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In One Person

John Irving
Random House

Here’s something I’ve never done before: reviewed a book before I finished it, or even got halfway through it.  So that’s totally unfair, right?  Probably.
I will start by saying that I am a fan of John Irving’s work.  With a few exceptions, I have gobbled up all of his writing.  I have a friend who decided a few years back, based on Irving’s remarks about people living on welfare in Canada, to never buy another of his books.  I’m not that guy.  But then I never saw those remarks, so I could have been and still could be.
I really liked Last Night in Twisted River and wrote, glowingly I think, about it in this blog spot.
I began In One Person with a clean slate.  I had seen the headlines above certain reviews but had eschewed reading the reviews.
Unfortunately, I was reading it on an e-reader and, within moments, got what I thought initially was one of those electronic functions that allow you to see the thoughts and opinions of other readers, and what came up was, “This is boring!”.  I remember thinking, “Wanker.”
But here’s the thing.  It IS boring.
Oh.  My. God.
So by now we all know John Irving’s literary tropes:  bears, wrestling, New England, private schools, a defining act of violence.  Got that.
Well, having struggled to get a third of the way through this, I can find New England, private school, wrestling and bears (only if you count the trend amongst gay men to stop shaving everywhere).
The story, told in the first person, is about a young man in the small Vermont town of First Sister who is struggling with his sense of sexual identity.  He fixates on the breasts of the town librarian, on the breasts of the homely mother of a friend, yet finds the sculpted body of the young jerk, who is the wrestling champ, a turn on.  To underline this tediously repetitive idea of sexual confusion, Irving endlessly paints a picture of the town’s amateur theatrical troupe, in which his grandfather – a lumberman by trade, of course – likes to play the female characters.  There are countless dissections of Shakespearean plays, to the point that you think you’re back in Grade 10 English Lit.
I wanted to like this book, I really did.  But it bored the daylights out of me, to quote the Glimmer Twins.
So I often did that thing that spells the end for most novels: I put it down and picked up something else.
And that ended that.