I’ve been reading John Irving’s A Widow for One Year, largely out of gratitude to the friend who loaned it to me when I complained about how difficult it is to have enough to rad on such a long trip. There are things I like about it, notably including one chase scene that would have been hilarious in a movie and some quite likeable characters, but that wasn’t enough for me. The lukewarm reaction is probably why it took me two weeks to read through, which is outlandishly long for me. (The last one that took that long was LOTR, which is just, well, very long. (An edition with all three/six books in one volume.)) Irving left me feeling that one problem might just been that he’s more of a visual person and I’m more of a word one, something I realized when I thought that the aforementioned chase would be funny in a movie instead of just finding it funny as-is. He also left me wondering my “literary” writers are allowed to get away with so much telling instead of showing that any good sf or fantasy writer would have been ashamed of. Maybe that’s why I’ve been seeing it so much in mysteries lately; maybe those writers figure if a modern classic like Irving can get away with it, why can’t they? He does it well, and to some degree it just comes off as a matter of style, but it also left me feeling less engaged with the characters than I could have been.
This past weekend we went to Amsterdam for a regatta; since I was so close to the end I left Irving’s book home and took one by Lloyd Alexander, The Iron Ring. I tore through that in an evening, with such a sense of relief it was like drinking fresh water after a salt water gargle. I think some of the difference, too, is that I felt freer to just let Alexander wash over me. It’s not that it doesn’t have several layers (for one, the theme of learning to think for yourself even in the definition of your highest virtues is very evident) but I can also get more of those when I reread it. For the Irving book, one factor is that since it’s borrowed, I’m less likely to reread it (of course, if I’d loved it, I could have bought my own copy) but the other is that since this is Litrachure, and since it got sort of weird in parts in a way that kept feeling like the author was muttering “hey, I’m doing something cool here, nudge nudge wink wink” I kept feeling that I needed to stop and figure out just what he was doing. (Examples include the driving repetition of the motif of Ruth’s scar, which was really not as necessary to the book’s climax as Irving made it sound, and the fact that just about every conversation she had as a four-year-old was repeated verbatim somewhere in the book.)
Maybe I’ve been spoiled by readng writers writing about their craft, but isn’t it better art if you just leave your best work out there for the canny reader to discover, rather than hitting her over the head with it?
I’ve always been back and forth about John Irving. He delights and appalls in equal measure. I’ve gotten that, “heh heh heh, look how clever I am” feeling from his stuff too. Yet some of his people stay with me when other more worthy (in a literary and sometimes moral sense) characters from other books fade away soon as the cover’s shut. Certain of his phrases stick too. Like ‘a smart bear’s kind of fire’, an arson set by Suzie the Bear in ‘Hotel New Hampshire’. Sometimes he says things as I might have if I were telling the story and I can’t help but find that an agreeable thing. ~LA