Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
"Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater."
- John Irving, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (1976)
When I first read John Irving’s breakthrough novel, it was a mistake. Funny how that worked. I only picked the book up because I was forbidden by my parents to see MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN. If you remember, there was a vocal flap that accompanied that film’s release along the lines of THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST or DOGMA.
I had been exposed to the original episodes of FLYING CIRCUS by that point, and the poster for BRIAN looked like the most amazing thing ever to my much-younger eyes. In a library one summer afternoon, browsing the shelves, I happened to come across a book, the title of which somehow got all tangled up with LIFE OF BRIAN in my head. Since I was allowed to read anything I chose long before I was allowed to watch what I wanted, I checked the book out and took it home, swollen with smug satisfaction that I had circumnavigated my parents’ attempts at censorship.
As much as STAR WARS changed my concept of film entertainment, so did THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP expand my idea of what a book could be.
That first chapter, "Boston Mercy," is still one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever read. In detailing the development of Jenny Fields and her personal philosophy as well as the conception of her only son, TS Garp, the chapter is funny and sad and packed with character, a unique slice of imagination wrapped in a specific piece of history. When I think of John Irving’s gift as a writer, it’s this chapter I think of before anything else, a perfect testament to what he’s capable of in his finest moments. The book is such a love letter to the art of creation, the very process of writing, that I can’t imagine any writer not being shaken to the core by their first exposure to it.
"Though the novel was not about Helen and Garp and Harry and Alice, it was about four people whose finally unequal and sexually striving relationship is a bust.
Each person in the foursome is physically handicapped. One of the men is blind. The other man has a stutter of such monstrous proportions that his dialogue is infuriatingly difficult to read. Jenny blasted Garp for taking a cheap shot at poor departed Mr. Tinch, but writers, Garp sadly knew, were just observers – good and ruthless observers of human behavior. Garp had meant no offense to Tinch; he was just using one of Tinch’s habits."
By the time the film adaptation of GARP came out in 1982, I’d read the book five or six times, and I believed intensely in the world that Irving had described. Screenwriter Steve Tesich and director George Roy Hill managed to capture the eccentric flavor of Irving’s demented masterpiece, even if they took liberties with specific events and compressed the material. When watching the film, it felt like the world I’d envisioned. Robin Williams was an incredibly risky choice for the lead. He’d starred in Robert Altman’s disastrous musical adaptation of POPEYE in 1980, and he was actually still on MORK & MINDY, a show that was dying a slow and painful death by that point. In GARP, he’s perfectly cast, a revelation, and he convinced me that it was possible to bring Irving’s work to life onscreen.
With the recent release of GARP on DVD in a beautiful letterboxed transfer, I’ve been in an Irving mood. It’s a delight to be able to rediscover such pleasures as Irving’s cameo in the film as a wrestling ref, Glenn Close in a career-best performance as Jenny Fields, John Lithgow’s remarkable work as Roberta Muldoon, the Ellen Jamesians, the "undertoad," Helena and her gradual students, the way the film fetishizes the act of writing on old manual typewriters, Irving’s descriptions of Vienna (a hallmark of much of his earlier writing), the bruised sexuality of Mary Kay Place and Jenny Wright, and the wonderful sly sense of humor that captures all the nuance of Irving’s work.
To my great delight, just as I was really revving up to dive back in and re-read a few of Irving’s novels, a package arrived on the doorstep of the Labs featuring an advance copy of THE FOURTH HAND, his new novel set for release in July. As soon as I opened the envelope and realized what I was holding, I shut the phones off and dove in. The first thing I noticed was the book’s dedication:
"For Richard Gladstein and Lasse Hallstrom"
It’s not just a dediction, if the novel itself is anything to judge by. It’s a marker, a shift in Irving’s career, and I’m not entirely sure what I make of it yet as a long-time reader.
Irving’s last novel before this was the wonderful A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR, and it’s a classic John Irving novel in every way. It felt like a bookend to GARP, a return to certain themes and types of characters, and it showed a generosity of spirit that the younger Irving, like most young men, was incapable of expressing. It was another book about writers and writing, but instead of demonstrating the way a writer reflects life, WIDOW seemed to be about writing as life itself.
Since 1988, Irving’s only published three novels, but he’s started expanding into other forms, adapting two of his own books into script form (THE CIDER HOUSE RULES and the unproduced SON OF THE CIRCUS), writing a book about writing a screenplay that he happened to win an Oscar for, publishing a collection of odds and ends. I’ve read his script for SON OF THE CIRCUS, and it’s interesting. He’s chosen one particular storyline from his rich tapestry of a book, and he’s emphasized just that one thread. It’s as severe an adaptation of the material as Mark Steven Johnson’s SIMON BIRCH was of A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, more a exploration of certain themes from the book than any sort of literal adaptation.
My first thought upon finishing THE FOURTH HAND was, That should be easy to turn into a film. If there’s any truth to the rumor that George Clooney is interested in playing the lead role of Patrick Wallingford, it should be a perfect fit. If Lasse Hallstrom and Irving manage to strike just the right tone with the material, I could even see the role netting an actor an armload of year end awards. But I was left with a nagging feeling that Irving had traded in something of his own identity with this new streamlined approach to storytelling. At just over 300 pages, this is an afternoon’s worth of reading, a quick trip that seems like just enough time to get to know such admittedly wonderful characters as Mrs. Doris Clausen, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac, his housekeeper Irma, Mary with no last name, Angie the makeup girl, and even little Otto. For the first time in Irving’s career, I found myself unfulfilled by the journey, shortchanged.
The start of the novel is as funny as anything Irving’s written since GARP. It’s wicked and specific in the way it paints a picture of the life and habits of Patrick Wallingford, a field reporter being groomed for an eventual anchor chair on a cable network that deals primarily in tragedy. He’s a helpless womanizer, almost reflexive about it, and he’s terminally unable to form any sort of real intimacy with anyone. It’s not like it’s a problem, though. Patrick seems perfectly happy with the life he’s leading.
And then there’s the thing with the lions...
"When the lions began roaring, the cameraman zoomed in on them, and Patrick Wallingford – recognizing a moment of genuine spontaneity – extended his microphone to within reach of their cage. He got a better kicker than he’d bargained for.
A paw flicked out; a claw caught Wallingford’s left wrist. He dropped the microphone. In less than two seconds, his left arm, up to his elbow, had been snatched inside the cage. His left shoulder was slammed against the bars; his left hand, including an inch or more above his wrist, was in a lion’s mouth."
- John Irving, THE FOURTH HAND (2001)
In that moment, events are set in play that change more lives than just Patrick’s. He loses the hand completely, drawing the attention of Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac, who is looking to make his reputation by performing a successful hand transplant. He targets Patrick, makes him a project, thriving on the attention even as he struggles with his own dissolving marriage and his attempts at a relationship with his son.
Tragedy suddenly delivers a hand to Zajac and Patrick, but it comes with strings attached. Otto Clausen’s widow, Doris, agrees to let Patrick have the hand, but only if she can have visitation rights. With time being essential to the success of the operation, Patrick agrees to meet Doris and discuss her request, leading to a sexual encounter that leaves Doris pregnant and Patrick changed forever.
This is an intimate story, told as a collection of small details, and even when Irving digresses, it’s brief, like the material he includes here about the behavior of the media in the face of tragedy. He uses real events in the book to emphasize his points, like the death of JFK Jr., and in a way, it backfires. How is Irving’s exploitation of the dramatic potential of the events any different than the media’s frenzy to feed off of them? Timing? Intent? He seems to condemn the entire industry, and although I think the state of the art in broadcast journalism is nowhere near what it should be, I don’t think it’s worthless. It’s the kind of blanket attack that really surprises me coming from Irving. He’s always been so good at skewering his targets with precision, never taking the easy shot. And parts of this book feel... well... easy.
That’s not to say it’s a bad novel. It’s just a lesser novel that may make a heck of a movie, and I’ll be the first to admit it; I’m greedy for the work of my favorite artists. The Coen Brothers, Radiohead, John Irving... these are vital creators, and I remain impatient for their work from project to project. Despite some reservations about some of the material here, the eventual impact is fairly profound. Patrick’s journey isn’t easy or direct, and Irving does a good job of painting the picture of a man gradually realizing that not only does he have a soul, but he may even have a decent one. The pity he’s greeted with by everyone after he loses his hand... the way he stops being Patrick and simply becomes "the lion guy"... it’s rough stuff, and a good deal of our sympathy is earned in the way he deals with these events.
Late in the book, Patrick’s trying to understand Doris, and he’s begun reading Michael Oondatje’s THE ENGLISH PATIENT because she was reading it, and amidst Patrick’s sweet and flustered fumblings, Irving says something that just pierced me:
"Once again Wallingford felt like a fool. He’d tried to invade a book Doris Clausen had loved, and a movie that had (at least for her) some painful memories attached to it. But books, and sometimes movies, are more personal than that; they can be mutually appreciated, but the specific reasons for loving them cannot be satisfactorily shared.
Good novels and films are not like the news, or what passes for the news – they are more than items. They are comprised of the whole range of moods you are in when you read them or see them. You can never exactly imitate someone else’s love of a movie or a book, Patrick now believed."
This is true of John Irving’s work for me. I can tell you that I think THE FOURTH HAND is a worthy addition to his bibliography, even if it’s Irving in a minor key, and I can recommend you go back and read his earlier work if you haven’t already, and I can offer you my feelings after a lifetime of reading his work, but it’s all just a pale shadow of the joy you’ll find there on your own.
"Moriarty" out.
