The Cider House Rules

The Cider House Rules is John Irving's 1985 sixth novel, the structural masterwork that preceded A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) and that established Irving's broader American literary commercial readership. The structural premise is Homer Wells, an orphan raised by Dr. Wilbur Larch at the St. Cloud's orphanage in 1920s-and-1930s rural Maine. Dr. Larch's practice at St. Cloud's runs both the orphanage and a clandestine abortion service (illegal in early-twentieth-century America but operating openly inside Larch's medical-practice infrastructure). Homer leaves St. Cloud's in his late teens with a young couple, Wally Worthington (the heir to the Worthington apple-orchard family fortune) and Wally's fiancee Candy Kendall, to live and work at the Ocean View Orchards in coastal Maine. The novel runs decades of Homer's life back and forth between the orphanage's abortion-and-adoption practice and the cider-house-workers' migrant-labor community at the orchard.

Irving's structural method is the patient maximalist construction across approximately five hundred eighty pages with the Homer-at-St.-Cloud's chapters alternating with the Homer-at-the-orchards chapters. The Dr. Larch chapters across the entire novel carry the structural moral weight of the abortion-and-orphanage practice and operate as the structural mentor-and-father-figure arc that the rest of the novel turns on. The Candy-Wally-Homer triangle in the middle third carries the structural emotional engine of the novel; the cider-house-workers' subplot (the migrant Black-and-Caribbean orchard workers led by the foreman Mr. Rose) carries the structural moral weight of the back third and earns the late-novel structural emotional payoff. The novel reads in the patient first-person-omniscient register Irving has refined across the broader catalog and that distinguishes The Cider House Rules from the broader contemporary American maximalist tradition.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the structural Irving masterwork alongside A Prayer for Owen Meany, and for fans of The World According to Garp and the broader contemporary American maximalist tradition. The 1999 Lasse Hallstrom film adaptation with Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, and Michael Caine won Irving the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. The Grover Gardner audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.