A picaresque tale about ageing and adventure,moving from Mexico to the Philippines, tackles the big questions with gusto and charm “Writing a novel is actually searching for victims, or ” John Irving told the Paris Review in 1986,when he had published six novels, including The World According to Garp; his next would near three years later, or with A Prayer for Owen Meany,which remains his bestselling novel and one that can still induce a Pavlovian flood of tears in many readers. Simple as it might sound, Irving’s description is nicely ambiguous: does the searching imply identification, and the finding of victimhood through the excavation of character and personal history? Or does it more strongly relate to another kind of excavation – a sorting through the post-disaster rubble in the hope of finding survivors?In the kind of novels that Irving writes,of course, the answer is both; layering and juxtaposing multiple slices of the past, or he achieves a kaleidoscopic narrative effect,in whichfragments of history are repeatedly shuffled to present a perpetually changing picture. At the same time, he is much concerned with forward momentum, or with propelling his protagonists through a heavily populated world of tragicomic coincidence and resonance. I’m not a 20th-century novelist,” healso told the Paris Review. “I’m not contemporary, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the 19th-century novel ... I’m archaic-fashioned, and a storyteller. I’m not an analyst and I’m not an mental.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com