John Irving and Suspension of Disbelief

John Irving has attracted plenty of attention throughout his career with his explosive originality and his fearlessness when it comes to convention — from The World According to Garp to the most recent In One Person. Not all his work is created equal, of course, but when I ran across A Widow for One Year, I didn’t expect to be as intrigued as I was.

by Joan L. Cannon

I recently wrote about reading for entertainment and finding my left brain interfering from time to time. Despite my everlasting admiration for a literature of grammar and formality that has gone out of style (though not out of admirers), I thoroughly enjoy much of contemporary fiction for its irreverence, naturalism, and penetrating psychology. Sometimes a lack of subtlety irritates me, and I do think certain aspects of people’s universal lives that once were glossed over would be better off left at least partially in shadow, but I still am happily caught up in what’s happening, both outside and inside characters’ heads.

John Irving is an author of such antic and fertile imagination that his plots rush along with the momentum of a dodge-‘em car or a runaway horse. I can’t get over how he can manage coincidence, burlesque, and shock to such dramatic effect. I remember reading The World According to Garp (1978) with my jaw figuratively on my chest. I also remember how despite the belly laughs and the satire, Irving was able to capture my sympathy.

A Widow for One Year (1998) manages to engage me even more sympathetically in spite of the constant thread of lust because everyone shown (with a single exception) has something endearing and redeeming about him or her, and because for so much of the time love is the motivation. However, now I find myself tripping over technical tricks in a way I didn’t notice with the earlier books (The Cider House Rules, Hotel New Hampshire). I haven’t decided whether that’s my problem or Irving’s.

It takes a pretty distinguished position in the literary hierarchy to carry off a rather lengthy story with a longer than usual list of main characters that is founded almost entirely on sex — on its command over the characters, and its unexpected consequences.

The most intriguing part for me is that the central character is a novelist — and so are three of her closest contacts, and a fourth is a journalist. Thus, a series of conversations is permitted that reveals many of Irving’s convictions about writing and fiction.

Unlike so many modern writers, Irving relies on a good deal of expository narration. It works for me as a reader because so much of this includes backstory, social commentary, intimate quick reads of characters’ motivations and hints of deeper ones.

In one pivotal scene, the place is described adequately at the beginning: a frame shop in a well-to-do vacation town on Long Island. The scene’s characters enact a drama that follows a farcical disaster for the father of a four-year-old girl who has happened into the care of a sixteen-year-old boy. Together they face a tough middle-aged divorcée who owns the shop. The object is to force the owner to deliver an overdue framing job.

It’s not merely serio-comic conflicts among people from different places with wildly varying private agendas. Those confrontations are emblems of profound struggles among the main characters in the novel. With the scene in the frame store finished, Irving launches into an inventory of significant detail about the store itself that adds even more impact to the action that has just taken place there. The final paragraphs of the chapter reverses the standard practice and increases impact because of where it appears. He uses this ploy more than once in the book, and now, of course, I can’t help noticing it.

Irving as a stylist is, as we all know, one-of-a kind. Because this novel is largely about writers, there’s ample opportunity for him to indicate some of his preferences. The fact that he’s an admirer of Graham Greene resonates, for instance. He puts his analysis of the difference between reportage and fiction into his character’s mouths, along with what appears to be a fairly rigid position against autobiographical fiction.

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John Irving and Suspension of Disbelief

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