[John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire is] a family chronicle—a tale of generations of parents coping with children and siblings coping with each other…. Family dailiness—traditional sitcom material—is in nearly constant view throughout the novel. Father and mother tell stories about their youth to their children. Grandfather teaches grandson his special athletic skills. Mother intercedes when older siblings try to force their juniors into premature knowingness. Mother spe...

"The Hotel New Hampshire," the story of an eccentric family that sets up house in various unlikely hotels here and abroad, is a hectic gaudy saga with the verve of a Marx Brothers movie; one can see those old words "antic" and "zany" emblazoned on the marquee. Midgets, dwarfs and performing bears race in and out of the novel with manic haste; the narrator's homosexual brother sleeps with a dressmaker's dummy; toilets explode: Anything for a laugh. But ...

[There] is no denying that [John Irving] has at least one thing in common with … Twain and Dickens: he can tell stories. Things happen in The Hotel New Hampshire; if one admired Irving for nothing else, one would have to admit that he can keep as many narrative balls in the air without dropping them as anyone in America now writing fiction. Whether or not his books instruct and delight as we critics are supposed to think they should, they are full of characters and events, and suffused with details, ...

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

In the following review, Fuoroli offers praise for The Hotel New Hampshire.

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 a...

Again and again The Hotel New Hampshire disappointed me by the perfunctoriness of its situations and their handling. That quality of jokey contrivance which initially put me off in Garp is painfully in evidence throughout the new novel. (p. 12) [The tone of The Hotel New Hampshire is prevailingly juvenile,] full of the bittersweet wisdom of a late-hour bull session interrupted from time to time by exploding firecrackers.

As usual novelist John Irving is telling a story [in The Hotel New Hampshire]. As usual, it's an episode marked with impending violence, unending hopelessness, offbeat humor, and parental heartache…. John Irving makes his living telling tales that turn on … bizarre, contradictory situations. Fashioning wildly inventive, delightfully intricate narratives out of his sense of humor, sense of dread and sense of duty, Irving blends the madcap, the macabre, and the mundane into sprawling, spi...

There is something of Byron about John Irving. Not only is it that he woke after the publication of The World According to Garp to find himself famous, but the extremity of his opinions and the nervous violence of his language recall that intemperate nobleman, and, like Byron, he would certainly say that love is no sinecure. Indeed, nothing in life is easy for Irving's characters, and in his five novels the still, sad music of humanity rises to the orgasmic uproar of a rock band. (p. 1) Those who adm...

Lurching glumly to the end of this joyless romp [through The Hotel New Hampshire] the reviewer finds a surge of pejoratives to hand: narcissistic, ponderous, cute, brutal, relentless, self-adoring, vulgar, popular, American…. At which point alarm bells start to ring in the critical command centre. It's easy to despise a certain gauche deftness, an un-Englishly energetic ambitiousness. What exactly grates? If Irving seems heartless, so does Waugh; it his characters are robotic, so are Orwell&#x...

This exuberant, garrulous American novel [The Hotel New Hampshire] tells the story of a family of eccentrics. To me, eccentricity is seldom more than the acceptable face of egotism; but the eccentricity of Mr. Irving's Berrys is, without exception, intended to be funny, quaint, appealing, endearing and loveable. (p. 26) Eccentricity has long been the most important ingredient in best-selling American family sagas … and I can only suppose that it is the remorseless eccentricity of all Mr. Irvin...

Only an oaf or a meanie could not be touched by a novel as eager and bumptious and cuddly as John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire…. It's sheer energy all the way, plus magnetic characters, scenic wonders, horrendous happenings, and raffish, boffo jokes on every next page. It warms the mind, tickles the funnybone, squeezes the heart; it alerts concern, then punctures it with a fart, followed by a hug. This book loves us. And if sometimes you can't tell what's cruel from wh...