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, spiraling comedies of life….

To any suggestion that a popular novel can't possibly be a good one, Irving has some ready answers. "I think, to some degree, entertainment is the responsibility of literature," he says. "I really am looking upon the novel as an art form that was at its best when it was offered as a popular form. By which I probably mean the 19th century." Indeed, like the 19th century books he most...