Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief. Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. She’s about to fall in love for the first time. One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole awoke to the sound. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.Ī Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. Description for A Widow for One Year Paperback. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. A Widow for One Year ranks with A Prayer for Owen Meany as my favorite Irving novel. When we first meet her-on Long Island, in the summer of 1958-Ruth is only four. (Stephen King and Salmon Rushdie being the others). Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character-a “difficult” woman. This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, a story of a family marked by tragedy. “One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking-it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.”
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