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John Irving
has always called himself an underdog, and he still
talks like one — even at 67, even wildly famous as one
of America's great storytellers, even at the release of
his 12th novel, certain to be a best-seller.
Maybe he
feels goaded. A recent review of "Last Night in
Twisted River
" used such words as tricked-up, gimmicky, cartoony,
cheesy and preposterous — all in the first sentence.
(Although the reviewer, the famously harsh
New York Times
critic
Michiko Kakutani
, kindly followed up with "deeply felt" and
"often moving.")
Irving
defends his love for the expansive novel with quirky
characters and intricate plots full of surprises, but he
doesn't apologize. Nor does he apologize for recurring
Irving-esque elements, including bears, severed body
parts and wrestling.
At this
point — Irving wrote his first novel more than 40
years ago and became an icon in 1978 with "The
World According to Garp" — does he need to?
"Last
Night in
Twisted River
" tells the story of a father and son, Dominic and
Danny Baciagalupo. It covers 51 years, as Danny grows
from a 12-year-old involved in a gruesome accident to a
novelist whose writing career much resembles Irving's.
We talked
to Irving by phone about his new novel and the writing
life. Irving lives in
Toronto
and
Vermont
and spends part of his summers on an island in
Lake Huron
. He has three sons, the youngest 18, and four
grandchildren.
Q. How
long has this novel been in the works?
A. This
novel has been in my mind longer than any other, for 20
years. It was always in my mind a fugitive novel about a
cook and his pre-teenage son. Something violent happens
in the early going of the story and forces them to go on
the run. And they are running for more than 50 years.
But I
don't begin a novel on the basis of how long I've had it
mind.
Q. What
is the process?
A. I
don't start writing a novel until I not only see what
happens at the end of the story but until I've actually
written the last sentence. In 12 novels now, that last
sentence hasn't changed, not even the punctuation.
Once I
get that sentence, I make a kind of road map for the
story back to where I think it should begin. I sort of
plot a novel from back to front. When I get the first
sentence, however many months after I get the last
sentence, only then do I begin writing the book.
That
process from getting the last sentence to getting the
first sentence sometimes takes a year, sometimes 18
months. Then once I start writing the book, with the
fates of my characters already known to me, I'm
concentrating on the language.
Q. You've
written shorter pieces, screenplays, including the one
for "The Cider House Rules," for which you won
an Academy Award. But you seem to prefer the sprawling
novel. This one covers 50 years of these characters'
lives.
A. I'll
tell you the reason. Passage of time is as important as
any major or minor character in 10 of the 12 novels I've
written. It is one of the reasons I like writing novels,
to show the effects of the passage of time on the
principal characters. To give the arc of a whole life.
Now the
second-longest of my novels is "A Son of the
Circus," and there's not an appreciable passage of
time. One of my shortest novels, "The Fourth
Hand," also falls into that category. But that's
two out of 12.
I'm
usually not interested in adapting my novels as
screenplays, for the very reason that movies do not do a
good job with the passage of time. If you need more than
one actor to play a character, the emotional impact on
the audience is diffused every time you switch actors.
For
"The Cider House Rules," I saw a way to take
the 15 years of the novel and compress the story to a
mere 18 months. I saw how to do it without losing the
central impact and the central relationship between the
old doctor and the young orphan.
Q. Where
does that love of this kind of novel come from?
A. My
taste comes directly from the novels I read as a
teenager, the ones that made me want to be a writer in
the first place. They weren't contemporary novels or
remotely modern novels. They were these long, plotted
novels of the 19th century: Dickens, Hardy, Melville,
Hawthorne.
I loved
those stories because the plots were huge. They were
larger than life stories, the kind of things that some
snotty modernist or postmodernist today would scoff at
as improbable or farfetched. Or other people with a
sizable lack of imagination.
Q. You
and Danny Baciagalupo, who becomes a writer, have an
awful lot in common. Does that make this book more
autobiographical than the others?
A. My
process as a writer, that is, how I write a book, I gave
that to Danny. And I gave him what amounts to my
biography as a writer, where I went to school, my exact
age. And the books Danny writes have an overlapping
similarity to some of mine. Those things are easily
identifiable, factual things coming from this author's
life.
But most
of them, please note, are utterly superficial. It's not
terribly meaningful that Kurt Vonnegut was my teacher at
the
Iowa Writers' Workshop
and I have him as a fictional character in Danny's life.
Those things are more playful or mischievous than they
are meaningful.
What to
me are the things that are more autobiographical often
don't get pointed out. Danny's life has nothing to do
with anything that has happened to me, but it has
everything to do with all that I fear.
Q. I
think much more revealing or telling about an author are
when you write repeatedly, recurringly about those
things that have never happened to you, but which you
obviously are terrified of happening to you or to anyone
you love.
A. We
begin with Danny as a 12-year-old, and he's already
afraid. I have written about losing people and the fear
of losing people. There is a nightmare quality to this
book, as there is with some of the other novels. So the
theme about loss, and the fear of loss, the things which
are repeated so often over the course of 12 novels, any
psychiatrist would tell you, that stuff is a lot more
credibly autobiographical than the occasional reference
to wrestling or
Iowa
.
Q. So why
write so often about loss and fear of loss?
A. I
don't think you have any choice as a writer. I think
there are these elements in any writer's life that are
in the category not of choice but of obsession. You
don't get to choose your obsessions. They chose you.
Q. There
are recurring themes but also familiar devices. When the
frying pan is described in the book, readers are
thinking that something very
John Irving
is going to happen with it, right?
A. Why
did
Shakespeare
write about dysfunctional royal families? Nobody got to
interview
Shakespeare
, but if they did, someone probably would have said,
"Will, what's with you and the royalty?"
How many
orphans are there in Dickens' novels? How many sexual
mistakes haunt and bring down Hardy's characters? I look
at serious writers, and they always repeat themselves.
They can't help it.
This is a
worthwhile caveat for young writers. Melville said woe
to him who seeks to please rather than to appall.
That's a
good mantra. It means if you write about what terrifies
you, the chances are good that the audience will stay
alert. They'll be anxious too. They'll think, "Here
he goes again. He's made me like this character, now
what terrible thing is going to happen to this
character." If I like them, I'm worried about them.
Something is going to go wrong. I didn't invent this
pattern.
And I
can't be bothered by those critics who believe all plot
is improbable because they also believe plot became
old-fashioned sometime before they were born. They think
the 19th-century novel is an extinct species, but I
disagree. I didn't invent the kind of storytelling I'm
committed to.
Q. Will
there be more films from your novels?
A. For
all the reasons I've said, the only two novels I'm
working on screen adaptations are "The Fourth
Hand" and "A Son of the Circus."
Somebody
may want to make a movie of "Last Night in
Twisted River
," but they won't do it with me. It's not the kind
of movie I'm interested in. You cannot separate "
Twisted River
" from its more than 50 years. You can't take those
50 years out and have anything of the integrity of the
whole remain. You can't take the passage of time out of
"Until I Find You."
People
may make movies of those, but they'll do it without me.
———
ADAPTED
FOR FILM
John Irving
wrote the screenplay for just one of the movies made
from his novels, "The Cider House Rules." He
won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.
Irving
has not been happy with all of the film versions of his
novels. He famously disassociated himself from "
Simon Birch
," demanding that the character names and title be
changed.
He wrote
in "My Movie Business: A Memoir" (1999):
"It sounds awfully simple to say this. But here's
another enormous difference between novels and films: In
the movies, what people look like truly matters."
———
HIS
NOVELS
"Last
Night in
Twisted River
"
"Until
I Find You"
"The
Fourth Hand"
"A
Widow for One Year"
"A
Son of the Circus"
"A
Prayer for
Owen Meany
"
"The
Cider House Rules"
"
The Hotel New Hampshire
"
"The
World According to Garp"
"The
158-Pound Marriage"
"The
Water-Method Man"
"Setting
Free the Bears"
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