Writers: John Irving

I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

 John Hulse gave me a John Irving novel around 40 years ago. The Water Method Man? I saw The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. Nothing more did I read of him until I was arrested and found a copy of The World According to Garp. 

I think anyone wanting to be a writer should read The World According to Garp. It is one of those books I should have read when younger. 

Then in prison, I read everything I could get my hands on of Irving's novels. I like the guy. 

Yes, there are recurring themes, motifs, and tropes: wrestling, New England, Toronto, sex, trauma of some sort (usually the death of a loved one), the need to love, and we all need to tolerate and be tolerated. If these tics are a problem for you, then you should stay away from Thackeray, Dickens (especially Dickens), and Trollope. 

An Irving character is eccentric. If that bothers you, see the comment above about Dickens. But where I find the charm of Dickens' caricatures variable, Irving's eccentrics are people. 

YouTube has the following video where Irving talks about his work and being a writer. Like his books, he is both straightforward and serious and thoughtful. 

Another reason why some may not take Irving seriously is that he has been popular. If popularity means one cannot also be literary, I refer you again to Charles Dickens.

While looking for a link to Garp, I found Garp, Forty Years Later by Ilana Masad (The Paris Review).

Roberta and her friendship with Garp—he considers her his best friend—exemplify something about the novel as a whole. Even cis, straight white men are capable of being tolerant, of being empathic in their relationships as well as their art. Even they can learn. And maybe that’s what the book is about more than anything else, more than gender and its messy expectations, more than violence and fear and death—perhaps it is about the need for tolerance. Irving seems to think so: “It’s not good news that Garp is still relevant. We should be ashamed that sexual intolerance is still tolerated, but it is,” he writes in his introduction.

We should be ashamed, yes. But there is something like hope here for me, too—because rather than being relegated to an oddball corner, Garp is still being read, which means that Roberta Muldoon still lives, and Garp’s cis son and the trans woman he married still live, and all that love and affection in the book’s pages still live. Which means we can still learn from these characters, letting them reach through time and space to give us what we need from them now.

 Unknown to me, Irving recently published a new novel. How I found out was this video:

This will also explain how Irving is both a traditional novelist out of the 19th Century and a modern.

sch 6/9

I ran across the following video today, listened to it while working on another blog post, and realized it gave very good advice on writing, and it explained his novels.

Do I do enough bad things to my characters?

sch 6/14