Volume 28, Number 17 · November 5, 1981
Reservations
By Robert Towers
The Hotel New Hampshire
by John Irving
Dutton/A Henry Robbins Book, 401 pp., $15.50
I was decidedly a late-comer to The World According to Garp. Over-urged by enthusiasts in the summer of 1978, I became resistant and did not even make a start on the novel until it had appeared in its rainbow assortment of paperbacks. Then I had trouble getting past the first chapter, which seemed to me unbearably facetious in its account of the engendering of T.S. Garp by a ball-turret gunner lobotomized by shrapnel and a nurse who hated sex. The prospect of more than 400 pages of jokey contrivance, weird sex, and eye-gouging details of physical horror was off-putting; I have always disliked a kind of hyperkinetic fiction in which a proliferation of 'vividly' written incidents is made to do the work of a sustained engagement with a complex and thematically charged action.
Review, 2483 words
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