John Irving, A Novelist Among Novelists

This book has been around since 1998. I picked a copy up for a dollar at the Lower East Side book fair.

I like John Irving. Loved Garp and Owen Meany, but the title of this one, A Widow for One Year, sounded dry. (And A Prayer for Owen Meany didn't? Hmm.) Turned out the book was--as they say--a page turner.

The crux of this novel is novels and novelists. Writers writing about writers is not novel; writers write about writers all the time. But this book is writers writing about writers writing about writers and their writing.

All Irving's characters are writers of different types. Okay, there's one editor and one cop. But those two are window dressing.

Irving explores the question of whether one can assume that a writer is writing about herself. Eddie, does nothing but write about the same pivotal event in his life in book after dreary book. Hannah the journalist accuses best friend Ruth, the good novelist, of writing about their friendship over and over. Ruth doesn't believe this truth, but by the end of the book she does.

Ruth's father, a writer of children's books, writes very little, but is famous. Her mother, a writer of detective novels, is a mystery herself, leaving her family without a trace for thirty-six years. All Mom's novels are about the central tragedy of her life.

A Plot too?

All the musing about writing and exerts from the characters' books are wrapped around a compelling story that kept me guessing. Guessing way too late in the evening. Irving has a knack for making you think he is giving you a spoiler, but he is not. I kept wondering when the "spoiler" was going to happen and made assumptions about its effects. Wrong and wrong again.

A chunk of the book is set in Amsterdam's red light district and Irving makes the dingy area come alive for the reader. Many Dutch words authenticate it as well.

John Irving, the novelist, writes a little too much about breasts. Specifically, Ruth's breasts. For some reason, Ruth's "nice breasts" are mentioned over and over and over again. Her "nice breasts" (no other adjective is ever used) are the only thing some people remember about her. Somehow the nice breasts must have something to do with the lessons of the book.

But you'll have to I connect the dots on that one. I can't.