When I started reading John Irving’s A Widow for One Year I wasn’t sure I would continue to the end. But it was overall an interesting story with offbeat characters. A long book that could have been edited down, about a young man (Eddie) who falls in love with a (much) older woman whose two sons have been killed in a car accident (when they were around his age, sixteen). And also about that woman’s daughter (Ruth) and her journeys after her mother abandons her to her father when she is four years old. It is a story about loss and love and loss and love. The heart of human life.
I enjoyed the conceit of foretelling the events of the storyline long before they happen chronologically. But the level of slapstick humor at the beginning of the novel did not work at all for me. I rarely relate easily to that kind of humor but in writing, at least here, it became more ridiculous than funny.
But I enjoyed the book, not only because the story was intriguing, the people quirky, but also because it didn’t keep my attention long enough to interfere with my sleep (as did Blessings, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Dry). So I suppose that is a good enough reason for me to like it.!
Until near the end. Then I found the novel absorbing and worth waiting for the final one hundred pages. There were two passages that warrant quoting:
Hannah (Ruth's friend) asks Eddie (now in his 50’s but still courting much older women) what he is thinking when he is with his “older women”, is he attracted to her as she is or is he really thinking of someone else when he is with her. His reply: “I try to see the whole woman. …..A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am—ageless. An old woman doesn’t always see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her whole life in her. There’s something so moving about someone’s whole life.”
And
Harry (Ruth’s second husband) had always been attracted to people who contained a lot of anger. As a police officer, he’d found that uncontained anger was nothing but a menace to him. Whereas contained anger greatly appealed to him, and he believed that people who weren’t angry at all were basically unobservant.
So we (older women) are not trying to make up for lost time; we just don't know that we are older and want to open the valve after having observed so much!