May 13, 2012 - The Daily Beast - Liesl Schillinger
Like his famous previous work, John Irving’s new novel, In One Person, goes boldly into controversial issues. Liesl Schillinger on the surprising feminism of his work—and how she first found him on her parents' shelves.
The American ’70s have been too much maligned—the era reduced by its detractors (or its over-simplifiers) to shag rugs, free love, macramé, lava lamps, and retrospectively cringe-inducing male sensitivity. That’s a shame; because the issues that the ’70s grappled with—feminism, equal rights, civil rights, sexual liberation, and the anti-war movement—have not gone away in the intervening decades; and many good things that took root in the mulch of those questing, messy, in some ways guileless times are only now coming to fruition. “The ’60s are over,” Joan Baez wrote, in her song “Winds of the Old Days;” but the ’70s never really ended. Like it or not, all of us in this society continue to live in an open-ended ’70s: in which the moral codes, stereotypes, and repressions of preceding generations have melted away, or are trying to; and nothing firm has yet entirely replaced them. It’s a slow and unsure process, exchanging rules for ideals.
There is no American writer of that era who deserves more to be re-read and reconsidered than John Irving, who wrote three novels in that decade (The Water-Method Man, The 158-Pound Marriage, and The World According to Garp) and who has produced another three or four major novels every decade since, never abandoning his core subject: the individual’s right to respect, regardless of sex or gender orientation. He is daringly feminist, to a degree that his sex-positive contemporaries (Roth and the late Updike) never considered—imagine either of them putting these words in the mouth of a female protagonist: “In this dirty-minded world…you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don’t fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you.” Commentators often focus on Irving’s repeating themes and plot devices—bears, wrestlers, amputations, fatherless children, adultery, Vienna, partner-swapping, transgendered characters, academic and prep-school settings, stories within a story, and epilogues—but these repetitions are set-dressing to his overriding repeat emphasis: tolerance for the breadth and flaws of human nature, particularly as it applies to people that others label sexually defective.
The first John Irving novel I ever read was The Water-Method Man, his second novel, which he published in 1972, when he was 30. It came into our house sometime after 1978, after The World According to Garp came out. By coincidence, my father is Irving’s age exactly—born in 1942—and like Irving, spent his 30s in academia.
It was the 1970s, and my parents were young, liberal, and irreverent, but completely traditional. Like their friends, they gave dinner parties with china and crystal, listened to Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt and Joan Baez, had mortgages and children and (the men) tenure-track jobs. The men had soft mustaches and wore wide-collared shirts, the women wore giant hoop earrings and had long hair. All of them read the novels that everyone in their demographic was reading from coast to coast at the time—Vonnegut, Heller, Tom Robbins, John Irving—though they lived in Indiana.
I was 12 when I read The Water-Method Man. Its subject (loosely) is a Ph.D. student who has left his wife and child in the Midwest, and moved into a New York apartment with a large-breasted Polish woman named Tulpen, who flips one “tit” whenever she wants to show scorn. The man, Fred “Bogus” Trumper, has a urethral condition that requires penile surgery. You might think that’s an inappropriate book for a 12-year-old, and I did not read it with parental consent. I filched it from my parents' shelves, soon after watching my father laugh so helplessly while reading it that tears rolled down his cheeks. I needed to know what had made him laugh. Children are obsessed by what makes their parents tick. They want to know what it means to be an adult; they assume there’s a definite answer.
It was the 1970s, and my parents were young, liberal, and irreverent, but completely traditional. Like their friends, they gave dinner parties with china and crystal, listened to Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt and Joan Baez, had mortgages and children and (the men) tenure-track jobs. The men had soft mustaches and wore wide-collared shirts, the women wore giant hoop earrings and had long hair. All of them read the novels that everyone in their demographic was reading from coast to coast at the time—Vonnegut, Heller, Tom Robbins, John Irving—though they lived in Indiana.
I was 12 when I read The Water-Method Man. Its subject (loosely) is a Ph.D. student who has left his wife and child in the Midwest, and moved into a New York apartment with a large-breasted Polish woman named Tulpen, who flips one “tit” whenever she wants to show scorn. The man, Fred “Bogus” Trumper, has a urethral condition that requires penile surgery. You might think that’s an inappropriate book for a 12-year-old, and I did not read it with parental consent. I filched it from my parents' shelves, soon after watching my father laugh so helplessly while reading it that tears rolled down his cheeks. I needed to know what had made him laugh. Children are obsessed by what makes their parents tick. They want to know what it means to be an adult; they assume there’s a definite answer.
“You make all these sexual extremes seem normal,” adding, “You create these characters who are so sexually ‘different,’ as you might call them.”
Full piece at The Daily Beast
No comments:
Post a Comment