Success has neither spoiled nor improved Irving, though some have tried to make a case for the former. In truth, Hotel New Hampshire is the fifth in a reasonably straight line of Irving novels….

Death, mutilation, and rape are frequent occurences [in this book], though they are not quite as gruesome as in Garp; Irving seems to enjoy such grotesqueries, sometimes leading the reader to wonder whether his sense of the comic is rather off-key. Yet precisely this harmonizing of bizarre accidents with an authorial assurance that everything will come out all right is Irving's most distinctive music….

All of Irving's previous novels are full of storytellers and their variant versions of believable fiction. Hotel New Hampshire rejects this plethora of tellers in favor of a straightforward narrative, choosing instead to catalogue its variations directly in the linear flow of sequential events….

[The technique of double and tripling...