Wednesday, May 16, 2012

John Irving’s Rules of Attraction


By JOHN WILLIAMS - New York Times - May 14, 2012

John Irving speaking at the 92nd Street Y on Sunday night.Nancy Crampton photo - John Irving speaking at the 92nd Street Y on Sunday night.

During his appearance at the 92nd Street Y on Sunday night, John Irving said he thought he was done with the theme of “intolerance of our sexual differences” after “The World According to Garp.” But his new novel, “In One Person,” from which he read two extended scenes, features a bisexual narrator named Billy Dean, and Mr. Irving’s bibliography makes it clear that he has always been drawn to the experience of unconventional sexuality.
When Mr. Irving was an adolescent, he said, he “imagined having sex with just about everyone.” That included friends, mothers of friends and wrestlers he admired. His heterosexuality eventually asserted itself, but he said, “I didn’t forget what it felt like to be attracted to everyone.”


Recently asked by someone if Billy was the most “sexually extreme misfit” he had created, Mr. Irving said he didn’t think so, and listed some of his other characters: Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, has sex just once, with a comatose man. In “The Cider House Rules,” Dr. Wilbur Larch also has sex just once, with a prostitute. And John Wheelwright, the narrator of “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” never has sex with anyone. (“He’s probably in love with Owen,” Mr. Irving said, “though he wouldn’t come out and say it.”) “No sex at all,” he continued, “that’s radical.”

Bullying was also a topic on Sunday. It began when Mr. Irving said he had been asked if Jacques Kittredge, a teenage wrestler who plays a key role in the new novel, should be read as “the bully that the young Mitt Romney might have been.” Mr. Irving said Kittredge is “far more complicated than Mr. Romney.” Later in the night, Mr. Irving recounted the genesis of “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” which involved his adult friends reminding him of a young classmate, and how Mr. Irving used to pick the boy up by his ankles and shake him just to hear his distinctive voice, a “piercing shriek.”
The audience participated by sending in questions in the days and weeks before the reading, and Mr. Irving answered some of those that had been preselected. Asked about the worst advice for writers he had ever heard, he cited Hemingway’s “boring, journalistic dictum: ‘Write about what you know.’ What a horrible limitation to impose on the novel or the play. ‘Don’t learn anything.’ Why don’t you just say that?” He concluded with the best advice for writers he knows, from Melville: “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.”

No comments: