The Hotel New Hampshire

John Irving’s contemporary novel The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) centers on a quirky family from New Hampshire and the hotel that brought them all together one fateful summer. Critics praise the book for how it balances emotional resonance against its witty, comedic themes. In 1982, the book received a National Book Award nomination. An award-winning author and screenwriter best known for his book, The Cider House Rules, Irving’s books are available in more than thirty-five languages. Before he turned to writing, Irving competed as a wrestler for twenty-seven years.

The central characters in the book belong to the Berry family, comprising Win and Mary, who are husband and wife, and their five children, Frank, Franny, John, Lilly, and Egg. John, the middle child, narrates the story. He knows that his parents and his siblings are eccentric, but he loves them for it. He wants to make his family proud. Closest to his sister, Franny, he tells her all his secrets.

Win and Mary enjoy telling the children the story of how they met. They both grew up in Derry, New Hampshire. One summer, they worked at the same resort hotel in Maine. They fell in love and were engaged before summer ended. Their favorite colleague was a man called Freud who worked as the resort handyman. Freud owned a bear called State o’ Maine, which he eventually sold to Win.



Win bought the bear because he planned to tour the country, staging performances to raise money to study at Harvard. His bear act was a success, and he graduated from Harvard a few years later. Although he now has a good job teaching young boys at a Derry prep school, he feels incomplete and unfulfilled.

One day, Win decides to buy an abandoned girls’ school and convert it into a hotel. He calls it the Hotel New Hampshire. They employ a middle-aged woman, Ronda Ray, to work as the housekeeper. She flirts with John, taking advantage of his naivety. They start sleeping together, but John keeps it a secret, even from Franny.

Franny, meanwhile, has her own problems. She loves Chipper, a quarterback, but he only wants her for sex. He rapes her and denies everything. Traumatized, Franny refuses to talk about it. John doesn’t know how to make her feel better; things only get worse when Sorrow, the family dog, dies.



Everything appears to be going downhill for the Berrys until, one day, Freud invites them all to Vienna to run his hotel. Mary and Egg fly over first to check the place out, but they die in a plane crash. Win insists on traveling to Vienna anyway, because he can’t bear life in New Hampshire without Mary. However, when he arrives in Vienna, he realizes that Freud isn’t the man he once was.

Freud keeps a woman called Susie dressed up as a pet bear. He calls her his “smart bear.” Now that Freud is blind, it is unclear if he knows that Susie is a human playing dress-up or if he is senile in his old age. Win regrets his decision to move the family to Vienna when he sees the hotel. Prostitutes occupy one floor, and violent communists live on the other. Win knows this is no place for children, but he doesn’t know where else to go.

In the meantime, the children make their own relationships at the hotel. Franny hooks up with Susie and a communist. John also sleeps with a communist, but she commits suicide shortly after. The event draws John and Franny closer together, and they realize they love each other. They don’t tell Win because they know their feelings are inappropriate.



One evening, John finds out more about why the communist committed suicide. The radical communist group plans to blow up the Vienna opera house. They also intend to use Win and the family as hostages inside the building. She couldn’t take it anymore and, feeling powerless to change her life, she killed herself. By the time John discovers this information, it’s too late, and the communists lure the family out to the opera house as bait.

Just in time, Freud and Win catch on to the scheme. They block the communists from blowing up the opera house, but they don’t emerge unscathed. A communist blinds Win, and Freud dies from his own injuries. The family decides to return to America to make a new home in New York City. Susie goes with them because she has nowhere else to go.

In New York, Franny marries Junior, whom she knew in high school. Junior had helped Franny when Clipper raped her; he now works as a civil rights lawyer. John wants Franny to be happy, although he is devastated that they can’t marry each other. He and his eldest brother, Frank, purchase the hotel where their parents first met and turn it into a refuge for abused women.