John Irving

I love him a little bit, hate him a little bit. I really liked The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules, but I stalled on Setting Free the Bears and haven't read anything else by him. What are the goodies I'm missing out on? And you, SRH, are you a lova? Or a hata?

Did he write that 'The Fifth Hand'? because if so I am ambivalent. It was alright, but didn't make me want to buy my own copy or get ehaps more

every book of his I read featured a hotel, a bear, and a dwarf, and I couldn't keep any of them apart in my head.

ah, so he wrote 'The Hotel New Hampshire' as well. Hmm. Still ambivalent but my friend really likes him. He reminds me of a travel writer even when he isn't being one.

i liked garp and some others. he reminds me of stephen king for some reason. in that "here are some loveable characters that i will make you care about. now watch as i torture them endlessly".

As mentioned above, bears, wrestling and rape only hold my interest for so long. That said, I do have a quiet fondness for "The Water Method Man". I haven't read it since I was 20 though, so it may be quite his worst book.

in the words of axl rose, I used to love him but I had to kill him.

When I was younger I liked A Prayer For Owen Meany quite a lot.

Why did I like it? Probably because I was younger. It's been so long since I've read any of them that I can't really say much about them, except that I don't really have any interest in reading them again. He came and read at my college once, from, what was it, A Widow For One Year?, it was all about a woman who goes on a sexual awakening or something. Just dreadful.

I'm a lover. More than that, though, I think that John Irving is a vastly underrated writer. You usually hear about him in the same breath as John Grisham, not Paul Auster. Perhaps that has to do with sales figures.

If Thomas Pynchon challenges our notions of truth by writing about conspiracy theories (The Crying of Lot 49), Salman Rushdie challenges our notions of history by having an unstable narrator give an account of Indian history (Midnight's Children), and Umberto Eco can challenge our notions of significance by writing about a literary/ historical hoax (Foucault's Pendulum), then why can't John Irving challenge our notions of (sexual) morality by writing himself a more-or-less amoral (sic) world?

It appears to me that Irving plays in a postmodern fashion, but on a different subject than the others. The dildo-waving blonde in Son of a Circus and the incestuous relationship in Hotel New Hampshire, for example, are both ways of challenging our preconceived ideas of what is right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, behaviour.

I would claim that those disgusted with Irving's choice of motifs are being prudish (not that there's anything wrong with being a prude).

It is also interesting that literature still has the ability to shock in this day and age. That's encouraging news.

Hmm. In that case I think I'm going to have to put myself in the hater camp. I think that the main reason for this is that I read his book about the making of the film of The Cider House Rules, which was an excellent film of a very good book, and the book about the film was also excellent. In it, he talked a little about the history of abortion in the US, as well as some other things, and I just thought he would make a much better popular historian than novelist. I think he's interested in all the 'right' things, and he does his research very well, but I'm not sure that he always translates that into a fictional work as well as someone else might.

Mind you, popular history is a genre I really love, so I always think more people should be writing in it.

I have The World According to Garp, which I picked up at a used bookstore. I really should get to it because everyone I talk to really likes his work. I also hears that A Prayer for Owen Meany was his best book.

I love Garp and, at the time, The Cider House Rules was my second favourite book ever. But I wouldn't want to read it again - I was depressed and upset for over a week afterwards.

(though I read it when I was 14 or 15, so hopefully I'm less easily moved nowadays).

Luvah. A Prayer for Owen Meany, Garp, Cider House Rules are big, expansive novels of ideas. His characters are very well-developed and you care. His story lines are never "obvious" - what's not to like.

Hmm, most of the responses here seem to support my own contention that John Irving is a writer that you either used to Love or never cared for.

I used to love.

When I was younger I loved him. I remember reading Garp and then running out to read everything else. I think Owen Meaney was my favorite. I have read that book at least 5 times. But you know, I haven't read it in years. So for me, I remember loving him, but maybe my tune would change if I read him now. I haven't read much of his newer stuff either.

I used to love John Irving, but his recent books have left me cold.

i really like john irving.. the slow, strange way his characters do things.. and the detaails.. man, the details.. a prayer for owen meany was very good.. i enjoyed garp and the 4th hand.. 158 pound marriage and the water method man are on the bedside

Years ago I read A Prayer from Owen Meany and liked it quite a bit. But for the love of God, do NOT watch Simon Birch--the movie based on the book. It's bad, bad, bad.

SRH, other people -- so many other people -- challenge our notions of sexual morality, and do a much better and more interesting job of it than Irving does. (Delaney comes to mind immediately, but it's a pretty crowded field.)

One of the things I liked about Owen Meany was the way the plot was constructed, going from large scope to small detail. I realized that in the first section of the book, the childhood section, most of the stories get told several times -- a quick mention, a longer description, and then an even longer description -- but the contexts are so different that each time it feels like a different story. It was a good effect (or seemed so when I was 15).

>A Prayer for Owen Meany, Garp, Cider House Rules are big, expansive >novels of ideas. His characters are very well-developed and you >care. His story lines are never "obvious" - what's not to like.

I'd go with this--though I've only read Owen Meaney and Cider House Rules, both of which I was hugely impressed with. My impression is that he repeats himself a certain amount, just basing on others' reactions to books like The Fourth Hand and whatnot. But the rich background he lays on in Cider House Rules--amazing.

SRH writes:"I would claim that those disgusted with Irving's choice of motifs are being prudish" and "It is also interesting that literature still has the ability to shock in this day and age. That's encouraging news."

Not prudish. Bored. And rape is not about sex anyway. Nor are bears. At least not for me... And rereading the comments above, no one registered with me as being disgusted at any sexual themes in his books. Or shocked. Am I missing something?

I do agree he has a talent for delineating geographic atmosphere.

I loved "Owen Meany" - that said, I saw a stage version of it in London and it did not work at all, which seems to back up what someone else has said about the film version.

I thought "The third hand" was a great imaginative idea, but I didn't think he made as much of it as he might have done.

I'm an Irving lover - Garp hooked me - was he the first writer to develop a character from conception? so I subsequently read most of his books. In one of those nice coincidences Iwas just reading a review of Lars Von Trier where he was described as 'a provocateur with the sensibility of a practical joker' does this fit John Irving or wot1

Laurence Strene beat John Irving out on that one by a few centuries. (And there might be even earlier precedents.)

well,of course, my favorite is "Cider House Rules", his best book ever!
next in my private ranking are garp and owen meany and of course
for men with some problems below their belly button, the water
method man is very recommendable!
Widiw for a year and circus child (are these the original titles?-sorry, I was just translating in a very german way...)weren´t really, what I expected them to be..
Hotel New Hampshire is more touching as a film than in book´s form, something that cannot be said by the cider house rules.

SRH is OTM about irving challenging conventional morality. he deals with issues like sexuality, infidelity, and abortion in a realistic and non-judgemental way. that is, his characters and heros are always very flawed and real and he's never even close to preaching to you. what makes his stories so engrossing to me is that he makes it so hard to hate anyone. There are usually a whole bunch of characters (except for 158 lb) and I always end up loving a lot of them. ahh im rambling.

i love everything i've read of his so far (5 or 6 of his novels). Owen is the best, it think. i wouldnt ever recommend seeing the movie adaptations.

He is surely one of our great living writers, isn't he? I gave my heart to him with GARP and have remained loyal. Owen is the best, though.

I find him very erratic. At his best (Owen, Garp, Widow) he's incredible. At his worst (4th hand, Son of the Circus) he's nearly unbearable. Put me in the lover category.

AaronK writes: "SRH is OTM about irving challenging conventional morality." I'm stuck here. I don't understand how he challenges conventional morality. Writers like Bret Easton Ellis,Kathy Acker, Nabokov, Iain Banks, Nicholson Baker, de Sade, von Sacher-Masoch, William Burroughs, Will Self, and Valerie Solanis challenge conventional morality with varying degrees of success. Irving reports on modern moral dilemmas from the points of view of an arguably engaging cast of each-quirk-quirkier-than-the-last characters. Irving's novels challenge conventional morality in the same way a sitcom does. He delineates various choices clearly enough, but I don't see the envelope bulging at the far edge.

even Brett Easton Ellis characters don't bonk their blood kin, sometimes Irving places his characters in morally very dark places with no justification but hedonism

I heart John Irving so much! I read Hotel New Hampshire, my first Irving book, when I was 12 (Pretty naughty book for 12!), and devoured everything he'd written up to then in pretty short order.

I was, unfortunately, disappointed in The Fourth Hand. I hate being disappointed by favorite authors. Ray Bradbury, my other major favorite, has disappointed me lately too.

My favorite Irving, hands down, is Cider House Rules (good movie too), and I really enjoyed Widow for One Year.

I've read Garp, Owen and Cider House Rules and they were all brilliant. I suspect that I've read the best ones and that anything else will either get redundant (more beers wrestling in vienna?) or just won't be as developped/well crafted, but I'll probably give it a shot in a few years anyway just because I loved those three so much.

I guess I should try Hotel New Hampshire and, hmm, 158 Pounds Marriage?

Many, many years ago I read Owen Meany. It seemed wonderful at the time, but I was also fanatical about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance around then. When I think of the World According to Garp, I remember being fascinated by the penis part. Fascinated with what? Horror, pain, unbearable agony. When I think of John Irving now, Stephen King and David Lynch ooze into my head. These "artists" leave me with an unpleasant hollow feeling inside. The works of John Irving will be forgotten. The sooner the better. Yuck.