i'm a very very complex person

I finished The Hotel New Hampshire last night. It certainly wasn't bad, but it falls quite a bit short of Irving's best books. I grew to like quite a few of the characters (despite finding nearly all of them to be insufferable for the first half of the book) and the story had its engrossing moments, but the book felt more like a collection of isolated incidents than a unified whole. Many of the things that happened seemed either too far-fetched or too coincidental to be believed; some writers can pull off a plot that hinges on coincidence or the outre without leaving me feeling incredulous, but Irving didn't manage it this time. I also didn't particularly care for the ending. The characters all seemed to sigh and say, "Well sure, it's true that we were all tremendously passionate, intense people back when the book started, but now that we're older, we're happy to have given up on the things we wanted so badly and decided to live our quiet little lives. Our lives might be smaller now, but they're so much more functional." Man, fuck that. I am really unwilling to believe that entering middle age means giving up all the ardor you once possessed.

Despite the fact that there were many things I didn't like about the book, there were a couple things that were interesting. I found it fascinating that Irving gave the main character his own name, especially since this character was also the first person narrator of the book. There are already so many people who are eager to assume that everything is autobiographical and to conflate an author with his character that I wouldn't think an author would want to do anything to encourage that conflation, such as giving the character his own name. Of course, John is hardly an uncommon or unusual name, but neither is my name and I can't remotely imagine naming a character after myself. Even when my writing was at its most blatantly autobiographical, I used another name for myself. When Jonathan Safran Foer writes a book about a character named Jonathan Safran Foer its quite clearly an instance of postmodern cleverness, but that's not really Irving's style. Makes me wonder...

I also found it interesting that one of the characters becomes a writer. It's almost always worth paying attention when a writer writes about a writer. Some of the things that Irving had to say about Lilly seemed obviously to refer to himself and to reveal a desire to be a more 'literary' writer than he is. But the thing that grabbed me the most was this: "But our little Lilly wrote her first book almost by accident; that book was only a euphemism for trying to grow, yet it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write." There it is: my biggest fear in a nutshell.

Next to read is The Last Picture Show. I haven't read anything by Larry McMurtry in two or three years, ever since Streets of Laredo sapped my will to live with its relentless hopelessness. I saw the movie of The Last Picture Show a very long time ago, but I don't remember anything about it other than Jacy's famous line: "What's on your feeble mind, Duane?"