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Relation Marion and Ted had since the tragedy. Marion is a beautiful woman whose life was devastated when her two teen-age sons were killed in an automobile accident Ruth was conceived after this event in the only sexual Parents, Marion and Ted Cole, on Long Island in Sagaponack. On the youngest of these four, Ruth Cole, whose most recent work is also titled ''A Widow for One Year.'' In the novel's first third, set in the summer of 1958, Ruth is 4, living with her about-to-be separated

The four main characters in ''A Widow for One Year'' are all writers, three of them novelists, the fourth a failed novelist who has turned to writing children's books.

He quotes a claim by Dickens's biographer,Įdgar Johnson, that Dickens invented ''a new literary form, a kind of fairy tale that is at once humorous, heroic and realistic.'' This is not a bad way to think of Irving's own post-Garp productions, and the Such charges, certainly the sentimentality one, don't make Irving flinch, since he has proclaimed Dickens as his favorite novelist, a writer who is ''most unafraid'' of sentimentality. Whose fiction lacks intellectual and emotional complexity. He is pigeonholed, rather, as an entertaining writer, inclined toward cuteness and sentimentality, Is patent yet my sense is that he has never quite been taken seriously by readers who take seriously Pynchon or Roth, DeLillo or Morrison. His exhibited mastery of comic action sequences is undeniable the most brilliant, perhaps, occurs in ''A Prayerįor Owen Meany'' when an obnoxious headmaster attempts, with disastrous consequences, to steer down the marble stairs of the Great Hall of Gravesend Academy a Volkswagen cleverly placed there by students. Over the past two decades he has energetically produced five longish novels (this new one is the fifth) filled with inventive, exuberant, often farcical, sometimes tiresome, knockabout performances that are also painstakingly researched,įilled with lore on the Bath shipyards, or abortion, or the physiology and habits of achondroplastic dwarfs. Ver since ''The World According to Garp'' (1978), John Irving's work has attracted a huge readership, not only in this country but internationally.