A Widow for One Year is a 1998 bestselling work of fiction by John Irving

John Irving

John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978...

, the ninth of his novels to be published.

The first section of the novel was made into the movie The Door in the Floor

The Door in the Floor

The Door in the Floor is a 2004 American drama film written and directed by Tod Williams. The screenplay is based on the first third of the 1998 novel A Widow for One Year by John Irving.-Plot:...

in 2004.

First section

In the opening section of the book, the year is 1958 and Ruth Cole is four years old. Although she is a loved child, her parents do not have a happy marriage. Her two older brothers died four years earlier in a car accident, and she is constantly reminded of their presence from the pictures of their childhood hanging on the walls of the Cole family home. Ruth's father, Ted Cole, writes successful children's books, and hires Eddie O'Hare, a teenager who attends Phillips Exeter Academy

Phillips Exeter Academy

Phillips Exeter Academy is a private secondary school located in Exeter, New Hampshire, in the United States.Exeter is noted for its application of Harkness education, a system based on a conference format of teacher and student interaction, similar to the Socratic method of learning through asking...

, the same school as Ruth's two late brothers, to work as his assistant for the summer. Eddie is unwittingly drawn into a plot orchestrated by Ted to drive his unhappy wife, Marion, to infidelity. Marion, unable to forget her dead sons, shows little affection to her daughter. Ted has always conducted extramarital affairs and would likely lose in a custody battle for Ruth in divorce court. If Marion had an affair, he feels that this would strengthen the case for custody to be awarded to him. Ted picks Eddie specifically to tempt Marion, since he bears a striking resemblance to his two dead sons. Eddie and Marion's affair leads to Marion's disappearance at the end of the summer.

Second section

It is 1990 and Ruth is thirty-six. She is in Europe, dealing with the failures of her love life as she herself has become a successful writer. Ruth is doing research on prostitutes in Amsterdam's red light district, and finds herself hiding in a closet while she observes the murder of a prostitute by the prostitute's client. She makes note of certain details of the murder which, in the future, lead to the murderer's arrest. The detective who solves the murder case is left with the identity of the mysterious "witness" unknown.

Third section

Ruth is now forty-one, has a son, and is about to fall in love for the first time. This section covers Ruth's brief widowhood ("A Widow for One Year" is a literal description of Ruth's situation as well as a quote from one of her novels). The detective who solved the murder case that Ruth witnessed four years before realizes that Ruth is the witness, because Ruth included details of the victim's room in her novel, and the detective is a fan of Ruth's work. Ruth discovers that the murder was solved and the murderer caught. Ruth meets with the detective, and they fall in love. After a whirlwind romance in Paris (the next stop on Ruth's book tour) he agrees to follow Ruth to Vermont, where they marry. Eddie O'Hare and Ruth, unexpectedly, re-unite with Marion. They end up living happily in Vermont.

Cultural references

• In a theme common to many Irving novels, Eddie is the son of a teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy
  Phillips Exeter Academy
  Phillips Exeter Academy is a private secondary school located in Exeter, New Hampshire, in the United States.Exeter is noted for its application of Harkness education, a system based on a conference format of teacher and student interaction, similar to the Socratic method of learning through asking...
  
  . He grows up on the campus, and subsequently attends secondary school there.
• Ruth is a fan of Graham Greene
  Graham Greene
  Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
  
   (she even names her son "Graham" after him), and in the novel reads The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry
  Norman Sherry
  Norman Sherry is an English born American novelist, biographer, and educator who is most well known for his three-volume biography of the British novelist Graham Greene. He has an older brother Thomas Taylor Sherry and a twin brother called Alan Sherry...
  
  .
• When Ruth marries for the first time, Eddie reads the passage about marriage from George Eliot's
  George Eliot
  Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
  
   novel Adam Bede
  Adam Bede
  Adam Bede, the first novel written by George Eliot , was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time...
  
  .
• At Allan's memorial service Eddie reads the poem "When you are old" from William Butler Yeats
  William Butler Yeats
  William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
  
  .
• When Harry marries Ruth, he reads Yeats' poem "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven".
• One of the children's books that Ted Cole writes, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound
  A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound
  A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound is a children's picture book by John Irving, and is also a story from the 1998 novel A Widow for One Year, also by Irving....
  
  , has become a real children's novel with illustrations by Tatjana Hauptmann.

External links

• John Irving and the architecture of character: Interview about Widow for One Year