“My novels aren’t ideas…I begin with the characters, which leads me to the problems that the characters are prone to have, which yields a story – every time.” The speaker here is Ruth Cole, one of the protagonists of John Irving’s A Widow for One Year. But it is Irving himself – or Irving, too – who puts this proposition to the test in his rich, great new novel. He has posed the most provocative question any storyteller can ask when he or she launches his people on a fictional journey: what if?

What if a children’s novelist (Ted Cole) marries a beautiful woman (Marion Cole)? What if the Coles have two handsome sons (Timothy and Thomas)? What if the boys die in a car crash? What if Ted is a philanderer who has begun to turn away from his grieving wife? Add another child, Ruth. What if, to compensate for his many affairs, Ted hires a 16-year-old writer’s assistant, Eddie O’Hare, to help Marion out of her grief by seducing her? What if Eddie resembles one of the dead sons? What if, after falling in love with Eddie, Marion leaves her husband, daughter and Eddie, and vanishes for 37 years? What, then, if Ruth grows up to become a better writer than her father, and Eddie grows up to become a worse one – one who writes only of younger men forever searching for loving older women?

Irving puts these and a thousand other propositions to the test, proving Ruth’s later assertion that “A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning.” What these propositions render is a profoundly engaging and lively narrative. Irving manages to make us care deeply about the lives of his characters. One of the most likable of these, Harry, a Dutch detective who turns up later in Ruth’s life, loves only those books with “complexly interwoven stories about real people.”

And this is one of the great achievements of A Widow For One Year. We are treated not only to the convolutions of the lives we have come to care about, but also to a host of wise asides about writing itself – because almost everyone in this novel becomes a writer. So Eddie’s relationship with Marion is like the relationship of the novelist with his or her own memory. Eddie tries forever to reconstruct the “departed beauty” in his aging women just as Irving unearths that same departed beauty in our own lives.