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'''The Hotel New Hampshire''' is a 1981 coming of age novel by John Irving.

Contents

Plot summary

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Plot summary

This novel is the story of the Berrys, a quirky New Hampshire family comprised of a married couple, Win and Mary, and their five children. The parents, both from the small town of Dairy, fall in love while working at a summer resort hotel in Maine as teenagers. There they meet a Viennese Jew named Freud who works at the resort as a handyman and entertainer, performing with his pet bear; Freud comes to symbolize the magic of that summer for them. By its end the teens are engaged, and Win buys Freud's bear and motorcycle and travels the country performing to raise money to go to Harvard, which he subsequently attends while Mary starts their family. He then returns to Dairy and teaches at the local second-rate boys' prep school. But he is unsatisfied with his life there and is always dreaming of something better.
The children are Franny, who is attractive, self-confident, and brash, and who loves to swear; John, the narrator, who is nice, somewhat non-descript, and close to Fanny but always "one step behind" her; Frank, who is physically awkward, a loner, and homosexual; Lily, a quiet dwarf; and Egg, a rather immature little boy with a penchant for dressing up in costumes. John and Franny are companions, seeing themselves as the most normal ones of the children, aware that their family is rather strange. But, as John remarks, to themselves the family's oddness seems "right as rain".
Win conceives the idea of turning an abandoned girls school into a hotel. He names it the Hotel New Hampshire and the family moves in. This becomes the scene of the children's growing up and the first part of Irving's Dickensian-style tale. The chief plot elements are: Franny's rape at the hands of several members of the school football team, including the quarterback, a boy named Chipper Dove with whom she is in love, and her rescue, though somewhat late, by Junior Jones, a black member of the team; the death of the family dog Sorrow and its repeated resurrection by Frank via taxidermy, the first instance of which scares the grandfather literally to death (the dog's name provides a metaphor that reappears throughout the book); John's taking up bodybuilding as a reaction to his helplessness in the face of Franny's rape and his sexual initiation and relationship with the hotel housekeeper; and the letter from Freud inviting the family to move to Vienna to help him (and his new, "smart" bear) run his hotel there, and the family's preparations for moving.
Travelling separately from the rest of the family, the mother and Egg are killed in an airplane crash. The others take up life in Vienna at what is renamed the (second) Hotel New Hampshire, one floor of the which is occupied by prostitutes and another by a group of radical communists. The family discover that Freud is now blind, and the "smart bear" is actually a girl in a bear suit named Susie. Chief plot elements in this part of the novel are: the father's decline following the death of his wife; the family's relationships with the prostitutes and the radicals; John and Franny falling in love with each other; John's relationship with a communist who commits suicide; Franny's sexual relationships with Susie and with the "quarterback" of the radicals; Lily developing as a writer and penning the story of the family; and the radicals' plot to blow up the opera house, using Freud and the family as hostages, which Freud and Win Berry foil, Freud sacrificing his life detonating the bomb and Win killing the leader of the radicals and losing his eyesight in the bomb explosion (by which act he however regains his position as leader of the family and becomes a hero to his children again). The family becomes famous and, with Frank (who as an adult is developing into quite a mensch) acting as Lily's agent, her book is published for a large amount of money; the family (with Susie the bear) return to the States, taking up residence in a large hotel in New York.
The chief elements of the final part of the novel are: Franny and John's resolution of their love; John's meeting Chipper Dove and Franny's revenge on her rapist; Franny's success as a movie actress and her marriage to Junior Jones; Lily's suicide from her despair over her lack of ability as a writer; John and Frank's purchase of the shut-down resort in Maine where their parents met and their pretended resurrection of it as the third Hotel New Hampshire to fool their father--it's real function being a rape crisis center run by Susie; her and John finding happiness in a relationship with each other and a pregnant Franny asking them to raise her and Junior's impending baby, which they gladly accept.
The novel is very evocative of the New Hampshire of Irving's childhood days, giving the reader a feeling of all the sights, sounds, smells and tastes that the author experienced in his life there. Irving communicates his feelings of love for the place with his humor and the phenomenal detail of his imagination. The story is vibrant with the adventures of childhood, some of which are the kind we might later recall with perhaps some embarrassment, but the author pulls no punches in imbuing his story with such events; risking the chance that the reader might speculate some of them as being based on real events from Irving's life, the novel is all the richer for it.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

The novel was made into a film in 1984, directed by Tony Richardson and starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges.