{"product_id":"the-hotel-new-hampshire-isbn-9780345417954","title":"The Hotel New Hampshire","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling saga of a most unusual family from the award-winning author of \u003ci\u003eThe World According to Garp\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.”\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of \u003ci\u003eA Prayer for Owen Meany \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Last Night in Twisted River\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cp\u003e“A hectic, gaudy saga with the verve of a Marx Brothers movie.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A startlingly original family saga that combines macabre humor with Dickensian sentiment.”—\u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Rejoice! John Irving has written another book according to your world. . . . You must read this book.”\u003ci\u003e—Los Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Spellbinding . . . intensely human . . . a high-wire act of dazzling virtuosity.”—\u003ci\u003eCosmopolitan\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eJohn Irving\u003c\/b\u003e has been nominated for a National Book Award three times—winning once, in 1980, for the novel \u003ci\u003eThe World According to Garp\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for \u003ci\u003eThe Cider House Rules\u003c\/i\u003e—a film with seven Academy Award nominations.\u003c\/p\u003eChapter One — The Bear Called State O’Maine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The summer my father bought the bear,  none of us was born — we weren’t even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny,  the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg.  My father  and mother were hometown kids who knew each other all their lives, but their “union,”  as Frank always called it, hadn’t taken place when Father bought the bear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Their  ‘union,’ Frank?” Franny used to tease him; although Frank was the oldest, he seemed  younger than Franny, to me, and Franny always treated him as if he were a baby.   “What you mean, Frank,” Franny said, “is that they hadn’t started screwing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “They  hadn’t consummated their relationship,” said Lilly, one time; although she was younger  than any of us, except Egg, Lilly behaved as if she were everyone’s older sister—a  habit Franny found irritating.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “ ‘ Consummated’?” Franny said.  I don’t remember  how old Franny was at the time, but Egg was not old enough to hear talk like this:  “Mother and Father simply didn’t discover sex until after the old man got that bear,”  Franny said.  “That bear gave them the idea — he was such a gross, horny animal,  humping trees and playing with himself and trying to rape dogs.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “He mauled an occasional  dog,” Frank said, with disgust.  “He didn’t rape dogs.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “He tried to,” Franny said.   “You know the story.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Father’s story,” Lilly would then say, with a disgust slightly  different from Frank’s disgust; it was Franny Frank was disgusted with, but Lilly  was disgusted with Father.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And so it’s up to me — the middle child, and the least  opinionated — to set the record straight, or nearly straight.  We were a family whose  favorite story was the story of my mother and father’s romance: how Father bought  the bear, how Mother and Father fell in love and had, in rapid succession, Frank,  Franny, and me (“Bang, Bang, Bang!” as Franny would say); and, after a brief rest,  how they then had Lilly and Egg (“Pop and Fizzle,” Franny says).  The story we were  told as children, and retold to each other when we were growing up, tends to focus  on those years we couldn’t have known about and can see now only in those years more  clearly than I see them in the years I actually can remember, because those times  I was present, of course, are colored by the fact that they were up-and-down times  — about which I have up-and-down opinions.  Toward the infamous summer of the bear,  and the magic of my mother and father’s courtship, I can allow myself a more consistent  point of view.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When Father would stumble in telling us the story — when he would  contradict an earlier version, or leave out our favorite parts of the tale — we would  shriek at him like violent birds.\u003cbr\u003e “Either you’re lying now or you lied the last time,”  Franny (always the harshest of us) would tell him, but Father would shake his head,  innocently.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Don’t you understand?” he would ask us.  “You imagine the story better  than I remember it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Go get Mother,” Franny would order me, shoving me off the  couch.  Or else Frank would lift Lilly off his lap and whisper to her, “Go get Mother.”  And our mother would be summoned as witness to the story we suspected Father of fabricating.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Or else you’re leaving out the juicy parts on purpose,” Franny would accuse him,  “just because you think Lilly and Egg are too young to hear about all the screwing  around.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “There was no screwing around,” Mother would say.  “There was not the promiscuity  and freedom there is today.  If a girl went off and spent the night or weekend with  someone, even her peers thought her a tramp or worse; we really didn’t pay much attention  to a girl after that.  ‘Her kind sticks together,’ we used to say.  And ‘Water seeks  its own level.’” And Franny, whether she was eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-five,  would always roll her eyes and elbow me, or tickle me, and whenever I tickled her  back she’d holler, “Pervert!  Feeling up his own sister!”  And whether he was nine  or eleven or twenty-one or forty-one, Frank always hated sexual conversations and  demonstrations of Franny’s kind; he would say quickly to Father, “Never mind that.   What about the motorcycle?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “No, go on about the sex,” Lilly would tell Mother,  very humorlessly, and Franny would stick her tongue in my ear or make a farting noise  against my neck.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Well,” Mother said, “we did not talk freely of sex in mixed company.   “There was necking and petting, light or heavy; it was usually carried on in cars.   There were always secluded areas to park.  Lots more dirt roads, of course, fewer  people and fewer cars — and cars weren’t compact, then.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “So you could stretch out,”  Franny said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Mother would frown at Franny and persevere with her version of the  times.  She was a truthful but boring storyteller — no match for my father — and  whenever we called Mother on to verify a version of a story, we regretted it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Better  to let the old man go on and on,” Franny would say.  “Mother’s so serious.”  Frank  would frown.  “Oh, go play with yourself, Frank, you’ll feel better,” Franny would  tell him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But Frank would only frown harder.  Then he’d say, “If you’d begin by  asking Father about the motorcycle, or something concrete, you’d get a better answer  than when you bring up such general things: the clothes, the customs, the sexual  habits.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Frank, tell us what sex is, Franny would say, but Father would rescue  us all by saying in his dreamy voice, “I can tell you: it couldn’t have happened  today. You may think you have more freedom, but you also have more laws.  That bear  could not have happened today.  He would not have been allowed.”  And in that moment  we would be silenced, our bickering suddenly over.  When Father talked, even Frank  and Franny could be sitting together close enough to touch each other and they wouldn’ t fight; I could even be sitting close enough to Franny to feel her hair against  my face or her leg against mine, and if Father was talking I wouldn’t think about  Franny at all.  Lilly would sit deathly still (as only Lilly could) on Frank’s lap.   Egg was usually too young to listen, much less understand, but he was a quiet baby.   Even Franny could hold him on her lap and he’d be still; whenever I held him on  my lap, he fell asleep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “He was a black bear,” Father said; “he weighed four hundred  pounds and was a trifle surly.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Ursus americanus,” Frank would murmur.  “And he  was unpredictable.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Yes,” Father said, “but good-natured enough, most of the time.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “He was too old to be a bear anymore,” Franny said, religiously.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That was the line  Father usually began with — the line he began with the first time I remember being  told the story.  “He was too old to be a bear anymore.”  I was in my mother’s lap  for this version, and I remember how I felt fixed forever to this time and place:  Mother’s lap, Franny in Father’s lap beside me, Frank erect and by himself — sitting  cross-legged on the shabby oriental with our first family dog,  Sorrow (who would  one day be put to sleep for his terrible farting).  “He was too old to be a bear  anymore.” Father began.  I looked at Sorrow, a witless and loving Labrador, and he  grew on the floor to the size of a bear and then aged, sagging beside Frank in smelly  dishevelment, until he was merely a dog again (but Sorrow would never be “merely  a dog”). \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That first time I don’t remember Lilly or Egg — they must have been such  babies that they were not present, in a conscious way.  “He was too old to be a bear  anymore,” Father said.  “He was on his last legs.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “But they were the only legs  he had!” we would chant, our ritual response — learned by heart — Frank, Franny,  and I all together.  And when they got the story down pat, eventually Lilly and even  Egg would join in.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “The bear did not enjoy his role as an entertainer anymore,”  Father said.  “He was just going through the motions.  And the only person or animal  or thing he loved was that motorcycle.  That’s why I had to buy the motorcycle when  I bought the bear.  That’s why it was relatively easy for the bear to leave his trainer  and come with me; the motorcycle meant more to that bear than any trainer.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And  later, Frank would prod Lilly, who was trained to ask, “What was the bear’s name?”\u003cbr\u003e And Frank and Franny and Father and I would shout, in unison, “State o’ Maine!” That  dumb bear was named State o’ Maine, and my father bought him in the summer of 1939  — together with a 1937 Indian motorcycle with a homemade sidecar — for 200 dollars  and the best clothes in his summer footlocker.","brand":"Dutton","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304367182053,"sku":"NP9780345417954","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345417954.jpg?v=1767739833","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-hotel-new-hampshire-isbn-9780345417954","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}