Success has neither spoiled nor improved Irving, though some have tried to make a case for the former. In truth, Hotel New Hampshire is the fifth in a reasonably straight line of Irving novels….
Death, mutilation, and rape are frequent occurences [in this book], though they are not quite as gruesome as in Garp; Irving seems to enjoy such grotesqueries, sometimes leading the reader to wonder whether his sense of the comic is rather off-key. Yet precisely this harmonizing of bizarre accidents with an authorial assurance that everything will come out all right is Irving's most distinctive music….
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