Time

Time is a publication whose assessments in the supplied material frame John Irving’s fiction as both macabre and broadly recognizable. Its review of The Hotel New Hampshire emphasizes the novel’s combination of dark humor, family sentiment, and moral outrage; a later observation on Irving’s popularity presents his imagined world as widely shared rather than narrowly private.

Review of The Hotel New Hampshire

Time described The Hotel New Hampshire as a startlingly original family saga, comparing its reach to The World According to Garp. The novel follows nearly four generations of the troubled Berry family, and the review stresses the tension that gives the saga its character: macabre humor works alongside Dickensian sentiment, while the story registers anger at cruelty, dogmatism, and injustice. The praise thus identifies more than a comic style; it points to a mode in which unruly, even grim material remains joined to emotional attachment and moral judgment.

Irving’s Broadly Shared World

In a separate comment on Irving’s continued popularity, Time suggested that his appeal was readily understandable because his fictional world resembled the world according to nearly everyone. The phrasing shifts the emphasis from the distinctiveness of an individual novel to the breadth of Irving’s imaginative reach. Read beside the review of The Hotel New Hampshire, it links extravagantly particular family stories to recognizable human experience: the fiction can be startlingly original and still feel widely inhabited.