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'A Widow For One Year' by John Irving

'Widow For One Year' Is Powerful Despite Unconvincing Heroine

Sunday, May 10, 1998

By Kim Germovsek, Deputy Graphics Editor, Post-Gazette

	A Widow For One Year By John Irving Random House $27.95

John Irving is an author on the grand scale, a sensitive writer but never a maudlin one. He crafts beautifully eccentric characters in novels that are blackly humorous, almost gleeful in the slapstick zeal with which he treats his characters' loves and losses.

Twenty years ago, Irving unleashed "The World According to Garp" on an unsuspecting public. It was one of the word-of-mouth bestsellers that had friends buying it for friends who bought it for friends, in its own way changing the face of American fiction. "Garp" told the tale of a self-absorbed writer and his freaky extended family, a premise he explores over and over again in his following novels with varying degrees of success.

His best-known and best-loved works ("Garp," "A Prayer for Owen Meany," "The Hotel New Hampshire") burst at the seams with maniacal wit and preposterous circumstances. His last full-length novel, "A Son of the Circus," matched the others in length and complicated storylines, but it was a sprawling, unwieldy mess of a book, and perhaps the exotic India locale was a bit too unfamiliar for both the author and his regular readers.

Irving doesn't make this mistake in "A Widow for One Year." Fans will find that he doesn't stray far from his usual territory - we still have the all-boys prep school, the ensuing masturbation sequences, prostitutes, European cities. Some surprises: Not a single wrestling scene, not one dwarf or nary a bear sighting.

"Widow' Ruth Cole's life in three parts. We first meet Ruth during the summer of her fourth year. She is a "replacement" child for the two sons her parents lost in a car accident 10 years earlier. On paper and in pictures, Ted and Marion Cole seemingly had a charmed life before the deaths of their teen-age sons. Ted is a famous author of children's books, Marion is "one of the most beautiful women alive."

But Ted consoles himself with constant womanizing and drinking, while an inconsolable Marion spends her days reliving the past through the hundreds of framed snapshots of her two dead boys that hang all over the house.

Irving is at his best in his portrayal of Marion's all-consuming despair, her refusal to accept the deaths of her sons, her inability to mother Ruth because of her fear of loving her, only to lose her, too.

Indeed, for an author who in the past has had trouble writing about women (see any of the female characters in "The Hotel New Hampshire" ) his depiction of Marion Cole ranks among his finest writing ever.

The same cannot be said about his main character, though. Ruth Cole marks the first time that Irving has a female protagonist, and there really isn't much of an emotional or mental difference between her world and Garp's.

More evidence of Irving's discomfort with female character stems from Ruth's friendship with Hannah Grant. Ruth's slutty best friend (Is there any other kind? Modern fiction and television would never have you believe otherwise) sleeps with Ruth's father, flirts with Ruth's boyfriends and blows Ruth off repeatedly throughout the novel.

Conversations between the two are teeth-gratingly inane - one hopes that Irving doesn't really think that women talk about their body parts so constantly to one another.

Where the portrayal of Marion is finely wrought, sensitive yet unapologetic about her self-absorption, Ruth is a one-dimensional lady who throws very few curves (except for her own highly touted ones) at the reader.

A major flaw in "Widow" is the extensive foreshadowing that Irving uses to tell Ruth's story. You can learn the entire outcome of the first section from the first few paragraphs of the first chapter. But future twists in the book are alluded to so often before they actually occur that they sap any sense of suspense the reader might have.

The summer of Ruth's fourth year is pivotal in charting the course of her life. That is the summer that Marion abandons her family, the summer her father stops drinking, the summer she herself starts to become a writer.

We then follow Ruth's life through the ups and downs of her own friendships, her love life and her illustrious career in which she writes novels about the importance of making decisions (all going back to the decision her mother made about leaving her, one would guess.)

And although "Widow" is ostensibly Ruth's story, Marion from the wings again and again provides its framework and gives the book its emotional core.

Ruth eventually finds happiness and love during a calamitous business trip to Amsterdam, but not always where you think she will find it.

She also finds the subject matter for her most controversial novel, "My Last Bad Boyfriend," a novel that also has a hand in finding the one true love of her life.

"A Widow for One Year" is somewhat flawed, overly romantic and never quite believable, yet because of the power of Irving's writing, well worthy of sitting on a shelf between "Owen Meany" and "Garp."