short people, wrestling, bears, sexual deviance, defenestration and things getting bitten off... (John Irving in general)

Member Name: pje

Product:	John Irving in general
Date:	22/01/02 (114 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hilarious and moving.

Disadvantages: Bears, wrestling and, oh, Vienna (which means nothing to me.)

I first came across the name John Irving when I was reading Brian May's autobiography. For the benefit of those who've been listening to Debussy for the last three decades, Brian May is/was the lead guitarist in the band Queen. On their 1984 album "The Works", Queen included a song called "Keep Passing The Open Windows" - a very powerful song about suicide.

[Which I probably shouldn't mention in case this opinion gets black-balled by the nanny-gods up on Mount OpCom. Words are dangerous y'see, and some people are so afeared of 'em that some things can't be discussed here on dooyoo. If you're one of those people kindly beggur off and read my Eminem opinion y'bleddy silly ostrich.]

It turns out that the song took its title from a line in a John Irving novel...


THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE (1981)
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A bizarre farce following the adventures of the Berry family. Winslow and Mary Berry run The Hotel New Hampshire, first in an old school building in New Hampshire, and later in Vienna. They have five extraordinary children: The oldest, Frank, is nicknamed the King of Mice and can make dogs fart on command. He's queer, by the way. Egg is the youngest, but she's not as small as Lily - who becomes a writer, as does John (our narrator - or is it our author perhaps? John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire). And that just leaves Franny - now she really is weird...

There's a plane crash, terrorists, incest, a stuffed dog, a dancing bear, oh, and someone jumps out of a window. One reviewer in the New York Times likened it to a Marx Brothers movie. What more do you want from a novel?
¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 0552992097 ¶ pp 520 ¶


So that was my introduction to the novel world of John Irving. It took me several months to hunt it down though. Libraries never buy enough copies of Irving's books, so they're always out on lo
an. And then, when they've been well-thumbed, what happens to them? They get flogged off cheap, that's what happens. And I buy 'em! Which is how I came to own and read copies of the the next two. And, boy-oh-boy, what bargains they were...


THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (1978)
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John Irving creates marvellously memorable and often eccentric characters and then traces their lives from the cradle to the grave, as they and their families and friends survive freaky, farcical and tragic events. In this novel we follow the life of 'Garp' from before his conception to beyond his death, but it's his mother, the feminist icon Jenny Fields who steals the book.

The book opens with Jenny being arrested for trying to slice off a soldier's nose after he gropes her in a cinema! She wants a baby, but she doesn't want to share her body, or her life, to get one. In the course of her duties as a nurse during the war (this is 1942) she comes across a badly injured patient capable of giving her just what she requires, but no more. In fact he can utter only a single syllable as she takes advantage of him: "Garp".

A reviewer for The Observer described Garp as: "a social tragi-comedy
of such velocity and hilarity that it reads rather like a domestic sequel
to Catch-22". It is THAT good. It's one of my favourite books of all-time, and it only cost me 20p in a sale.

¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 0552992054 ¶ pp 591 ¶


The third Irving book I read (bought for 30p) was unbearably good...


A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY (1989)
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This is one book you really don't want to end - not just because it's so good, but because you fall in love with the character of Owen Meany, while all the time knowing that his life is going to end in tragedy.
You know that right from the first line:

"I am doome
d to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because
of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

Irving combines tragedy and farce in a way that makes you laugh out loud one moment and then, on the next page, he can break your heart. Irving's fans regard Owen Meany as his finest work - in fact some of them regard it as the best book by anyone ever, full stop. I think that's going a bit far, but it's certainly unforgettable. I felt emotionally wrecked at the end of it.

¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 0552993697 ¶ pp 640 ¶


By now I was well and truly hooked - John Irving had become my favourite living author, and I set out to read anything and everything he'd written...


TRYING TO SAVE PIGGY SNEED (1993)
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I don't remember much about this mixture of memoirs and short stories (including The Pension Grillparzer which which was the story within a story that formed one chapter of Garp). I think the highlight was an enthusiastic essay about his love for the work of Dickens. One for completist fans only.

¶ Paperback: £6.99 ¶ ISBN: 0552995738 ¶ pp 224 ¶


A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR (1998)
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Ruth Cole's parents are both writers. Their marriage has been devastated by the deaths of Ruth's two older brothers in a car accident.

Her father Ted, is a philanderer with a drink problem who becomes famous for a children's story called The Mouse Crawling Between The Walls inspired by a dream four-year-old Ruth has, in which she hears a sound "like someone trying not to make a sound."

Ted agrees to give a young man with an ambition to become a writer (groan!) a summer job as his assistant. The Cole's can't help noticing that
he bears a strong resemblance to one of their dead sons, and Mrs. Cole ends up teaching him much more than her husband...

And that's just a summary of the first few pages. Love and grief intertwine just as they do in real life, in the end. John Irving captures those emotions extremely well. As always, his writing has the power to move you deeply.

¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 055299796X ¶ pp 667 ¶


THE CIDER HOUSE RULES (1985)
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Dr. Wilbur Larch runs an orphanage, but as well as taking in unwanted children, he also secretly gets rid of them - in his capacity as an unpaid 'back-street' abortionist. (Abortion being illegal at the time in which the novel is set. Oh dear, suicide AND abortion, I'm not sure that John Irving would be allowed to write for dooyoo, would he? And this opinion might have to be double padlocked...)

Early in his career as a doctor, Dr. Larch was implacably against abortion, but the death of a girl, following his refusal to give her an abortion, made him decide that it's not always possible to know what is best for another person. And then there is Homer, an orphan-boy whose life we follow from his arrival at the orphanage, through several unsuccessful adoptions, and on into adult life, where he follows in Dr. Larch's footsteps.

Don't read this book unless you're already an Irving fan, go see the film instead. Don't get me wrong it's a superb book, but it does deals with the thorny subject of abortion very graphically at times, and it is very long.
Those of you familiar with my dislike of long books will appreciate that getting me to read something of this length is quite an achievement.
Amazingly, this was the fourth such long book by John Irving that I read. But then, he is such a captivating writer that his books never drag.

¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 0552992046 ¶ pp 731 ¶


I found Irving's
autobiography a bit of a let down though...


THE IMAGINARY GIRLFRIEND (1997)
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It's a short book that concentrates almost entirely on his life-long love
of wrestling - his two wives get little more than a namecheck!

"I want you to understand", he explains, "that the distance between my writing and my wrestling is never great." And, more tellingly: "when you love something, you have the capacity to bore everyone about why."

¶ Paperback: £6.99 ¶ ISBN: 0552996807 ¶ pp 159 ¶


But then last year we were treated to a new Irving novel:


THE FOURTH HAND (2001)
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A transplantastic tale of a television journalist who, while reporting on a tragedy at an Indian circus, gets a little too close to a cage and loses his hand to a hungry lion - on camera. (And before you ask, no, he didn't poke it with 'is 'orse's 'ead 'andle.) He subsequently receives a hand transplant performed by a surgeon who, while roller-skating by a river, likes to flick turds at rowers with a lacrosse stick, while 'walking' his "shit-eating dog". (As you do.)

Fans were disappointed, but for anyone unfamiliar with John Irving's style I reckon this wouldn't be a bad introduction.

¶ Hardback: £16.99 ¶ ISBN: 0747554323 ¶ pp 326 ¶


I've only got four of Irving's novels left to read now. His first three:-


SETTING FREE THE BEARS (1969)
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Irving's debut featured two students riding around Austria on a motorbike, ultimately heading for Vienna Zoo to set free the bears.

(Bears and Vienna are two recurring motifs in Irving's novels, along with short people, wrestling, sexual deviance, and things getting bitten off...)

As a young man, Irving went to Vienna as part of a study abroad program, where he encountered anti-S
emitism - despite not being Jewish! It seems that just the name Irving is enough for some people's prejudice to show.
His hatred of "tolerance of intolerance which allows intolerance to persist" and a loathing of injustice drew him to the works of Charles Dickens, which he devoured despite being dyslexic. It didn't help him academically, though. As he says: "Loving long novels plays havoc with going to school."
¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 0552992062 ¶ pp 383 ¶


THE WATER METHOD MAN (1972)
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Subtitled "a man with a complaint more serious than Portnoy's" because of the defective urinary tract of the main character: Fred 'Bogus' Trumper.

¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 0552992070 ¶ pp 399 ¶


THE 158-POUND MARRIAGE (1974)
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Irving's shortest novel boasts a 'ménage à quatre' involving two couples including a wrestler and a Viennese lady - very familiar themes, I wonder
if there's a bear in there as well?

¶ Paperback: £6.99 ¶ ISBN: 0552992089 ¶ pp 234 ¶


and:


A SON OF THE CIRCUS (1994)
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Dedicated to Salman Rushdie and set in Bollywood, this was a departure for Irving. A complex novel about a circus-loving, dwarf-studying, doctor, who also writes screenplays for films, starring a villain who's being stalked by a transsexual... As I said before, what more do you want from a novel?

¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 055299605X ¶ pp 829 ¶


And they're all sitting there on a shelf calling out to me: "Read me next!" - but I'm rationing myself to one a year. Okay, so I've read three in the last eighteen months, but the autobiography doesn't really count. I think I will read A Son of the Circus this year. Mind you, The 158-Pound Marriage is very short. Umm, then again I am dying to read The Water Method Man. Deci
sions, decisions....

Keep passing the open windows, folks...
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