Helpful Score: 1
As always, Irving writes a good one, but this wasn't my favorite of his. The protagonist had very strong relationships with two characters who end up leaving the narrative partway through the book, to its detriment, I felt. After they leave it seems as though the book moves on toward a conclusion that it never quite reaches, leaving the ending unsatisfying. That said, if you've read Irving before and enjoyed his writing, I'd recommend this one.
The kindest thing I can say about this, after 47 pages, is I'm grateful that it has reminded me how much I dislike John Irving.
Horrible memories of reading "The World According to Garp" came back to me. It was the late 1970s, and I believed the blurbs that told me that this was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, and that it would be very small-minded of me to be put off by the smirking, laddish and constant references to sex. And very small-minded and boring of me to feel uncomfortable about the the casual misogyny. But the whole thing -- starting with the woman who rapes a man who is in a persistent vegetative state so she can conceive the baby she wants, as if this was just the funniest thing you had ever heard -- just seemed wrong, wrong, WRONG.
And here we are again, and it still just doesn't seem right. In 47 tedious pages, you can already see the queue of mouthy, nasty, boring and smug woman lining up to ruin the lives of Good Men. There is a line that, I think, gives away more than Irving intends: the narrator's grandmother (a boring snob, and complete cow ... quelle surprise) "... believed that all the women's roles in any dramatic performance should be played by boys and men; ... this was the way drama should be enacted-- strictly by male actors."
I think Irving is working his way toward that happy ideal. He can do so without me.
Horrible memories of reading "The World According to Garp" came back to me. It was the late 1970s, and I believed the blurbs that told me that this was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, and that it would be very small-minded of me to be put off by the smirking, laddish and constant references to sex. And very small-minded and boring of me to feel uncomfortable about the the casual misogyny. But the whole thing -- starting with the woman who rapes a man who is in a persistent vegetative state so she can conceive the baby she wants, as if this was just the funniest thing you had ever heard -- just seemed wrong, wrong, WRONG.
And here we are again, and it still just doesn't seem right. In 47 tedious pages, you can already see the queue of mouthy, nasty, boring and smug woman lining up to ruin the lives of Good Men. There is a line that, I think, gives away more than Irving intends: the narrator's grandmother (a boring snob, and complete cow ... quelle surprise) "... believed that all the women's roles in any dramatic performance should be played by boys and men; ... this was the way drama should be enacted-- strictly by male actors."
I think Irving is working his way toward that happy ideal. He can do so without me.
