One of our editors will have spent my Christmas vacation with John Irving and his latest book (1000 pages), The Ghosts of the Jerome Hotel.
His reading report below.
Even if, for me, it is far from being the best novel by this author (of which I have not read all), all his characters accompanied me for two weeks like those of a series and it is the memory I will keep of this reading.
With The Ghosts of the Hotel Jerome, John Irving takes us into a saga from 1941 to the present day with a gallery of colorful characters, a construction that mixes fiction and history (Vietnam War, AIDS years, etc.), scenes full of burlesque sex, tragic deaths.
As in the other novels by John Irving that I have read, the female figures are very present, that of the central mother while the father is absent.
John Irving underlines the power of books in the trajectory of Adam, the writer’s fictional double: Nana reads Moby Dick to him from the age of 10 to 13 and he is forever marked by it.
-As its name suggests, ghosts are very present in this novel: that of the grandfather in childbirth who haunts Adam’s attic room, that of his biological father whose identity he wants to know, those of Little Ray, Molly and Elliot Barlow who he would like to see after their deaths.
No character is not banal under the pen of John Irving whether it is the evil aunts Abaigal and Martha, Nora the cousin and Erm who speaks in pantomines since the day she decided not to speak anymore, the racketeer Mr Barlow , surrogate father who will become “her” later in his life, Adam and his little hands that he never stops twisting…
What I liked least : the novel for me repeats itself a lot, and the two long chapters written like a screenplay as well as the review of a film lost me (I ended up skipping these passages).
What I remember most
I remember his non-conformism, his ode to love, his criticism of puritanical America and all the passages devoted to Adam’s girlfriends when he was young which made me laugh a lot!
