A Widow for One Year

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Writers and writing are not new themes in John Irving’s fiction;
several of his previous novels have had at least one writer as a major
character, and Irving explored the writing life in such famous works as
The World According to Garp and Hotel New Hampshire. In this book,
Irving uses writing as a prism to reveal virtually the entire literary
spectrum. Nearly every major character is a writer. Ruth Cole, his main
protagonist, is a successful novelist. Her father, Ted Cole, is a
successful children’s writer. Ruth’s best friend, Hannah, is a
successful journalist. Ruth’s estranged mother, Marion, is a
successful mystery writer. The only nonworld-famous writer is Ruth’s
friend and former baby sitter, Eddie O’Hare. He is a mediocrity,
because he writes “familiar, autobiographical novels—all of them
variations on an overworked theme.”

Yet when the narrator (an omniscient, unnamed, and sometimes annoying
voice) condemns Eddie for writing familiar autobiographical novels,
Irving is in many ways criticizing himself. Irving’s novels are rife
with recurring themes of prep schools, New England towns, hotels, and,
of course, writers. The main theme of A Widow for One Year is whether
writers should write from their imagination or from their life
experiences. When one of Ruth Cole’s characters turns out to be a
widow, Ruth reaps scorn from an actual widow, who accuses her of not
knowing what she is talking about.

Fans of Irving’s intelligent, finely chiseled, and occasionally racy
prose will find much to admire in this latest work; unfortunately, there
is perhaps too much for the non-diehards. Large portions of the book are
occupied by tedious minutiae about each character. Plowing through this
surfeit of autobiographic detail is like being trapped in a stalled
elevator with several people who are convinced that everyone else is
dying to know every particular of their self-absorbed lives. Score one
for the writers who write from imagination.