A Widow for One Year (90 page)

JI:  
No. Never.

Oh, all right, there have been
small
surprises, but the characters essentially remain as I have imagined them. I’ll tell you what I mean by a small surprise. I knew Marion would come back and buy Ruth’s house, with Eddie. I
didn’t
know that Eddie would be so smitten with the idea of owning Ruth’s house that he would go so far as to propose buying the house with Hannah. Naturally Hannah’s reaction to that idea wasn’t hard to imagine, but Eddie did surprise me in this one respect: he wanted that house badly enough to embark on this simply terrible proposition. It was a funny moment, and I decided to see where it took me.
I believe you earn those occasionally spontaneous moments only by carefully planning all that you can; if you’ve done your homework on your characters and their stories, a few good accidents will happen and you can take advantage of them. That’s a far cry from trusting in accidents.
A good story must feel to the reader that it happens naturally. But it’s not so natural being natural. In my case, it’s mostly planning.

Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. A passionate and complex theme throughout the book is the concept of a writer’s imagination. “Eddie O’Hare, who was doomed to be
only
autobiographical in his novels, knew better than to presume that Ruth Cole was writing about herself. He understood from the first time he read her that she was better than that” (p. 204). What role does imagination, lack of it, even fear of it, play in the lives and careers of the central characters?

2. Ruth, as a novelist, sees books as inventions based on both borrowed and imagined experiences—not necessarily personal ones. However, her best friend, Hannah, a journalist, presumes that all novels are substantially autobiographical; she sees in Ruth’s books a “Hannah” character, who is the adventurer, as well as a “Ruth” character, who holds herself back. Explore the ideas of fiction and imagination and the autobiographical ingredients of writing.

3. What is the meaning and symbolism of the “feet” photo? Why do you think it became kind of a talisman for Ruth? What emotions does the photo evoke in you as a reader?

4. Discuss the humor and the pathos of Ted Cole’s oeuvre. What about the humor and pathos of Ted himself? Where does Ted’s true imagination lie—if not in his writing? Is Ted’s real talent—his passion, his art—the seduction of the prettiest and unhappiest of young mothers? Doesn’t Ted pursue his seductions as passionately as his daughter will pursue her writing?

5. During that fateful summer, Eddie, the aspiring young writer, found his voice. Marion gave him his voice. “It was losing her that had given him something to
say.
It was the thought of his life
without
Marion that provided Eddie O’Hare with the authority to write” (p. 112). Discuss the life and writing career of Eddie O’Hare: his brilliance when being truly autobiographical, and his mediocrity when it came to believability in things that were “imagined.”

6. When Ted tells Eddie the “story” of Thomas and Timothy’s accident, he tells it in the third-person removed. “If Marion had ever told the story, she would have stood so close to it that, in the telling of it, she would have descended into a final madness—a madness much greater than whatever madness had caused Marion to abandon her only living child” (p. 154). Examine the madness. Discuss Ted’s ability—and Marion’s inability—to detach.

7. How is Eddie, who appears as the most benign of characters, often the most powerful? For example, beginning with the restaurant “fingerprinting” scene (p. 240), he gives Ruth the gift of her past, of her mother, of other realities. How does he open the door to her future?

8. Examine: “Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid” (p. 267).

Discuss the idea that the books in Ruth’s life and the characters in them were more fixed in Ruth’s life than the flesh-and-blood people closest to her— namely, her father and her best friend.

9. Why do you think Ruth decides to marry Allan? Why was he so safe? How was he different from her “type” of man—a type that disturbed her so?

10. Discuss the theme of humiliation in her novel-in-progress as well as Ruth’s own unconscious quest for humiliation. Examine the themes of women, humiliation, and control. In Amsterdam, Ruth writes in her diary: “The conventional wisdom is that prostitution is a kind of rape for money; in truth, in prostitution—maybe
only
in prostitution—the woman seems in charge” (p. 338). What do you think of this?

11. Examine the scene after she witnesses the murder. “At last she’d found the humiliation she was looking for, but of course this was one humiliation that she wouldn’t write about” (p. 375).

12. Examine the powerful car scene before Ted’s suicide. As Ted is driving, Ruth reveals the shocking incident with Scott. Her tale is one of degradation. Does it have the desired effect on her father? What does she want? Was this scene about revenge—about giving back the hurt done to her? Can matters of families, of love and hate (her father is the one she most loves and hates in her life), ever really be understood? Of course this scene mirrors the driving scene where Ted tells Ruth the details of her brothers’ death. Discuss.

13. What changes occur in Ruth after she becomes a widow? How do these changes finally free her to fall in love at last?

14. What kind of emotions do you feel at the ending of the book? How have the characters of Ruth, Marion, and Eddie found, in essence, their way back? How has Marion, through her books, come to terms with her grief? When she reveals to Eddie that “grief is contagious,” is she effectively saying that her absence from her daughter’s life was the only way she could love her or the only way she could not destroy her daughter?

Praise for John Irving

The World According to Garp

“A wonderful novel, full of energy and art, at once funny and horrifying and heartbreaking . . . You know
The World According to Garp
is true. It is also terrific.”

—The Washington Post

The Cider House Rules

“Witty, tenderhearted, fervent, and scarifying. . . This novel is an example, now rare, of the courage of imaginative ardor.”

—The New York Times Book Review

A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Extraordinary, so original, and so enriching. . . a rare creation in the somehow exhausted world of late twentieth-century fiction. . . Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] richly textured and carefully wrought world.”

—Stephen King for
The Washington Post Book World

The Hotel New Hampshire

“A hectic, gaudy saga with the verve of a Marx Brothers movie.”

—The New York Times Book Review

The 158-Pound Marriage

“Deft, hard-hitting. . . What he demonstrates beautifully is that a one-to-one relationship is more demanding than a free-for-all.”

—The New York Times Book Review

Setting Free the Bears

“Truly remarkable. . . Encompasses the longings and agonies of youth . . . A complex and moving novel.”

—Time

A Son of the Circus

“His most entertaining novel since Garp.”

—The New York Times Book Review

The Water-Method Man

“Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry.”

—Time

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

“Supple and energetic as a stylist, Mr. Irving also knows just how to create in the reader’s mind a vivid impression of an existing world-and just how to populate it.”

—The New York Times Book Review.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
OHN
W
INSLOW
I
RVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. He is the author of nine novels, among them
The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany,
and
A Son of the Circus.
Mr. Irving is married and has three sons; he lives in Toronto and in southern Vermont.

ALSO BY JOHN IRVING

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
A Son of the Circus
A Prayer for Owen Meany
The Cider House Rules
The Hotel New Hampshire
The World According to Garp
The 158-Pound Marriage
The Water-Method Man
Setting Free the Bears

A Widow for One Year

is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1998 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

PENGUIN USA:

Excerpt from

Madeline’s Christmas

by Ludwig Bemelmans.
Copyright © 1956 by Ludwig Bemelmans. Copyright renewed 1984 by Madeline Bemelmans and Barbara B. Marciano. Copyright © 1985 by Madeline Bemelmans and Barbara B. Marciano. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.

A. P. WATT LTD. ON BEHALF OF MICHAEL YEATS:

“When You Are Old” and excerpt from “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” from

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.

Reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Irving, John.
A widow for one year : a novel / John Irving.
p.     cm.

I. Title.
PS3559.R8W53     1998
813'.54—dc21     97-49166
Random House website address:
www.randomhouse.com
First Trade Edition

eISBN: 978-0-375-50447-1

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