I’m a huge fan of John Irving. If you happen to not like the stuff I write and wish I’d never gotten the itch to put it out in public, then you can put at least a bit of the responsibility on his shoulders. To me, his work is the perfect blend of literary and popular fiction. You get the brain candy of his absurd plots and loveable characters, and yet, when you’re done, you don’t feel like you’ve just junked out. Your brain has been nourished, you’re a little more understanding of everyone’s eccentricities, and you understand that you can laugh and cry about the world at the same time. I remember reading someone’s review of A Prayer for Owen Meany. They used the book as a test for whether or not a relationship could last. If the person reading it didn’t like it, then they simply didn’t have a soul, and there would be trouble ahead. That’s pretty high praise for a book, but it’s praise that is well earned.
Irving’s writing has soul. If he was a musician, he’d be an old blues player. His writing is very firmly grounded in the world of the average American, and he has a talent for making those lives into epic tales of love and loss. Yes, he seems to have a predisposition towards bears and writing about writers and New England and a number of other things that you come to expect will show up at least once in every couple of novels, but that’s what he knows, and I would argue that it’s a testament to his talent as a writer that he’s made those things vivid enough for us to notice their repetition.
I haven’t read his latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, yet, but it’s on the bookshelf begging for me to finish off those other books and get to it. I’m looking forward to the moment I can do that.