Novel: The Cider House Rules

Overview
John Irving's novel traces the life of Homer Wells, an orphan raised at St. Cloud's, a Maine orphanage run by the physician Wilbur Larch. The story spans decades, following Homer from childhood into adulthood as he wrestles with questions of identity, responsibility, and conscience. The title reference, the cider house rules, stands as a recurring symbol of arbitrary authority and the gap between written orders and lived reality.
The narrative weaves a humane, frequently comic portrait of institutions and individuals shaped by love, loss, and practical necessity. Medicine and reproductive choice form a moral backbone: Dr. Larch's quiet, transgressive work at the orphanage, delivering babies and providing illegal abortions, forces Homer to confront competing claims of law, religion, and compassion.

Plot summary
Homer grows up inside the routines and peculiar family of St. Cloud's, learning anatomy and care from Dr. Larch while being told he can choose to stay or be adopted. As he matures, Homer must decide whether to accept the narrow security of the orphanage or to seek a place among ordinary people beyond its walls. He leaves and spends time working on an apple orchard where he experiences the messy intimacy of adult relationships and the responsibilities of community life.
Confrontations with pregnancies, unwanted children, and the needs of people he cares about bring Homer back to the moral questions that defined his upbringing. His choices are rarely dramatized as simple triumphs or failures; instead, the novel shows the slow, often ambiguous work of making ethical decisions under imperfect conditions. By the end, Homer's journey leads him to take a stand rooted in practical compassion and the hard-won knowledge imparted by Larch.

Main characters
Wilbur Larch is a complex mentor: a devoted, eccentric physician whose compassion for abandoned infants is matched by a stern, controlling manner. His medical practice at St. Cloud's operates within and against the law, and his influence on Homer is the novel's emotional fulcrum. Homer Wells is both contemplative and stubborn, bearing the orphanage's lessons while trying to form his own moral vocabulary. Other characters populate the orchard and nearby towns, providing intimacies and conflicts that force Homer to translate theory into action.
People in the novel are portrayed with a mix of satire and deep sympathy; flaws, foibles, and acts of courage emerge in close relief. Relationships are central, chosen families, adoptive bonds, and fragile erotic ties all shape Homer's sense of belonging and of duty.

Themes
The novel examines abortion, medicine, and moral choice without resorting to polemic. Rather than presenting tidy answers, it dramatizes how practical compassion often clashes with law, dogma, and personal desire. Questions of who gets to make decisions about bodies and lives recur: caregivers, fathers, institutions, and the individuals directly affected all stake claims.
Belonging and home run through the story as Homer seeks a place where his skills and ethics matter. Authority and the gap between written rules and lived practice are symbolized by the cider house rules themselves, posted, obscure, and often irrelevant to those who must work under them. Irving probes how people create moral codes in response to concrete human needs.

Style and tone
The prose mixes shaggy humor with earnest moral inquiry. Irving's storytelling is expansive, populated by memorable episodes and a cast of vivid characters, and it often balances sentimentality with ironic distance. Scenes of medical detail sit alongside domestic drama and pastoral description, producing a novel that is both grounded and richly allegorical.
The Cider House Rules reads as a moral coming-of-age and a meditation on care: it asks how to do the right thing when there are no perfect options and how institutions and individuals negotiate responsibility in a world of ambiguous obligations.