down bad crying at the end of The Cider House Rules

John Irving January comes to an end!

I still haven’t seen the movie but I needed an image for this wall of text!

When I reached the final twenty pages of The Cider House Rules, I found myself holding my head in my hands, covering my mouth in shock, blinking back tears. Homer, Dr. Larch, Wally, Melony. John Irving didn’t spare anyone (did you want an uncomplicated happy ending? Well, sorry!) and he also killed a lot of characters unceremoniously. He’s the master of the “oh, remember them? Yeah, they died” aside, which you can only get away with if your book has roughly 1,000 characters. I did not expect anything that happened in this last section of the book, and I finished it feeling…I don’t even know! Call me Kacey Musgraves because I am happy and sad at the same time. I bet she wrote that song after finishing The Cider House Rules. I’m just so…astounded, I guess, that this book managed to be so much about morals, so much about doing the right thing, while also being so entertaining and never preachy. Okay, let’s get into it!

You may remember that Wally’s plane was shot down over Burma. His mom and Candy are like, “he could be alive!” and every man is like, “okay, but…he’s not.” Homer is conflicted because Candy may be his now, but “if Homer wanted Candy, he wanted her ideally. In order for Candy to choose Homer, Wally had to be alive; and because Homer loved Wally, he also wanted Wally’s blessing. Wouldn’t any other way be compromising to them all?”

Dr. Larch, meanwhile, tells him, “Are you going to hold out for all or nothing? And do you call that being of use?” Again, Dr. Larch is a stoic! If he lived in 2025 he would have a shelf full of Ryan Holiday books in his office (but he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on any of them because he’d be on yet another ether trip).

Dr. Larch’s main concern is that he’s growing older and he doesn’t know who will take over St. Cloud’s. His latest project is writing to the president and asking Roosevelt to make abortion legal. You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take, I guess. Dr. Larch’s argument is shockingly similar to an argument many of us make these days toward certain politicians and public interests groups who care a whole lot about a baby until the moment it exits its mother’s body:

These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the unborn—they are the same people who seem not so interested in defending anyone but themselves after the accident of birth is complete! These same people who profess their love of the unborn’s soul—they don’t care to make much of a contribution to the poor, they don’t care to offer much assistance to the unwanted or the oppressed! How do they justify such a concern for the fetus and such a lack of concern for unwanted and abused children? They condemn others for the accident of conception; they condemn the poor—as if the poor can help being poor. One way the poor could help themselves would be to control the size of their families. I thought that freedom of choice was obviously democratic—was obviously American!

If a man who is out of his mind on ether can understand this, I don’t see why the rest of the country can’t understand it.

Meanwhile, Homer and Candy may miss Wally, but do you think that’s going to stop them from hooking up? No. Here’s where I have to pause and give John Irving credit for writing a pretty good literary sex scene. I’ve written before, mostly during Franzen Fall, about how sex in romance and sex in literary fiction have very different aims. Sex in romance is supposed to be good and, well, sexy. Sex in literary fiction is often supposed to be unpleasant, off-putting, plot-forward, etc, and as a result it can be kind of strange. See: every Franzen sex scene ever. But John Irving managed to write a sex scene that was two pages long and intercut with the perspectives of almost every character in the novel, including some who were not even in the same city, including random animals in the barn. Okay, sure, so it does involve multiple people and also animals wondering if Homer’s sex noises are made by an owl. That part is funny. But it was also weirdly moving…I don’t know how he does it!

Speaking of sex, this book would be great to pass out to middle schoolers as part of their sex education. Dr. Larch writes out a page-long list of ways condoms can be misused. See, you can learn things from fiction!

And speaking of condoms…you’d think Homer would know his way around preventing a pregnancy, but Candy still gets pregnant. Which is a problem, because she’s still kind of committed to Wally, who’s very much still missing (many of the soldiers on the plane who bailed out have been found, but no one knows where he is). But Homer wants this baby—which makes sense, in a really sad way. He longs for the family he never had. “Whatever is brought to me, whatever is coming, Homer thought, I will not move out of its way.” Look who’s more like Dr. Larch than he wants to admit.

Homer and Candy name their son Angel, after Nurse Angela. I absolutely love these nurses. They’re helping Dr. Larch do the Lord’s work, they’re caring for so many children, and they’re having fun—they blow up condoms as a Thanksgiving decoration, in lieu of balloons. Talk about making the best of things.

And then—I gasped! WALLY IS ACTUALLY ALIVE! He’s severely malnourished and partially paralyzed, but he’s alive. If the body horror of the first section was pregnancy related and the body horror of the second section was Melony related, the body horror of this third section is mostly about the very bad catheter the locals give Wally. It’s so bad that he gets an infection that sterilizes him.

But the point is, he’s coming back and that presents a problem for Homer and Candy. She can’t exactly leave her injured soldier boyfriend, especially not when his mom dies before he even gets home. That’s another one John Irving just tosses in there— “oh yeah, Olive gets cancer and dies, but not before making Candy and Homer feel guilty as hell.”

So their plan is to tell everyone that Angel is Homer’s adopted son, and they’ll all live together in the same house on the orchard. Does that seem like an implausible plan? It’s not, because it works for fifteen full years, I guess because everyone on the orchard is like, “this isn’t my business.” The kid looks exactly like Homer and Candy but everyone’s like, “sure, yes, this is an adopted child.”

Speaking of fifteen years…John Irving takes us on a fifteen year time jump! This is, honestly, one of my most hated literary devices. I have a hard time with a few things: point of view shifts (I love to settle in with one point of view), dual timelines (you’re telling me I just got comfortable and now I’ve gotta go back in time??), and time jumps. The first two I can get over easily when they’re done well, but the time jump is something that makes me viscerally angry. I will close a book. I will turn off a television show. I hate that feeling of disorientation, trying to picture a character looking much older while not yet knowing anything that happened to them in the intervening years. That being said, I got over it…but I wasn’t happy about it!

A lot can happen in fifteen years, particularly if you’re Melony. She has a long relationship with her friend-turned-lover Lorna, who then cheats on her with a man and gets pregnant, sending Melony back on the hunt for Homer. That’s the thing about Homer…the women love him so much that even obstacles like time and apparent lesbianism (Melony talks pretty frequently about how much she hates men, who, aside from Dr. Larch, all think with their “dongs”) don’t calm the desire to hunt him down.

When she finds him, she doesn’t murder him or fall back in love with him—in fact, she kind of hates him. For starters, unlike everyone else at the orchard she isn’t content to ignore the fact that Angel is clearly his child with Candy. One thing about Melony: she tells the truth. “I got eyes. I can see what it’s like—it’s like shit. It’s ordinary, middle-class shit—bein’ unfaithful and lyin’ to the kids. You of all people!”

All Homer Wells ever wanted was to be of use…but what is he doing now? Melony’s outburst plants the first seed in his mind that maybe life hasn’t turned out how it could, or should, have. Dr. Larch is now begging Homer to come back to St. Cloud’s and take over—later we see the most horrific scene of the whole book, a young woman who dies because of a botched abortion before she made her way to St. Cloud’s. Dr. Larch knows that he’s the only person helping these women, the only thing standing between them and certain, painful death. “HOW CAN YOU FEEL FREE TO CHOOSE NOT TO HELP PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT FREE TO GET OTHER HELP?” he writes to Homer (John Irving loves capitalization).

“Here’s the trap you are in,” he continues. “And it’s not my trap—I haven’t trapped you…If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice, and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you’re trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.”

But that’s not what ultimately seals Homer’s fate, what ultimately brings him back to his first home and to the duty he was called to perform. When the migrant workers come back for apple season, the guy in charge, Mr. Rose, brings his daughter and her baby. Homer has always liked and been scared of Mr. Rose in equal measure. The men trust him and he gets the job done, but he’s also not afraid to use a knife. Angel, now a teenager, quickly falls in love with Mr. Rose’s daughter, who is named…Rose. Rose Rose. Just another great John Irving name, in the tradition of Big Dot Taft. There are some 1950s barriers to their relationship (namely that she’s Black and he’s white), but the biggest and most horrifying problem is that we find out, as Candy discovers it, that Mr. Rose is raping his daughter and has impregnated her. As a plot point, I really wrestled with this one—when I first got the inkling that it was happening, I just kept thinking, “Okay, but that cannot be what’s going on.” And I’m still not totally sure how I feel about it as an aspect of Mr. Rose’s character—I don’t know if I fully buy that he was capable of something this horrible, although perhaps we saw clues earlier and I didn’t want to believe it—but as part of Homer’s character arc, it works very well.

Because do you remember what brought Dr. Larch to the field of abortion? It was seeing that young girl in the back-alley abortion waiting room, pregnant from her own father. That was what made him realize that his skill was needed to save lives, and Homer, who for so long has maintained that he can’t personally perform abortions because he believes that a fetus has a soul, realizes that he cannot ethically allow this girl to carry her father’s child. She’s being physically and sexually abused, and it would be immoral for him to allow it to keep happening. Her life, as Dr. Larch would agree, is valuable too.

But he can’t even talk to Dr. Larch about it because Dr. Larch ethers himself to death! The only thing that helped me accept this was that he was, like, 100 years old. But he and Homer never got to have another conversation. They were never as open with each other as they could have been. It breaks my heart.

Homer finally takes his place where he belongs—at St. Cloud’s. It’s such a long story that involves Dr. Larch’s whole Fuzzy Stone invention. Honestly, the man was a genius. I guess the ether was really working for him. Candy and Wally are still together. Homer ends up with a socialist nurse. Rose Rose hitchhikes away from Maine (good for her, we say). Mr. Rose dies because Rose Rose used some impressive knifework on him (good for her again, we say). Melony dies from an electrical accident (but she’s back together with Lorna) and donates her body to St. Cloud’s.

And what’s the last line, the one John Irving was working toward the whole time?

To Nurse Edna, who was in love, and to Nurse Angela, who wasn’t (but who had in her wisdom named both Homer Wells and Fuzzy Stone), there was no fault to be found in the hearts of either Dr. Stone or Dr. Larch, who were—if there ever were—Princes of Maine, Kings of New England.

I can’t handle it. It’s too much. I miss them all already!

This was the best way to start out my year of 2025 reading, and I kind of can’t imagine finding another book I like even half as much. I struggle to think of a contemporary author writing like John Irving, even though I’m sure there are some. What he’s doing is unique because it’s very, very commercial—these are likable characters with a lot of action. But it’s also literary, or at least perceived that way. It’s deeply moral. The book, ultimately, is concerned with the idea of being of use, the idea of doing the right thing even if others—the government, your neighbors, religion—think it’s wrong. It’s political, inasmuch as it discusses abortion. It’s funny, and silly, and violent, and heartbreaking. It constantly references Jane Eyre and David Copperfield. It’s 600 dang pages long. I think that if you liked Lonesome Dove, you’d really like this—it’s another long book with a million characters. But also, I sort of don’t know why anyone wouldn’t like this book. It’s just so human.

I loved it, obviously. Enough to write way, way too much about it, even though I’m not sure anyone cared. That hasn’t stopped me before and it will not stop me in the future. I realize that I’m not, like, doing Substack right. A quick glance through Notes shows me that everyone else is writing about trends in books and film. Everything is a response to a response. I’m just…not interested in that? (Except when I am, lol.) I realize this sounds a little like, “I’m not like other Substacks” *hair flip* but…I don’t want to read about the same thing over and over. I don’t want to be constantly getting annoyed by someone’s bad faith piece on a trend, or reacting to someone’s bad opinion. I don’t want to feel like I have to keep up on industry news just to read and write and watch. So I guess this is just a reminder that you don’t have to either! I’ll like your Substack better if it doesn’t appeal to a broad audience, if it’s just an earnest exploration of your niche interests. Although if we do happen into a moment where John Irving is trendy, I certainly wouldn’t hate it. He deserves it.

I would love to know your thoughts on The Cider House Rules, whether you’re reading this post in February 2025 or in the future. I’m always ready to hear John Irving thoughts! Next week, I’ll be back with the monthly roundup. See you soon. xo