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Dripping wet, John Irving stands on a dock jutting out
from one of Georgian Bay’s Thirty Thousand Islands in central Ontario.
Despite a heavy rain, he has conducted his daily exercise routine outside.
His black-and-purple tank top and yellow running shorts are sodden. His hair
is plastered wetly to his skull. For the past couple of weeks, the
celebrated American author has been engaged in a sacred Canadian rite — some
bucolic regeneration at the cottage. But this particular day is no lakeside
idyll. Once inside the modest cabin (part of the family compound of his
Canadian wife-and literary agent Janet Turnbull Irving, with whom he has a
two-and-a-half-year-old son, Everett), Irving disappears to dry off.
So far, it is impossible not to think of the
Georgian Bay island cottage described in Irving’s seventh novel, A Prayer
For Owen Meany. But as the wind lashes the jack pines and drives the rain
horizontally at the windows, Irving, who has reappeared in dry clothes,
warns against mistaking fiction for autobiography. “The danger is that the
fiction becomes plotless, characterless and storyless because the writer is
drawing on a very small and limited bank of material from his or her own
life,” says the 52-year-old author of books including The World According To Garp (1978) and
The Hotel New Hampshire (1981). “This is a kind of trap for
many writers. They begin to see themselves as that very dangerous thing for
a writer, an artist. I think maybe a much healthier idea is for the novelist
to see himself as nothing more than the slave of a good story, the faithful
recorder of characters whose lives are far more important and interesting
than his own.”
Few readers are likely to look for autobiographical
antecedents in Irving’s superb new novel, A Son of the Circus (Knopf Canada,
$32). The story’s protagonist, Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, is an expatriate
Indian physician. As the story begins, Daruwalla has returned to his native
Bombay from his adopted home in Toronto. But Bombay does not feel like home
— India has baffled him since his adolescence, and it has seemed
increasingly foreign with each return visit after his departure to attend
university abroad. Meanwhile, the discrimination in his adopted country —
both well-meant and malicious — makes his time in Toronto discomforting,
too.
Daruwalla is an orthopedic surgeon at Toronto’s
Hospital for Sick Children. He is also a clandestine screenwriter of Indian
detective movies and engaged in a medical project of his own devising:
working to find the genetic marker for achondroplasia, the syndrome that
causes the most prevalent form of dwarfism. The dwarfs have brought him back
to Bombay.
A Son of the Circus covers 20 years, three
continents, drug smuggling, transsexuals, the movie business, a pair of
twins separated at birth, murder, religious conversion — and, of course, the
circus — over 633 rich, intricately plotted pages. Every one was completely
rewritten twice during the book’s five-and-a-half-year genesis. Irving
describes that process in the title essay of his collection of shorter work,
1993’s Trying To Save Piggy Sneed, as “the necessary, strict toiling with
the language; for me, this means writing and rewriting the sentences until
they sound as spontaneous as good conversation.”
Irving says he did not realize when he started
writing the novel how much of it would be set in India. It owes that to two
inspirations. The first was Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children,
which Irving read when it was still in manuscript form. It had a powerful
effect on him as both a reader and a writer. A Son of the Circus is
dedicated “to Salman,” but Irving hastens to point out that “that’s my
friend Salman, not Salman Rushdie the political figure. This book would
always have been dedicated to Salman, with or without the terrible thing
that’s happened to him.”
Rushdie was having supper with Irving when he
learned that his novel The Satanic Verses had been banned in India. Four
months later, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had condemned Rushdie to
death for blasphemy against Islam. And although neither of those acts
prompted Irving’s dedication, their echoes reverberate throughout A Son of
the Circus. Giving offense is a main theme of the story. It is used
principally as a comic device, but there is also a more serious aspect to
it: people committing unintentionally offensive acts unwittingly offer a
glimpse of their truest feelings and beliefs — it is a kind of thoughtless
candor.
The book’s other inspiration
presented itself when Irving unintentionally offended another expatriate
Indian, a stranger waiting for a light to change on a Toronto street corner.
“He looked about 62, and he was very well dressed, very dignified. He was a
first- or second-generation immigrant, and a very successfully assimilated
one. I found myself thinking, ‘There is a world in that man’s past which
will never be visible to those of us who know him in his home here; we’ll
just never see it.’ I was suddenly aware that he was aware of my staring at
him and that it made him uncomfortable. In that instant, I thought his
discomfort was almost decidedly racial. Maybe he was thinking, ‘That guy is
going to roll down the window of that cab and spit at me or tell me to go
back where I came from.’ I knew where the book would end. I knew my man
would be there, after the journey back home which didn’t feel like going
home, which wasn’t home any more, standing on that corner.”
Irving says all his novels
started this way: he imagined a telling moment, then worked backwards to
build the tale leading up to it.
Irving himself has had some experience of cultural
displacement. Born in Exeter, N.H., his shuttling between a Toronto
apartment (he and Turnbull Irving, who have been married for seven years,
spend about a third of each year in Ontario) and a principal residence in
southern Vermont has provoked some insights into cross-border cultural
traffic and the Canadian view of Americans. “It is well understood in Canada
how little Americans really know about Canada, but there’s something you
don’t know about Americans in Canada — at least you never talk about it —
and that is that Americans not only do very little thinking about Canadians,
they do very little thinking about Americans,” says the author. “I have a
very low opinion of nationalism, the nationalism that’s exhibited by my own
country included. It seems to me that nationalistic instincts have never
done anything but divided people and made very simple distinctions. But
there’s a pettiness to the nationalism I read about here, often reflected in
a kind of petty anti-Americanism. I find it amateurish, sophomoric, what I
read about the United States here.”
Irving speculates with some distaste that
A Prayer
For Owen Meany owes some of its Canadian and European popularity to “a
certain perceived anti-Americanism in the voice of its cranky narrator,
Johnny Wheelwright [a disillusioned American who has fled to Toronto]. I
wonder if readers who like that about Owen Meany, and who are super-zealous
in their nationalism about Canada, will find the portrait of Dr. Daruwalla’s
Toronto entirely to their liking.”
Irving offers a detailed reading list to underscore
his declaration that he reads authors, not nationalities. Charles Dickens
leads his list of favorites. (Trying To Save Piggy Sneed’s closing essay,
“The King of the Novel,” is a spirited defense and passionate appreciation
of Dickens’s work.) Then come — in no particular order— Gustave Flaubert,
Günter Grass, George Eliot (“I reread Middlemarch every five or six years”),
Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro (“I keep thinking if her stories were about 25
or 30 pages longer, and had all been published as books, she’d be one of the
best-known writers in the world,”) and Graham Greene. His praise takes on
another dimension entirely when he talks about the novels of Robertson
Davies. “I am astonished that he is not better known than he is,” says
Irving. “He is not only wonderful in all the literary ways, but he is
incredibly accessible.” Irving has nominated Davies for the Nobel Prize
several times.
Talking about novels and novelists seems almost
anachronistic in an age when writing fiction is often seen as merely
preparatory to selling the movie rights. Two of Irving’s books have been
made into films. In 1982, director George Roy Hill completed the movie
version of The World According To Garp, and Tony Richardson brought
The
Hotel New Hampshire to the screen in 1984. Irving has written a screenplay
titled A Son of the Circus. He has also finished the screenplay for
The
Cider House Rules and written the first draft of a movie version of A Prayer
for Owen Meany. He does not expect that any of them is likely to be produced
anytime soon. But given the fact that his novels usually command the
best-seller lists, he is not particularly worried that they could languish
unproduced forever. ‘I could write two screenplays a year and not make as
much money as I do writing one novel every five years. My only advantage in
the movie business is that I’m not in the business — I’m not doing it for
the money. I have a day job, and my day job is novels.”
Producers have eagerly sought Irving’s work as film
fodder, but in order to buy anything, they have to sign a letter of
agreement spelling out a few non-negotiable conditions: they cannot change
the story, Irving gets to approve the director, the director must have final
cut and cannot be interfered with. Some studios have even gone so far as to
cast the film and spend money on pre-production before buying the rights to
the story. But when they pull out their checkbooks to acquire it, they find
Irving intractable on his central demands. “If somebody wants to go and
spend half-a-million dollars impressing me with who they can get to star in
it, and all of that, let them spend their money. Ultimately, they have to
come back and say, ‘OK, now we want to buy it.’ And I’ll say, ‘But you’re
buying this script [The Cider House Rules], right?’ ‘Jeez, not the part
where the 12-year-old girl gets the abortion, we’ll leave that part out.’
And I just say, Well, I have a day job.’”
And the product of
that day job is probably superior to any screen adaptation of it. Reading
John Irving’s novels is an experience that film cannot duplicate. Not
everyone agrees with that assessment, of course. Despite the legions of
passionate Irving readers, there are some critics Irving wishes would simply
be more honest about their antipathy towards his teeming, complex tales. “I
can sympathize with someone who sees a book by me coming and says, ‘Aaaugh!
Not that guy!’ It would be so refreshing to read a really nasty review of a
book of mine that starts, ‘I hate John Irving. Always have. And now this.’” |
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