A Widow for One Year
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A Widow for One Year is a John Irving novel, released in 1998,
The novel is about the lives of Ruth Cole and Eddie O'Hare, both novelists.
In the book, Ruth's father, Ted Cole writes children's books. Ruth's mother, Marion, writes fictional crime dramas. Ruth Cole writes books about women. Eddie O'Hare writes about relationships with older women. The actual novel itself contains all of these elements.
It is divided into three sections.
Contents |
[edit] First section
In the opening section of the book, Ruth Cole is four years old. The year is 1958. Although she is a loved child, her parents are not part of a happy marriage. Her elder brothers had died four years ago in a car accident, and she is constantly reminded of their presence as pictures of their childhood adorn all the walls of the Cole family home. Eddie O'Hare is a teenaged boy who attends Exeter Academy, the same school as Ruth's two late brothers. Eddie is unwittingly drawn into a plot orchestrated by Ted Cole to drive his wife Marion to infidelity. At this point, Ted feels that Marion is not in a suitable frame of mind to parent Ruth. She shows little affection to her daughter, and a babysitter is employed for Ruth even though Marion has no other time commitments. Ted has always conducted extra-marital affairs and would likely lose in a custody battle for Ruth in divorce court. If Marion had an affair, he feels that this would strengthen the case for custody to be awarded to him. Ted picks Eddie specifically to tempt Marion as he bears a striking resemblance to his two dead sons and offers him a seemingly innocent summer job as a writer's assistant. Eddie and Marion's affair leads to the disappearance of a mother figure in Ruth's life as she chooses to leave her husband and daughter at the end of the summer.
This section was later made into the movie The Door in the Floor (2004). However, the movie moves the focus from Ruthie to Eddie's affair with Marion. Also, the movie is set in the 2000s instead of 1958.
[edit] Second section
In this section, Ruth is age 36 in 1990, and in Europe, and is dealing with the failures of her love life, as she herself becomes a writer. While researching her novel in Amsterdam's red light district, she observes the murder of a prostitute by the prostitute's client. Ruthie is doing research on prostitutes in Amsterdam's red light district, and finds herself hiding in a closet while the murder occurs. She makes note of certain details of the murder which, in the future, lead to the murderer's arrest. Having solved the murder case the detective is left with the 'witness' unsolved.
[edit] Third section
In this section, Ruth is age 41 in 1995 and has a son. Ruth is about to fall in love for the first time. This section covers Ruth's brief widowhood ("A Widow for One Year" is a literal description of Ruth's situation as well as the title of one of her novels). The detective, who solved the murder case that Ruth witnessed four years before, is now able to 'solve' the witness. As Ruth included details of the murder in her next novel, and as the detective happened to be a Ruth Cole fan he was able to identify his witness. Ruth now found out that the murder was solved and the murderer caught. In the course of this meeting with the detective, he and Ruth fall in love, and after a whirlwind romance in Paris (the next stop on Ruth's book tour) he agrees to follow Ruth to Vermont where they marry. They end up living happily in Vermont, again a tribute to John Irving's own life.
[edit] Trivia
In a theme common to many Irving novels, Eddie is the son of a teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy. He grows up on the campus, and subsequently attends secondary school there.
Ruth is a fan of Graham Greene, and in the novel reads The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry.
John Irving describes many of the children's books that Ted Cole writes and Illustrates. One of these, A sound like somebody trying not to make a sound has become a real children's novel with illustrations by Tatjana Hauptmann (The book is available in German).
