The Hotel New Hampshire - Just Not Big Enough

The Hotel New Hampshire

Author: John Irving

I did not want to be startled by that shape of death again, although I think the shape of death is always startling to us – it is meant to be startling – and not even proper anticipation can prepare us enough for it. 

–John Berry

Keep passing the open windows. –Various

Sorry […]. Just not big enough. –Lilly Berry

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone's older brother, and someone's older sister – they become our heroes, too. We invent what we love, and what we fear. There is always a brave, lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. –John Berry

This book started about how I'd expected it to. There were characters, there was a hotel, and there was a bear. These things I figured I'd find. What I did not expect were the deaths, the incest, and the rape. Had I first read the Wikipedia entry on John Irving  –  and specifically on his recurring themes  –  I would have expected the deaths. But I didn't, so I couldn't have.

Here's the book's description from Barnes & Noble:

"The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels."

So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they "dream on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel.

I'm going to focus on the deaths here. Including animals, there were seven major deaths in the family. I'm afraid I can't really discuss my feelings about these deaths without giving key points away. So let this serve as my spoiler alert for those of you planning to read this. Let me leave you with my overall thoughts: I enjoyed the book, both for its expected plot points and its unexpected ones. It's got some very controversial sections and themes, though it is well-written and overall, a really good read.

That said, let's get back to the deaths. The first bear dies; this is not entirely surprising, though the method is a bit unexpected. Sorrow the family dog also dies. While his death affects the whole family, each of whom loved the dog even if he/she didn't always admit it, Frank takes a particular interest in the dog's passing. To surprise his younger brother, Frank has the dog stuffed, for which he takes up taxidermy, in various stances. While Sorrow is in attack stance and stored in Iowa Bob's closet, he tumbles out, startling and agitating Iowa Bob (the children's paternal grandfather) so much that he also dies. His heart attack is the first unexpected human death; it happens quite fast and he, along with the dog and the bear, do not make it to the second Hotel New Hampshire.

The next deaths are the first ones that really got me. Mother and Egg, the youngest son, die suddenly, in one sentence. If Irving's offing of these two characters was meant to shock and confuse, he certainly achieved his goal with me. I wanted to mourn their deaths, but I simply wasn't given the time. I don't know whether Irving killed them so swiftly just to be rid of them, knowing they wouldn't be needed in the rest of the story, or if he wanted to make the point that people in our lives will die, but that dwelling on those deaths does not allow our lives' stories to go on.

Freud's death was a bit less abrupt, though only a bit. Irving allowed the reader to prepare, for a paragraph or so, for the death and heroism of Freud, who diverted the bomb from the Opera House and sacrificed his own life instead.

It was the final death in the family that was given the most lead-up. It was also the saddest. Perhaps Irving was trying to say something there, too: Lilly's death was the most significant to the remaining family members, to the story as a whole and to the deceased. Her death was the one that tied all the other deaths together: like State o' Maine, Lilly's mood forewarned of her impending doom; like Sorrow, Lilly lived on after hear death – not via taxidermy, but via her writing; like Iowa Bob, Lilly was confronted by her past – Bob saw the "ghost" of Sorrow and Lilly saw the "ghost" of herself, small and unable to grow and adapt fully to her place in the world; like Mother and Egg's deaths, Lilly's came too soon, yet at just the right time; and like Freud, her death was for others – while she didn't save an opera house full of patrons and musicians, in her own way she felt she was saving her family, her posterity and her world.

Lilly's suicide couldn't have been prevented, no matter what John or Frank did or didn't do. It was her time, and she knew it. Yet, she was young and talented and the world would not have chosen her to die then. To Lilly, who had never been quite earthbound – she was compared to a fairy, an angel, a ghost of a person – chose, poetically, to die by finally letting the earth claim her. Sorrow may float, but Lilly only sinks.

My takeaway: Part of becoming who are you are meant to be is learning to accept your faults, face your fears, recognize your talents and accept your family for what they are and love them anyway. And the smartest bears are women.