PLUMP FICTION

“I’ve done enough book-related travel to realise that I just like to talk to as many people as I can,” declares John Irving. “Conversation is more interesting than tourism. When I was a student in Europe in the ’60s, that was when I was a cultural observer. Now, unless one of my children wants me to take them to a cathedral or a church or a museum, I feel that going to look at things is a part of my life that’s behind me. Nowadays, I just like to sit at home and write books. For kicks, I talk to people.”

John Irving is one of the most envied writers in the world, so envied in fact that he is widely loathed, especially by other writers. It isn’t only that he clocks up the kind of sales figures that are more usually the preserve of rock’n’roll superstars, though that is a major provocation. It’s also that he has managed to retain his cult status in spite of his globe-girdling success. Irving’s novels live both in the bestseller lists and in the hearts of people with an inclination towards the bizarre, the ingenious and the grotesque.

Irving’s real crime is to have committed fiction. To wit, eight counts of aggravated storytelling. Irving’s novels are unapologetically traditional in that they contain stories with a beginning, a middle and an end (though not necessarily in that order). “I don’t write books with no plot, one character, all in the present tense in very short sentences with wide margins and type large enough for the legally blind,” he says. “Therefore, inevitably, I’m hated.”

He’s hated too, it must be said, because he’s such a handsome son of a bitch. At 52, Irving is disgustingly fit, trim and tanned. When he shakes hands, you can feel the keen strength in his arms and you can actually see the muscles bulge inside his shirt, like ferrets fighting in a sack. His teeth are a mouthful of snow, smooth and crisp and even. The shock of rapidly greying hair, which, he claims, has started to make him feel downright geriatric, does nothing but enhance his aura of healthy vigour.

In conversation as in his writing, Irving is a bit of a Thatcherite about words, believing that they shouldn’t just exist for their own sake but should do some work if they are to eat. He rarely wastes his breath. Even his small talk is peppered and salted with anecdotes and tangential yarns. An off-hand comment about how he prepared for the rigours of his current book tour with a short holiday on Ozone Island, a remote island in Canada’s Lake Huron, immediately becomes the tale of how his second wife’s grandfather won the island in a poker game. The arrival of the tea tray at our table in The Shelbourne Hotel is all it takes to ignite a lengthy reminiscence about a tea smuggler he met once in Toronto.

“I think it’s an obligation of the novelist to make up a good story,” he asserts later. “I have a 19th century taste for the long convoluted story, the twisted narrative that snakes back on itself and crosses its own path. The only modern writers I like are Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Günter Grass, Robertson Davies– what do they have in common? They’re all funny, they all write labyrinthine books and their characters tend to be exaggerations of real people. You either find that kind of writing fun or it’s tedious. If nothing else, I’ve proved that there are still lots of us who find it fun.”

As a novelist and a human being, John Irving has turned discipline into a laboratory science. His life story has all the crucial elements required to be just that, a story, complete with plot twists, character development and an inspirational hero possessing the courage to overcome his own limitations.

Irving was born John Wallace Blunt Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. While still a toddler, his parents divorced and John went to live with his grandparents. When he was six, his mother, Helen Winslow, married a local history lecturer called Colin Franklin Irving who adopted the boy and then changed his name to John Winslow Irving. In retrospect, Irving describes his childhood as “grim” but adds that this had more to do with his environment than his family circumstances.

“Growing up in New England is a pleasureless business,” he explains. “A very strong Protestant work ethic pervades everything. It’s probably the capital of abstinence and self-punishment and self-flagellation and all sorts of puritanical chastisements.”

Irving’s schooldays were marred by his affliction with dyslexia. Today, he writes, always in longhand and always on yellow legal pads, with a copy of a very large spelling dictionary by his side (though more often than not, it’s the small words that trip him up, like mistaking teh for the, for instance). Back in the ’50s, however, teachers knew little or nothing about learning disabilities and the young Irving was dismissed as merely “slow and dumb.”

“I never thought I was stupid myself but I couldn’t argue with people who said I was slow,” he avers. “I was always a poor student. It would take me three hours to read the history homework that my friends could read in forty-five minutes. I needed five years to get through a four year prep school. I grew up feeling that I wasn’t really as smart as other people and that therefore I had to be more diligent. That taught me patience and discipline, and this has helped as a writer. It takes me five years or more to write a book because I have a very healthy assumption that the first two, three four drafts are going to be crap.”

Convinced that he would never gain admittance to college through the academic route, Irving set his sights on winning a sports scholarship. However, he was, at best, only a mediocre athlete so he concentrated on one particular sport, wrestling, with a fervour and zeal that eventually saw him reach national championship standard.

Irving’s expertise on the canvas mat was to come in very handy during his 20s and 30s when he was able to subsidise his writing by teaching wrestling to teenagers. The sport also rears its sweaty head in a number of Irving’s novels, most notably perhaps in The World According To Garp. Some time ago, the author was selected for inclusion in the Hall Of Outstanding Americans by the board of the National Wrestling Hall Of Fame, in Oklahoma. In literary terms, John Irving is to wrestling what Franz Kafka is to insects, Henry Miller is to sex and James Joyce is to Dublin.

“It’s a kind of irony that I read about myself constantly like I was some kind of super jock,” he says. “I’m not what you would call a natural athlete. I was a quite successful wrestler because I eliminated all other sports from my life and diligently disciplined myself to it. The wrestling season starts in November and most people start running, lifting weights and skipping rope on the first of September so I would start in the middle of July.”

The launch of a John Irving book is a major global publishing event. Not one of his last four novels has sold less than 2 million copies, and most of them have sold considerably more. All eight of his books remain in print and are regularly republished in new editions and myriad translations. He is what people who appear on arts programmes like to describe as “a cultural phenomenon.”

A typical Irving novel is a sprawling literary tenement teeming with oddballs, weirdoes and human gargoyles, and bedecked with enough violence, sex and bellylaughs to make the pages burn and turn. For the flavour of one of these confections, let’s take, as a random sample, The Hotel New Hampshire, the rollicking family saga which put Irving, at the age of 40, on the cover of Time magazine in 1982.

John Berry, who narrates the story, is in love with his sister, Fran. Fran is the victim of a gang rape. She also has a lesbian affair with another rape victim who hides from the world in a bearskin. Brother Frank is gay. Sister Lilly, a dwarf, kills herself because she fails as a writer. Mother and baby brother, Egg, are killed in a plane crash. Father is blinded by a bomb planted by a terrorist gang whose dastardly plan is eventually foiled by the family.

And that really is only the half of it. To say that all human life is there is to invite comparison with no human life that I ever heard of. So, aside from relating a compelling yarn, what exactly is Irving trying to achieve through novels like this?

“My favourite writer is Dickens,” he replies with a grin. “I still marvel at how much mischief and complicated trouble he could cause within a narrative that starts out simply but doesn’t stay simple for very long. And that’s what I’m after, mischief and complicated trouble.

“It’s a question of making people laugh. Making people laugh, especially at the dark, malevolent side of life, is the best way to get people thinking. As time goes on, there will be more productions of Much Ado About Nothing than King Lear or Hamlet. There are emotional and psychological rewards to reading my novels but only if you find them funny. Being comic has won me readers but it has made me many enemies too. A comic novelist is truly despicable to those readers who don’t think you’re funny.”

Irving’s latest creation, A Son Of The Circus, crackles with his trademark shade of black humour. It’s the story of Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla (Irving has inherited Dickens’ liking for impossibly exotic character names), a Bombay-born 59-year-old orthopaedic surgeon who returns to India after years of exile to find himself completely bewildered by the land of his birth, and embroiled in a murder mystery for good measure. Aswarm with circus dwarves, drug smugglers, serial killers, sex changes and booty stashed in large dildos, it is vintage Irving.

A Son Of The Circus is dedicated to Salman Rushdie, an old friend of Irving’s since they first met as young writers in London in the early ’80s.

“It’s not a symbolic dedication,” Irving attests. “I spend too long writing a novel to throw away a dedication symbolically. All of my books are dedicated to either members of my family or my friends. The dedication has nothing to do with the fatwa but obviously, when his friends think about Salman, we cannot but think of it. I can’t imagine that anyone would deal with the life that’s been thrust upon him with as much grace and courage as Salman has shown.

“It seems to me to have been an especially difficult test for a comic novelist. If Salman were a brooding, humourless, terribly self-serious fellow who was literary with a kind of self-flagellating capital L, what’s happened to him would have slipped right into his already sombre worldview. But Salman’s triumph is that he is still as funny and funnier than he ever was. His new book is brilliantly comic. That he has maintained his humour is a marvellous act of defiance, because we know that it was his humour that got him in trouble in the first place. He still wants to make mischief.”

If Irving were to compile a report card on his career to date, grading each book like a teacher grades exams, to which ones would he award an A plus?

“I am decidedly of the opinion that the last three books, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer For Owen Meany and A Son Of The Circus are markedly better constructed and more complete than the books before,” he smiles. “As a carpenter and a builder of houses, and that’s how I see myself as a writer, if there are flaws in those books I don’t think they’re very important. Whereas, in the first five books I can just reel off the flaws. I see so many things that I wouldn’t do now. But I get letters all the time about Garp or The Hotel New Hampshire. My mother’s favourite is Cider House Rules, my wife’s is Owen Meany. The most fortunate thing is that I don’t despise any of my books.”

There are some novels that for various and rather unquantifiable reasons become associated with particular periods of people’s lives. There are certainly novels that remain more popular with teenagers than with any other age group. The list varies from decade to decade, even from year to year, and is often temporarily skewered by fad, fashion and the regularity with which particular names are dropped in Morrissey interviews.

Of the mainstays, however, there are a number of post-War American novels that never seem to lose their appeal among the under 20s. These include J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye, anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and, more recently, John Irving’s The World According To Garp.

To date, Garp has sold over 5 million copies worldwide, more than twice what even Irving’s most successful other novels have managed. Sixteen years after its original publication, it still reads as a quintessential Irving blend of farce, sentiment and the luridly shocking (few males who’ve ever read the book will easily forget the fate of the unfortunate Michael Milton, a character whose enjoyment of a blow job in a stationery car is dramatically curtailed by the headlong impact of another vehicle which results in him having his penis bitten off at the root).

John Irving, however, is not quite ecstatic about the company in which the popularity of Garp places it.

“Catcher In The Rye is a kid’s book for me,” he proclaims. “When I went back to look at it not long ago, it had lost its shine. It was a good book to read when you were 16 years old in the 1950s but I don’t think that it has any staying power. While I admire Joe Heller as much as I admire any American author, he and Vonnegut are the most original of American authors, Catch 22 was never my favourite of Joe Heller’s books, possibly because it’s not my war, it’s not my generation. Among World War 2 novels, I prefer Vonnegut’s Slaughter House 5– that was somehow more in the vein of my perspective. I think that Heller’s Something Happened is a wonderful book but I think that the sequel to Catch 22, Closing Time, is better than Catch 22, as a piece of writing. To me, it is a much more skilful and a more moving piece of writing.

“As the author of one of those books, I’m the least qualified to speak about them. As an author, you’re the least knowledgeable about what your most significant effect on an audience is. We all have these books. Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business is one of those books for me. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass was one of those books for me that caught me when I was in university and seemed at the time, and for ten years thereafter, the most important contemporary novel in my life, as both a student and a would-be writer.”

Watching Forrest Gump recently, I was struck by how similar in spirit, and in some more material ways too, this megabuck box-office-buster is to The World According To Garp. It’s an observation that Irving has already heard more than once, and you don’t exactly have to read between the lines to discover that he’s not too happy about it.

“I don’t know the film and I don’t know the story,” he insists. “I do know the writer and he’s not someone I ever thought of as a particularly interesting or literary writer so I’m not inclined to see the movie. And yet, I probably will because so many people have said what you just said. I was told that the guy who directed the movie privately kept comparing it to Garp. I know that the author was a big fan of Garp. I met him around the time that the book was published. He was having a rough time and was sensitive to the fact that he wasn’t as well regarded as he wanted to be. Just because he’s a writer, I sort of have to be happy for him because his ship has come in? Well, I must say I’m not.”

Though conceding that he was “comfortable” with George Rae Hill’s movie adaptation of The World According To Garp and “very happy” with Tony Richardson’s film of The Hotel New Hampshire, Irving claims that he has no particularly earnest wish to see any more of his novels transferred to the big screen. He was, however, recently involved in writing a screenplay for The Cider House Rules (“Nobody else could’ve done it, nobody else has taken the time to study obstetrical and gynaecological surgery in a Maine orphanage in 1930, nor would they want to”) and he’s currently completing a screenplay for a version of A Son Of The Circus. He claims, nevertheless, to be totally ambiguous about whether or not either of the two are ever actually made.

“I haven’t been in a movie theatre in five years, except to see Schindler’s List,” he says. “I see some things on video but I’m not really that interested. I went to see Schindler’s List out of a sort of political sense of solidarity. I thought it was a gutsy thing to do to make that movie but I don’t think Spielberg is a wonderful movie director. I don’t think that film is by any means artistically perfect, or even artistically successful. There is very little in movies that ever is.”

John Irving’s personal life is, in his own words, “boringly happy.” He and his first wife divorced in 1981, and in 1987 he married Janet Turnbull, his literary agent. There are two sons, Colin (29) and Brendan (25), from the earlier union, and two years ago, John and Janet added a boy whom they called Everett to the brood.

The biggest room in John Irving’s stately three storey home in Dorset, Vermont is, apparently, a 30ft square gym where he works out for at least an hour every day. He doesn’t wrestle competitively anymore but he still trains as though he did. These days, his most patient and disciplined diligence is expended on his writing.

Aside from the considerable imaginative and technical effort that goes into one of Irving’s novels, he is also stubbornly determined that every last detail in his stories be authentic and accurate. Indeed, he appears to take perverse pleasure in packing his work with realities that are so foreign to him that the research required becomes in itself as enormous a task as the actual writing.

A Son Of The Circus was a case in point. With its central story of an Indian-born orthopaedic surgeon who returns to an India that he himself finds overwhelming and strange, Irving had to submerge himself in both medical esoterica and Indian culture. The first part of this equation demanded weeks of intensive rummaging through surgical textbooks, the second called for a trans-world plane journey.

Irving travelled to Bombay with a specific shopping list of circumstances and environments he wanted to experience. The list read: “Children’s hospital, preferably crippled children; police station, two homicide detectives at least, one active, one retired; Indian circuses; connections to drug trafficking; Goa connections; must talk to Madames in at least three different brothels– transvestite brothels, preferably.” The morning after he had ticked off the final item on his itinerary, Irving then took his immense bundles of notes and returned to his writing desk in Vermont.

“I think that a novel without authenticity of detail is a padded short story,” he asserts. “It’s not a rich enough or a visual enough experience. You have to recreate the tactile. That’s especially important in the case of a country not being your country. I know there were doubtless readers who found that the gynaecological and obstetrical detail in The Cider House Rules was more than they wanted to know. But in a novel that has two main characters, each of whom is a practising abortionist, you don’t get the flavour of those men’s lives without showing the detail of their lives.

“And why would you write a novel about an obstetrician and a gynaecologist that would be an insult to obstetricians and gynaecologists because it doesn’t get the detail of their work right? If an orthopaedic surgeon can’t read A Son Of The Circus with interest and pleasure because it is so fraught with inaccuracy and vagueness, then the book is really thin.”

For John Irving, it all boils down to those twin qualities which he learned to develop during homework sessions in his bedroom all those years ago, discipline and patience.

“An impatient novelist is a contradiction in terms. It seems to me that what a novelist does is go over a story as many times as he can stand it. Passing through those sentences again and again, revising those sentences again and again, rearranging paragraphs, this is the essence of writing. Writing is rewriting. If you take the rewriting away from the writing, it’s stream of consciousness crap. It’s logorrhoea. You’re a diarist. You’re writing for therapy or something.

“If you’re writing to a reader then you have to write to as intelligent a reader as you can imagine,” he concludes. “I’m a patient and demanding writer and my readers are patient readers who are capable of making demands of themselves. I don’t write books for easy readers and I’m not an easy writer.”