Book Review: "In One Person" by John Irving

Hi everyone!

John Irving is unquestionably one of the greatest American authors alive and writing today. "The World According to Garp," "A Prayer for Owen Meaney," and "The Cider House Rules" are considered classics of contemporary American literature, as well they deserve to be. Mr. Irving is one of those writers whose prose is so effortless, whose characters jump off the page with humor and humanity, and whose dialogue is so witty one cannot help but laugh out loud while being struck time and again by an underlying sadness and the struggles of characters whose misfit status prevents them from being fully accepted in a harsh and rather cruel world.

Mr. Irving's thirteenth and latest novel "In One Person" is no exception. Spanning roughly fifty years and set predominantly in a rural Vermont town told from the perspective of a young man named Billy, "In One Person" touches on many themes familiar to those who have read Irving in the past. What sets this novel apart though is its theme of bisexuality and what it means to be gay in a tradition-bound fish-bowl society. The narrative focuses on a community of townsfolk who live and work on and around the campus of a private all-boys school circa 1960. As it turns out, nothing and no one is at all what he or she at first appears to be especially as Billy digs deeper into his family's past and his relationship with a Miss Frost, the town's mysterious librarian.

The novel is populated with a cast of superbly eccentric personalities--from the prudish Aunt Muriel to the  cross-dressing Grandpa Harry to Kittredge, the menacing and slightly ambiguous school bully and wrestling champ--all of whom and more play significant roles in shaping the man Billy becomes through the ensuing 50 years as well as adding to the central mystery of the identity of Billy's biological father and his seeming disappearance.

"In One Person" is and was a joy to read...at least until the final third when the narrative takes a grim though wholly necessary turn, punctuated by a scene where a mother, grieving over the death of her son from AIDS, injects herself with a syringe of her son's infected blood, thus assuring her own slow and painful death five years later. I found this final section of the novel almost too painful to read at times, and without taking anything away from the power of the story Mr. Irving is telling, I found the almost endless graphic descriptions of HIV-related symptoms and illnesses a bit heavy-handed and repetitive, almost as though the author is beating us over the head by emphasizing the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, particularly at its inception through the 80s and 90s. The novel becomes almost elegiac at its end and I couldn't help but feel that in this case less could really have been more.

Added to my dissatisfaction is the fact that these last 150 pages or so seem to move at a breakneck speed that doesn't quite gel with the folksy pacing of the previous 300 pages. It is almost as if Mr. Irving had written a much longer novel (though at 425 pages, "In One Person" is already quite hefty) that he was forced to trim at his editor's request. Because of this, scenes that should have more power pass the reader without their deserved impact. The fates of certain important characters, whom we've grown to know and even love, collide into each other and then pass by without pause for reflection. While much of the narrative is a mystery of sorts that succeeds in keeping us turning the pages, the resolutions are more often than not underwhelming and not overly surprising.

Still, I give "In One Person" a good recommendation if for no other reason than overall Mr. Irving's writing is impeccable and the themes he touches upon here are nothing if not timely and poignant. Is it one of his best? Probably not though I would say it is his best since "Cider House Rules." Billy and company are wonderful characters and all the more wonderful for being deeply flawed and not always particularly likable, much like ourselves.

Ciao.