SOURCE: "A Family Fable," in The New Republic, September 23, 1981, pp. 37-8.

In the following review, Beatty contrasts The Hotel New Hampshire with The World According to Garp.

It's extraordinary what a little feeling can do for a novel. To prepare for The Hotel New Hampshire, I read The World According to Garp, and disliked it intensely, not for its slapstick sex or for its "comic and ugly and bizarre" preoccupation with mutilation and death, but for its shallowness, its quality of energy without feeling. The novel conveyed only one emotion—self-love. Garp, Irving's writer-hero, was so taken with himself that the title of the last chapter jarred: how could there possibly be "Life After Garp"? Who would want to go on living without that paragon? I frankly hated Garp, and picked up the new novel expecting to hate it too. Instead I liked it. Feeling made the difference...