For nearly 50 years John Irving has chronicled the American mind and temperament –- our characteristic kindnesses and cruelties, our injustices and the lengths we are willing to go to right them, the misfits and oddities produced by such extremes.
Born in 1942 in New Hampshire and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of New Hampshire and the University of Iowa, Irving brings elements of his upbringing and life into much of his fiction; New England and prep schools often serve as a setting for his works, and a good number of his main characters are writers. Irving’s career has been recognized by America’s cultural establishment, and his honors include a Rockefeller Foundation Award, an NEA Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Award for Fiction (for the paperback edition of The World According to Garp), an O. Henry Award (for “Interior Space”), an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (for The Cider House Rules), teaching stints at the University of Iowa and Breadloaf. The publication of The World According to Garp in 1976 launched Irving into the stratosphere of widely-popular and best-selling authors, where he has remained ever since thanks to works such as The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. This latter novel has become for the present generation of high school students what A Separate Peace was for an earlier one: a classic that offers a meditation on the friendships and loyalties forged in high school that mark an entire life. Several of Irving’s books have become successful movies; the film version of Garp gave Robin Williams, Glenn Close and John Lithgow their breakthrough movie roles; The Cider House Rules served as a vehicle for actors who were already well-established, Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron and Michael Caine; The Door in the Floor, based on an incident taken from the longer novel A Widow for a Year, brought together Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger for a remarkable collaboration. This very success, however, has made some in the academy look at Irving and his oeuvre askance.
The character of Garp sets the mold for many of Irving’s characters; his unconventional birth and death, in their illogic, speak to the American experience. Garp’s father is one of several Irving characters who come back from our wars forever harmed and changed; at the end, Garp falls victim to a fanatic from a fringe feminist group that responds to the horrific violence of rape with an equally horrific self-mutilation. This novel also introduces the menace of “The Undertoad,” that element of the contingent, the accidental, that though not malevolent can still shatter lives: the car accident that kills Garp’s son Walt; the foul ball that kills John Wheelwright’s mother in A Prayer for Owen Meany; another car accident that kills Marion’s and Ted’s two sons in A Widow for a Year.
Irving portrays the extremism that often characterizes the American stance: the Ellen Jamesians who protest violence against women with more violence; the dilemma of abortion that causes a divide not just between different people but within the same character in The Cider House Rules; the child abuse inflicted in that same novel, and the rough justice that punishes that act. These issues have gripped the American public discourse and imagination for decades and thread through the lives of Irving’s characters.
In Irving’s most recent novel, The Avenue of Mysteries, the thumbprint of the author is revealed in figures who are orphans, transgender characters, the circus world, a main character who is a writer. The Undertoad reappears as well, the unthinkable and unimaginable loss that tears apart the fabric of a character’s known world but that she quite often and quite inexplicably endures. As the sister of the main character says to her brother, “We are the miraculous ones.”