There is something of Byron about John Irving. Not only is it that he woke after the publication of The World According to Garp to find himself famous, but the extremity of his opinions and the nervous violence of his language recall that intemperate nobleman, and, like Byron, he would certainly say that love is no sinecure. Indeed, nothing in life is easy for Irving's characters, and in his five novels the still, sad music of humanity rises to the orgasmic uproar of a rock band. (p. 1)

Those who admired Garp will find the new novel, The Hotel New Hampshire, very much to their taste. Irving has expressed himself strongly on the subject of reviewers, so I shall not commit the reviewer's sin of spilling the beans about his story. It is enough to say that it is in the powerful, reader-coaxing mode of his earlier books, and recounts the adventures of the Berry family, two parents and five children, as they seek some kind of repose in three hotels, two in New Hampshire and one, named for that state, in Vienna. Repose is not, of course, what they find, but they achieve a rueful fatalism, a stoicism that reconciles the four survivors to life.

The Irving bench-marks are all here: body-building, bears, Viennese whores, rape and the pleasures of sexual intercourse. It would be unjust to call this "the mixture as before," because it is fresh and newly invented. Irving is unusual among modern novelists because his mind has a determined color, and he writes of certain themes in all his novels not because he cannot think of anything else, but because these themes seem to him to have overmastering importance. To the present reviewer they seem to boil down to a romantic insistence on the supremacy of passion and a desire for poetic justice. (pp. 1-2)

[As] Irving employs it, poetic justice takes on an unmistakable Old Testament character. Let them suffer as they made others suffer. Not a pretty doctrine, but it gives a warm glow in those dark caves of the spirit to which humanitarianism has not penetrated.

John Irving has obviously not achieved his position by dealing in trivialities. He has said his say about "new fiction" and does not seek to do anything new with language or form. Indeed, in some respects he appears to have retreated, and the wrap-ups which finish Garp and the new novel, in which the fate of every character is revealed, are reminiscent of some of the Victorians. (p. 2)