The structure of The Hotel New Hampshire is in many ways like that of the traditional novel that chronicles the life of a family over a considerable time.

The first-person narrator alternates scenes of interaction with passages summarizing intervening periods. The narrator also, as in the novels of Fielding and Sterne, directly addresses the reader, heightening the sense that the story is an invention, an artifice, rather than reality. Like the traditional novel, The Hotel New Hampshire depends heavily on coincidence: On his way home from making love to his sister Franny, John Berry encounters the instigator of her rape, Chipper Dove, and is able to set the scene for his humiliation; the third Hotel New Hampshire is the hotel in Maine where Win Berry and Mary Bates met in 1920. Providing unity and resonance to the novel are two recurring statements. The first, provided by Win Berry's father...