A Widow for One Year by John Irving

First published: 1998

Type of plot: Character study

Time of work: The late 1950’s to 1995

Locale: Long Island, New York, and Amsterdam

Principal Characters:

• Ted Cole, an admired writer and illustrator of children’s books
• Marion Cole, Ted’s beautiful wife, who disappears and becomes a mystery writer
• Ruth Cole, Ted and Marion’s daughter, who becomes a successful novelist
• Eddie O’Hare, an unsuccessful novelist who as a young man worked for the Cole family
• Hannah Grant, Ruth’s best friend, her total opposite in character

The Novel

A Widow for One Year focuses on writers as it tells a sprawling story that covers nearly forty years. The novel introduces numerous characters, each one well drawn and memorable, and effectively relates a variety of events, often in a comic manner. Yet its main narrative thrust lies in the way writers develop, the private and public lives they lead, the methods they employ, the reasons they write, the material they use, and the success they gain. Told in the omnisicient third person, the novel opens in 1958 when sixteen-year-old Eddie O’Hare enters the dysfunctional Cole household on Long Island as an assistant to Ted Cole, a much-admired writer and illustrator of children’s books. His distraught wife Marion, a strikingly beautiful woman, continues to grieve over the deaths in an automobile accident of their two teenaged sons. The parents, who were in the back seat of the car, escaped the crash physically unhurt but emotionally devastated. Weary of his wife’s obsessive behavior, Ted handles his anguish with alcohol and womanizing. Their four-year-old daughter Ruth lives in an overprotected and sometimes chaotic environment amid memories of her dead brothers, whose pictures line the walls of the house. As the summer passes, Eddie and Marion engage in a tempestuous sexual affair, which affects Eddie for the rest of his life and provides Marion with an opportunity to escape both her cruel, philandering husband and her daughter, whom she is afraid to love lest she too might be lost. At summer’s end, Eddie returns to his exclusive private school, where his father is an English teacher. Marion vanishes, taking all of the boys’ pictures with her. Ted, who continues to drink and chase women, hires a faithful couple to run the household and to help rear little Ruth. These events cover about one-third of the novel and foreshadow what will happen in the future.

Once the fateful summer’s events have been told in stunning detail, the narrative moves forward to find Ruth and Eddie as adults. They meet again in New York in a perfectly executed and highly comic scene when bumbling, insecure Eddie introduces a confident Ruth, who is reading from her new novel. While Eddie has published several novels, mainly rehashings of his long-ago affair with Marion, he has enjoyed little success and makes his living primarily through appearances at writers’ workshops. On the other hand, Ruth has published fiction that has drawn a wide circle of admirers and turned her into a cult figure, which becomes evident at the reading, where Ruth stars and Eddie stumbles.

The two writers renew their acquaintance, and a circle of friends develops. All sophisticated New Yorkers, the group includes Ruth’s alter ego, the sexually charged Hannah Grant, who believes that Ruth writes mainly about her, and Ruth’s editor, who later becomes her first husband. The rest of the narrative falls unevenly between Eddie and Ruth, with Ruth receiving the major share of the attention. In one particularly intriguing sequence, Ruth goes to Amsterdam on a book tour and while there carries out research for her new novel in the city’s famous brothel district, where she witnesses a prostitute’s murder. Because no incident, no detail in the complex narrative structure is irrelevant or goes unused, this experience leads Ruth into yet another adventure and finally into a second marriage. The death of her first husband and her subsequent year-long widowhood lends the novel its title, which is further amplified by the mysterious widow who haunts Ruth.

As the 537-page novel concludes, the major characters find the peace and security and love for which they have been searching—either through their lives or through their fiction. Even Marion, who has become a mystery writer in Canada, reappears, much to the delight of the aging Eddie and the once-deserted child Ruth, who has at last found her mother.

The Characters

John Irving’s characters always emerge as distinctive individuals. They are stronger than the sometimes weak and meandering plot, which gains its momentum from their personalities and actions. Thus action more than description defines the characters in A Widow for One Year. In fact, physical details are scarce, and the reader may find it difficult to picture the characters. The theme also emanates from the characters, who in this novel either reveal what it is like to be a writer or to be a writer’s friend or relative—and what it is like to engage in a search for love in one form or another. When Ruth is asked where she gets the ideas for her novels, she replies that her books do not have ideas, that she has no ideas, but that she begins with the characters, and from them the ideas flow. So it is with Irving’s fiction.

Ruth, whose childhood had been such a nightmare and whose sexuality was suppressed, discovers and reveals herself through the fiction she creates. Appearing stubborn and willful at times, self-centered and self-absorbed at other points, she does prevail as the artist who is determined to get at the truth of life—both in her writing and in her own experience. Irrevocably affected by his teenage affair with an older woman, Eddie behaves consistently throughout, showing a lack of confidence and an inability to handle his life in a mature fashion. That he fails as a novelist results in large part from his stunted emotional growth. Yet he remains a likable character, even though Irving treats him more or less comically as an adult. Contradictions distinguish the character of Ted Cole, a failed novelist who delights children with his books but seduces their mothers. While Marion Cole is absent from most of the novel, her memory lingers over the narrative: a temperamental, volatile, passionate, selfish woman. It is possible to imagine how she behaved during her long absence, so that when she reappears her character is re-established easily.

The narrative introduces a number of colorful supporting characters. There are the wronged women whom Ted has seduced and discarded. There is Eddy’s father, who borders on a cliché representation of the pretentious English teacher at an exclusive boys’ school but who manages to retain his humanity in spite of these encumbrances. While Irving depicts all manner of human folly through his characters’ behavior, he avoids undercutting or ridiculing them. For example, the crude, ribald, sexual predator Hannah Grant is overwrought, but she ultimately evolves into a somewhat sympathetic and understandable personage. While Irving appears to tolerate her excesses, she is often just plain tiresome and offensive to the reader.

Irving’s method of characterization relies on exaggeration, odd behavior, and well-defined actions. The characters develop incrementally, never revealing themselves fully at first but becoming whole as the outrageous plot, which they determine, unravels.

Critical Context

Irving has said that his favorite novelist is Charles Dickens. Irving’s past novels and A Widow for One Year could well qualify him as an American Dickens: a writer who loves rich and at times seemingly irrelevant details, who tells his story in a forthright manner and depends on coincidence in plotting, who masters both comedy and tragedy—which he mixes audaciously, and who develops quirky characters whose actions carry the story. To a degree, Irving’s fictional technique marks him as an old-fashioned writer. That may well be the reason that his work continues to enjoy popular success, especially in a time when so many novelists are bent on experimentation and obscurity. Irving never crosses the border of conventional fiction; nor does he fall into ambiguity and abstractions. Ruth Cole says that her novel is not about anything, that it is just a good story. While it is possible to draw thematic implications from Irving’s novels, they are also first and foremost good stories. This quality is undoubtedly the reason for the continuing popularity of Irving’s most widely admired novel, The World According to Garp (1978), as well as the broad reception of the novels that followed, which show a tremendous variety in settings, characters, and situations.

The quest on which Irving always sends his characters—that of fulfillment, security, peacefulness within a turbulent world, the attainment of love—remains a familiar one, a quest with which readers can identify. That the characters, once they have struggled and experienced setbacks and faced all manner of odds, do in the end discover a sense of oneness with others always rings true. Readers understand and appreciate this timeless discovery.

Bibliography

Harter, Carol C., and James R. Thompson. John Irving. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Although the study covers Irving’s fiction only through The Cider House Rules (1985), it remains a clear and forthright introduction to his work. The authors focus in part on the reasons for the popular appeal of the novels.

McWilliam, Candia. “Love, Grief, and Breasts.” The New Statesman 127 (May 22, 1998): 55. McWilliam complains that the women in A Widow for One Year behave too much like men, condemns the “unfunny comedy” and “slapstick” humor, and dislikes the obsession with sex and body parts. She admits that the novel’s theme is “patently prompted by love” but asserts that the book fails in its execution of so powerful a theme.

Pritchard, William H. “No Ideas! It’s a Novel!” The New York Times Book Review 147 (May 24, 1998): 7. This review of A Widow for One Year stresses Irving’s kinship to Charles Dickens, explores the comic touch, praises the book’s readability, and places the new novel in the context of Irving’s earlier work.

Van Gelder, Lindsy. “Yupward Mobility.” The Nation 266 (May 11, 1998): 52-54. Van Gelder calls Irving the “American Balzac, or perhaps our Dickens.” She praises him for his brisk storytelling, for believable and memorable characters in spite of their “collection of tics,” and for caring “about the smallest aches of the human heart.” She concludes that Irving has captured “the whole yuppie Zeitgeist”: the search for commitment, meaning, and success.

Wymard, Eleanor B. “ A New Version of the Midas Touch’: Daniel Martin and The World According to Garp.” Modern Fiction Studies 27 (Summer, 1981): 284-286. This comparative study of John Fowles’s and Irving’s novels focuses on their similarity as old-fashioned fictions, on the comic elements, and on the way they depict characters clashing with the demands of modern life.