes occurred in the final segment of the book when Ruth discovers her mother was a crime writer who wrote novels that had psychological undertones and always alluded to “two missing kids”. Ruth bore a son, Graham, whom she named after Graham Greene, one of her favourite writer’s whose biography held her interest and got numerous mentions in the novel. She also by chance met the police officer, who was also a fan of her novels, had they fell in love in circumstances I find “questionable”.
Irving’s succinctly raised themes and matters of discourse which he made relevant to his novel: of loss and how people handled Grief; of the novelist and the creative process; of how earlier events predispose individuals to reoccurrence and perhaps the unpredictable patterns of fate most especially love and death.
If it serves as any consolation, the denouement after a torturous course of the novelist involved Ruth finally finding love in the arms of a retired Dutch police officer and Marion’s return to Ed’s life in a nick of time to prevent his belated mid-life crisis. And the ending bore unmistakable resemblance to the beginning, when Ruth sights Ed and her mother again together and Marion said, “Don’t cry honey, It’s just Eddie and me”.
