John Irving's In One Person -- A Rumination

I finished reading John Irving’s In One Person last Friday. I hurried up and read the last 40 or so pages and then it was done. And I was sad that it was done.

Since I took up writing seriously, I discover that I read like a writer. Much more analytically. I pay attention to the construction of a novel, the introduction of characters, the weaving of the different characters’ story lines into the overall fabric of the novel, and the movement of the main character through his own story arch. I watch as he is touched here and there, sometimes it’s a gentle nudge, sometimes a heave from a volcanic force.

John Irving writes from a writer’s point of view. Deus ex machine is oft maligned by writing teachers and editors as a writer’s escape from “having written himself into a corner.” Irving does it without writing himself into any corner. He quotes Shakespeare and talks about wrestling and small-town stereotypes. It’s all done with a wink and a nod and makes me laugh at the jokes like I’m an insider.

Much of In One Person is set in an all-boys prep school in a small town in Vermont. “we saw the cross-country ski tracks crisscrossing the campus. (There was good deer-hunting on the academy cross-country course and the outer athletic fields, when the Favorite River students had gone home for Christmas vacation.)” Billy’s grandfather and his grandfather’s friend like to deer hunt on cross country skis at night.

Of course, I know this will have significance later in the story, whether for good or ill I don’t know. But at this entry it’s funny. Complete with a disapproving game ranger who has no law with which to stop the activity.

I laugh. Because I love Shakespeare and lived in a small town in far southeast Arkansas with people not unlike those small-town Vermonters. Where deer hunting is an important foundation of the culture and young people hunt deer out behind the McDonald’s before school.

I have been told that I do not write reviews because I do not write about what the book is about. It seems to me that the book, if it’s a good book, will do that. It doesn’t need my help.

But in this case I can let John Irving tell you himself. “In One Person is about a young bisexual man who falls in love with an older transgender woman.” And I will add that Billy Abbot is the first person narrator of this story. Irving goes on to say “Billy learns – in part, from being bisexual – our genders and orientations do not define us. We are somehow greater than our sexual identities, but our sexual identities matter.”

In a video on his website, Irving says “To really and truly be tolerant of everyone’s sexual identity, it’s not easy. This is a story about that.”

“Billy is not me,” Irving says. “He comes from my imagining what I might have been like if I’d acted on all my earliest impulses as a young teenager. Most of us don’t ever act on our earliest sexual imaginings. In fact, most of us would rather forget them – not me. I think our sympathy for others comes, in part, from our ability to remember our feelings – to be honest about what we felt like doing.”

I have often said that what I like about John Irving is that he does perversion and tragedy with such good humor. I will have to use a different word. Perversion carries too negative a connotation.

I am not alone in this shift of perspective. “From now on, the truly deviant will be the ones – the scowling churchmen and reprobates who cast everyone into hell – who cease to live their own lives while telling everybody else how to live theirs.” -- Esquire