Word: ruth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Eddie O'Hare, 16, finds himself working during the summer of 1958 as an assistant to Ted Cole, a well-known writer and illustrator of children's books. Also at the Cole house on Long Island, N.Y., are Ted's beautiful wife Marion and daughter Ruth, 4. And there are hundreds of framed photographs on the walls depicting the Cole sons Thomas and Timothy. They were 17 and 15 when they were killed, five years earlier, in a car crash. Their parents, in the backseat, survived unhurt but devastated...
...lest she lose her too. Marion uses Eddie, who has fallen into bed and love with her, to help her get away. She takes almost all the photographs of her sons with her, leaving her daughter without a mother and the walls with nothing but picture hooks to remind Ruth of the brothers she never knew...
Irving explains, "The picture hooks were part of the reason she became a writer--for years after her mother left, Ruth would try to remember which of the photographs had hung from which of the hooks. And, failing to recall the actual pictures of her perished brothers to her satisfaction, Ruth began to invent all the captured moments in their short lives, which she had missed." Eddie's love for the vanished Marion turns him into a writer as well; his five novels will all deal poignantly with young men and older women. And Ruth and Eddie come to suspect...
After relating the events of that momentous summer, Irving jumps forward to periods of time in 1990 and 1995, following Ruth and Eddie and Ted and assorted friends and lovers as they grow older. But nearly everything that happens in A Widow for One Year is foreshadowed or present in embryonic form in the novel's long opening section. Irving's use of suspense is peculiar and intriguing. The question he poses is seldom what will happen next; for example, he spills the beans quickly that Marion will reappear in the story 37 years after it begins. But this information...
This method of telling a story has its sometimes irritating limitations. Irving spends a lot of time describing what his characters do not know; for example, "[Ruth] had no idea that she was not through with him." And the author sometimes overexplains: "Oh, well, Eddie thought as he got off the bus--maybe it was almost Ninety-second Street. (It was Eighty-first.)" But these are the lapses of a generous narrator intent on giving his readers not just incidents but a way of making sense of them. "The grief over lost children never dies," Irving writes near...