This book repeatedly asks the question "what is fiction about?" Is the source of characters and events personal experience or imagination? Four main characters are authors (Ruth, Eddie, Marion, and Ted). We see how their experiences and their fictional transformations of those experiences are intertwined, with stories inside stories. The stories these characters tell and write are important in moving the main plot along, e.g., Marion's mystery novels, Ruth's novel with the scene in Amsterdam, Ted's use of his children's story writer reputation to seduce young mothers. Sometimes the retelling of an event as an event itself (for instance, telling about the Tommy/Timmy accident) and it is a new event for each person it is told to. (The telling of a story is an event in a story, as is telling about that telling of a story...) Also, two other important characters are avid readers (Minty and Harry) whose lives are deeply affected by what they read.
The property on Long Island also plays an important role in the story. Its changing physical layout becomes intertwined with the characters and the action. For instance: the photos of Timmy and Tommy on the walls, then just picture hanger hooks, then new photos of Ruth, then the photos gone and the holes filled in and painted over; first the back yard is rough and wild and untended, then when Marion leaves, Ted adds the swimming pool, shower and privet hedge; the squash court becomes a suicide scene, then an office, and will probably be used in new ways as Marion moves back at the end). In other words, the property is both a physical given and a human construct. The layout leads to events that affect people's lives (the memories of pictures and picture hangers; the four-year-old Ruth wandering into the master bedroom and seeing her mother with Eddie); and their experiences lead them to change the layout.
The characters and the incidents are consistently engaging. There's anticipation and surprise, humor and pathos from start to finish. This is Irving's most consistently brilliant and well-crafted novel. It is also a book about the craft/life of writing fiction. This is the mature work of an excellent writer -- one who began with great talent and promise and now writes with mastery.
The stories in his previous books centered around humorously improbable events and grotesquely exaggerated characters -- like the conception of Garp and the bear in Hotel New Hampshire. Widow feels real and immediate. Here Irving seems to extract more meaning from the events he recounts, rather than rushing on to tell of more events. Here he creates a fully wrought story, rather than a series of uneven but often brilliant sketches.
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