[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 7/5/2025]
John Irving blows me away - again. Even through the controversial themes (gender roles in America), even though he pitches that theme as the right righteous underdog, saga, and for all his borrowings and reshaping of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, I think Irving's In One Person a fine novel. It moved me. Just as Mr. Irving intended me to be moved.
I do not say John Irving is a subtle writer. I would say the same about Donna Tartt and her The Goldfinch. John Irving wrestles with his plots and characters and themes, and I doubt he'd be bothered by my verb. I do not think of him as sublime as Herman Melville. And he actually seems more like Hardy than Dickens (based on my scant reading of all three).
I want to freely admit I like his lectures on literature.
Miss Frost chose well. I would read Tom Jones, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre - in that order - thus becoming, to my mom's surprise a reader. And what those novels taught me was that adventure was not confied to seafearing, with or without pirates. One could find considerable excitement by not escaping to science fiction or futuristic fantasies; it wasn't necessary to read a Western or a romance novel in order to transport oneself. In reading, as in writing, all one needed - that is, in order to have an utterly absorbing journey - was a believable but formidable relationship. What else, after all, did crushes - especially crushes on the wrong people - lead to?
***
Was it prescient of Miss Frost to make me wait for Dickens - to work up to him, as it were? And the first Dickens she allowed me was not I've called the essential one; she made me wait for Greeat Expectation, too. I began as many a Dickens reader has, with Oliver Twist ... One thing Dickes and Hardy have in common is the fatalistic belief that, particularly in the case of the yong and innocent, the character with a good heart and unbudging integrity is at the greatest risk in a menacing world. (Miss Frost had the good sense to make me wait for Hardy, too. Thomas Hardy is not thirteen-year-old material.)
In One Person; Chapter 2: Crushes on the Wrong People (Simon and Shuster Paperbacks, 2013)
I'm thinking Irving gets his oversized characters from Dickens, and his lack of sentimentality from Hardy (again, note my scant reading). But the voice of the narrator draws you in - as it did in Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier - with digressions and confessions, and just the tone of the voice. I admit I was (am) susceptible to the narrator looking back at his life, at the missed opportunities, the dead, and his relationship with his father. I have all those subjects on my mind. Lucidity has been like a baseball bat upside my head. I have on my mind people unseen for decades and questions of why I let them go. I see myself as a jerk, an ass, a violent coward, going back to the dawn of my time on this earth. I need to write about this. I will as soon as I get "Mike Devlin's Homecoming" rewritten and more books out of my locker. I have pushed on this subject and shall continue to do so.
I started on Iain M. Banks' The Player of Games. Another writer I have some to admire and one I will never be able to emulate. The book goes back to 1988. Imagine my surprise, after reading In One Person, this passage from Banks' science fiction novel:
"I feel you want to ... take me," Yay said, "like a piece, like an areea. To be had, to be... possessed." Suddenly she looked away very puzzled. "There's something very... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You've never changed sex, have you?" He shook his head. "Or slept with a man?" Another shake. "I thought so," Yay said, ""You're strange, Gurgeh." She drained her glass.
"Because I don't find men attractive?"
"Yes, you're a man!" She laughed.
Strange running across that.
But I want to get in the closing of In One Person. John Irving ends with an idea I first heard long ago while employed as a busboy at Sambo's from the first bisexual man I ever met.
"You're bisexual, aren't you?" Kittredge's son then asked me. "Do you think that's normal or natural - or sympathetic? You're a switch-hitter," he said....
"My dear boy," I said sharply to young Kittredge, in what has become my lifelong imitation of the way Miss Frost so pointedly and thrillingly spoke to me.
"My dear boy, please don't put a label on me - don't make me a category before you get to know me!" Miss Frost had said to me; I've never forgotten it....
Chapter 14: Teacher
I will tell you this applies to you - and to me. Yes, I have allowed the government and thus the general public to slap a label on me. I will tell you it is the wrong one. You've got to know me to know what I truly am. Not that I will want the government's label in a pitched battle. I figure if I leave the public relying on in the governmental label, I might just get some peace for my remaining years.
sch
[7/5/2025:
One thing missing from prison is information. No Google. I would have liked to see what others thought about the books I noted above. Well, I got that chance now, and you can decide if I am a moron or not. You may also want to follow the links provided in the text.
‘In One Person’ by John Irving (I Would Rather Be Reading)
While Billy’s mind is opened to the wonders of authors such as Charles Dickens, he quickly becomes enamored with the mysterious town librarian. Miss Frost knows nothing of Billy’s sexual anguish as he tries to check out Great Expectations for the second time. She strongly recommends he read a different novel by Mr. Dickens for his second read. Billy knows that only two things matter to him at age 15: to be a writer, and to sleep with Miss Frost, but “not necessarily in that order.” A protagonist who desires to be a writer is nothing new to Irving, so there are always powerful literary conversations running throughout his novels. Great Expectations, Madame Bovary, and Giovanni’s Room are just a small sample of the works of literature discussed throughout In One Person. Unlike other novels that name drop famous writers and seem pretentious, I found that Irving manages to organically connect whatever work Billy is reading at the time to moving the narrative forward. While Mr. Dickens is so important as a fascinating text for children without parents, usually fathers, it is Shakespeare’s The Tempest that really serves as the heart of this novel.
John Irving In One Person Review - Irving on His New Book (Esquire)
Presuming to speak for most of us, I'll just say that we seem to maintain the delicate balance of our lives reasonably certain that almost everyone else in the world is lunatic, and that it is our duty to future generations to stand as a bulwark in the face of all the madness. Appearances can be so tiresome. And every so often, a book — a book! — gives you license to just give up the game, for fk's sake. Good for us that John Irving has always had a lovely and highly entertaining way of demonstrating just how crazy we all are. In his thirteenth novel, In One Person (Simon & Schuster, $28), Irving goes out on a limb and writes about the subject of debilitating sexual differences. Of course, Irving has written a lot about debilitating sexual differences his entire career, or at least ever since the nicely adjusted transsexual Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp. It is important to add that with Irving it is most often not the sexually different who are the debilitated ones but those around them. In fact, Irving's life could be described as a noble campaign to define deviancy out of existence. Billy Abbott, his latest protagonist, possesses a difference that is hardly different at all. He's gay. Or a "bi-guy," as Irving says. A bi-guy who came of age before AIDS and who becomes a full-fledged deviant, or perfectly normal person, during the epidemic. With that, In One Person marks a milestone for Irving, a tipping point, to use that ruined phrase: From now on, the truly deviant will be the ones — the scowling churchmen and reprobates who cast everyone into hell — who cease to live their own lives while telling everybody else how to live theirs. Oh, don't think you'll get away without transsexuals — there are transsexuals — but In One Person is a rich and absorbing book, even beautiful, and probably the most different book of Irving's long career. One might guess that he queued up this book special, just in time to snuff out the last gasp of homosexual panic in the American polity (last, that is, until the next one), to achieve a novel ripped from the culture wars. But when reached on the phone at his house in Vermont, he says no.
In One Person by John Irving - review (The Guardian)
If a novel were simply a plea for understanding of sexual difference, it would be bad art; this book is elevated beyond the merely political by, among other things, the ebullient voice of its narrator. William uses italics and exclamation marks for emphasis, one effect of which is that their absence makes his mordant judgments even more drily funny: "Like my grandmother, Aunt Muriel managed to be both arrogant and judgmental without saying anything that was either verifiable or interesting." He also has a talent for saying the wrong thing: "You can't take back something like 'Definitely not a ballroom'; it's simply not what you should ever say after your first vaginal sex."
John Irving: In One Person (shigekuni.)
His most recent one, In One Person may just be his best novel in many years, one of his very best efforts. As far as I can tell. A writer whose work I am so personally influenced by and indebted to is hard to recommend to others, but I can say this much: if you have read any other Irving book and enjoyed it, you will like this one, as well. In many ways it serves as a summary of a long and great career, touching on issues, tropes and ideas prevalent in many of his best books. That said, there’s a second group of readers to whom I can issue a definite recommendation: if you read any Irving and fundamentally disliked it, this is also not for you. It is not a book that will win over critics of his work. For everyone else, I recommend reading the rest of my review, maybe. In my opinion, In One Person, an interrogation of how the life that we led outlasts us, is a fantastic book, maybe even great.
The main problem with saying Irving is a great writer or calling any of his books great is how workmanlike he is as an artist. His prose is always well crafted, but designed to mainly stay out of the way of his characters and plot. It doesn’t make you stumble, nor does it invite you to stop and admire individual lines or paragraphs. In many ways he follows and echoes American literary traditions, but all the major writers of that tradition had a style that was important and remarkable. Irving’s stylistic unremarkableness is not something we associate with great writers. And yet, a page of mature Irving is instantly recognizable. This is not a case of a writer like Paul Auster who would be better off writing screenplays instead of novels. Irving’s unremarkableness is not an inept blandness, or the merely serviceable writing that you’ll find in a lot of genre literature. Irving intentionally strikes a tone that has just the right wavelength to support and cushion his characters. He’s well aware of where his style could go. I was introduced to James Salter’s writing through remarks in Irving’s books, and he championed Salter and other stylistically acute writers consistently. Irving just chooses, I think, to craft his style differently. This explanation of mine, however, is not only tainted by the fact that I am a fan of his work, it also doesn’t change anything about the literary surface of his work. It doesn’t make his novels more directly capital-l Literary. The signifiers that we take to show us literary excellence are sidestepped by Irving. It’s not just the prose. It’s also his plots and characters. Irving is very self-consciously literary, and includes metafictional artifacts in his work, playing with the ideas of authorial identity and authority, offering us postmodern epistemologies and games. In many respects, however, these seem extraneous to the emotional core of his novels, which is the interior landscape of his characters. Irving can marshal music, myth and miracles in order to show us the alienated heart of a teenager in the New Hampshire province, but we are never deluded as to where his focus is: it’s always personal and emotional. That kind of writing shares a lot with partisan political essays: they tend to primarily appeal to those already converted. If you fail to be empathetic to the emotional narrative Irving has to tell, you are bound to enjoy the book you’re reading much less. That is not how we conventionally frame Literature, which we frame as having an appeal even when its content is objectionable.
John Irving (The Greatest Literature of All Time)
It is always reassuring to one's vanity that one is completely wrong in their reading and understanding.
sch]
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