The Thin Red Line

I was a high school senior in 1981 when John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire was first published. I remember reading the first chapter or so while standing at a display in the entrance way of a bookstore at Lakeside Mall in Metairie Louisiana, sometime in the fall and putting the book at the very Top of my Christmas list.

In those days we celebrated on the 25th with my father’s side of the family, then on the 26th we piled into the car and drove about two hours to Baton Rouge to celebrate with my mother’s side of the family, where we did the entire presents galore and grand banquet routine all over again. Christmas two days in a row. Those were the days.

And so it was as the bloated company settled onto couches to watch football or nap, I dived into the present I had been waiting for and by the time dusk fell and it was time to begin the drive back home I had read fully half of Irving’s tale of the believably bizarre Berry family from Dairy New Hampshire who convert an abandoned school into a hotel, then toss aside their lives to move to Vienna, Austria to operate a hotel with a blind Jewish animal trainer who knows Nothing about the hotel business. And thus began a love affair with John Irving’s fiction that endures to this day.

Recently I was shelving in Biography when I happened upon a copy of Irving’s memoir The Imaginary Girlfriend, which somehow despite being an Irving fan I had never seen before. It’s a light and short read, at most the third the pages and emotional heft of an Irving novel. Many circumstances and settings disclosed in Irving’s memoir have strong parallels in his fiction, his own struggles with dyslexia as a faculty brat at an elite prep school mirror much of the narrator’s struggle with dyslexia and his friendship with the odd scholarship boy, Owen Meany and his year abroad in Vienna clearly foreshadowed that city’s major presence in both Hotel New Hampshire and The World According to Garp.

If Hotel New Hampshire was the book where I discovered John Irving the storyteller, The Cider House Rules was my introduction to John Irving the passionate and eloquent advocate. The story of Dr. Wilbur Larch, an idealistic young obstetrician sent by the Maine Board of Medical Examiners to establish an orphanage in remote rural St. Cloud is in my opinion the most sustained and eloquent argument for allowing women Choice in the matters of pregnancy. While Larch and his staff sometimes refer to "the Lord’s work" and "the Devil’s work" to distinguish between operating rooms being used for deliveries (an orphan) or abortions but privately they all agreed that it was All "The Lord’s Work". For they had all seen the horrible and often deadly and irreparable harm from back alley and DIY abortificants women turned to when they didn’t have the choice of taking the train to St. Cloud’s and asking for the orphanage.

All of rich and detailed characterization and finely detailed plotting that characterized his earlier work was still there but now he is channeling Dickens inveighing against work houses and the novel succeeds as both as art and as political treatise.

Irving’s blending of art and advocacy reached its apex in my opinion in A Prayer For Owen Meany, a long and eloquent answer to the Vietnam War, as well as a novel rich in themes such as childhood, loss, faith and friendship. The story of John Wheelright, the Torronto English teacher at a religious girl’s boarding school and the earlier years of his life, back when his life had evolved around his very unusual best friend, Owen Meany growing up in Gravesend New Hampshire in the 1950’s and coming of age in the Vietnam War era.

As always, Owen Meany is richly plotted with more twists and turns than you would ever expect in a prep school company town. Or maybe you would. I never went to prep school so I don’t really know. I do know that John Irving is one of the great novelists of our era who will in time be properly mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Mark Twain when the subject is great novelists in English.

If you’re already a fan, do yourself a favor and re-read a John Irving, you’ll be agog all over again how good it is. And if you haven’t already read these books. GO! TO THE LIBRARY!! NOW!!! and get started. Not To Be Missed.

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