When the girl's section of the school fails, Win buys it and transforms the building into the Hotel New Hampshire: he's nostalgic for summers of his youth when he bellhopped at a Maine resort that featured a refugee animal-trainer named Freud and his performing bear, State O'Maine. The Berry family, up in Dairy, N.H.-where dad Win teaches at a second-rate prep school in the Fifties-also includes Mom, eldest son Frank (who's gay), earthy Franny, narrator John, dwarf sister Lilly (who'll one day write a best-selling novel), little Egg, and Sorrow the dog. How many times can he then catch them? Only four times, it seems-because this time, in the weakest of all his books, the juggled pieces come clattering down around Irving's feet: he has again trotted out his genial cartoon. How many times can Irving, novelist-as-juggler, throw the same subjects, metaphors, and tricks-bears, motorcycles, prep schools, hotels, Vienna, muscle-building, feminism-up into the air? Five times so far, including the renowned, genuinely endearing Garp.
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