Renewal and Resilience

“A Widow for One Year” reestablishes John Irving as a premier storyteller, master of the tragicomic and among the first rank of contemporary novelists. This time around, every major character is either a writer, book editor or, at the very least, a prodigious reader. But “A Widow for One Year” is no tedious postmodern tract of writing about writing. Holding at bay his penchant for the outlandish, banishing most of his familiar imagery of circuses, bears, wrestling and the gruesome mutilations that 20 years ago made “The World According to Garp” both a strikingly imaginative work and something of a special case, Irving now offers a deeply affecting, entirely believable family saga. Coincidence, the reflex of earlier Irving novels, has risen to metaphor.

Ruth Cole is 4 years old when the novel opens, an after-tragedy child, whose two teenage brothers died in an automobile accident before she was born. Her bereft mother, Marion, makes love that summer 60 times to Eddie, a teenage boy hired to be her father Ted’s assistant. Fearing the loss of yet another child, Marion abandons Ruth to philandering Ted, author of children’s books. His best title, thought up by little Ruth, “A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound,” saves Ruth’s life at the novel’s climax. In Part 2, Ruth, unmarried at 36 and a famous novelist, meets Eddie. The final section takes Ruth from being “a widow for one year” to the good fortune bestowed generously upon her by an acknowledged Thackeray-esque puppeteer, Irving’s inevitable omniscient narrator.

This narrative voice, an Irving trademark, cannot resist the flash-forward, telling us what will happen hundreds of pages later (for example how long it will be before Eddie sees Marion again), but also what his characters do not know, or yet know (Eddie will become a novelist but never “a hugely successful one” or that two people are having “their last conversation”). Ruth doesn’t like sex the way her mother was doing it when she walked in on Marion and Eddie, but she doesn’t know why and “would never know.” Yet Irving’s flash-forwards are a delight because they never destroy the autonomy of his characters. Unlike other controlling narrators (Cormac McCarthy’s in “The Crossing,” Russell Banks’ in “Continental Drift”), Irving allows his people to shine in their intelligence.

So when 16-year-old Eddie summons the wisdom to explain to Ruth: “Brave means that you accept what happens to you--you just try to make the best of it,” he expresses a major Irving theme. As Irving put it in Salon magazine, his books are about “making do with what you have.” So acute an observer is Ruth that, having just lost her virginity and being discovered naked by the boy’s father, she perceives that “it was not lust that Ruth saw in his eyes--only his crippling envy of his lucky son.”

Of all the characters, Ruth speaks most often for Irving, not least when she realizes “how fortune and misfortune were unequally distributed, if not at birth then in the course of circumstances beyond our control.” The novel’s final uplifting note is sounded, however, by Marion, who with consummate wit reprises words heard at another primal moment in the story.

As if it were only fair, Irving interpolates whole chapters of the books of his writer-characters, incorporating them into the plot so that one of Marion’s pseudonymous detective novels, “Followed Home From the Flying Food Circus,” reveals her identity to Ruth and Eddie. Through Ruth, Irving answers his own critics. As is he, she is accused of being unfashionably comic and of recycling her characters. She is popular in Europe, as he is. She is attacked for sensationalizing everything, of exaggerating the “unseemly.” To this familiar charge, Irving replies: “[H]er worst fear was that the unseemly had become so commonplace that one couldn’t exaggerate it.” It is only an ineffectual, overly earnest lawyer, a trade for whom Irving evinces little respect, who finds Ruth’s novels “too bizarre.”

Ex-cop Harry Hoekstra, a voracious reader who will figure in a major way in the plot, loves novels that are “complexly interwoven stories about real people,” and that is what Irving has provided so splendidly in “A Widow for One Year.” Marginal people do appear, but unlike the dwarfs in Irving’s last novel, “A Son of the Circus,” they are prostitutes with a proliferating and changing ethnic composition, effectively revealing “how commonplace the bizarre is.”

Irving’s plot convolutions are rooted in psychological determinism, colored by the intertwining of life and art. Ruth hears a catch in her baby Graham’s breathing and peeks through the curtain, the same gesture she made in the Dutch prostitute Rooie’s room. She wants “to see if the moleman,” a character in one of her father’s stories, “was where she half-expected him to be: curled asleep on the window ledge with some of the pink tentacle of his star-shaped nose pressed against the glass.” The moment is so richly transcendent it encompasses the entire novel.

Perversity remains the emblem of human nature. Ruth’s knowing how much her father loves her only torments her all the more. What tortured her as a child describes her adult pain. Discovering that her best friend Hannah slept with her father (in the Irving universe people cannot help being what they are), it was as “if something had brushed against her (a dress on a hanger).” There is violence at dead center of this story, but this violence, unlike that delivered by the women who cut out their tongues in “The World According to Garp,” is an unavoidable condition of life in the late 20th century.

For Irving, the novelist’s responsibility is to discover life’s compensations, a goal he shares with his predecessors like Dickens. Ruth locates the wisdom to conclude that life had brought her “only a little misfortune.” Eddie experiences lifelong devotion to Marion, one undiminished by the ravages of age. “You’re not old, not to me,” he tells her, and the moment, predictable as it is, takes our breath away. A measure of Irving’s skill is that we believe him.

Sorrow may be permanent, as Eddie had long feared. Renewal and resilience must take up residence in life with a metaphoric “mouse crawling between the walls,” a best-selling Ted Cole classic. Yet there may be justice too in a benighted world. Ruth triumphs. The pleasures of this rich and beautiful book are manifold. To be human is to savor them.