John Irving

An Interview with John Irving

Of all the novels to appear in America during the 1970s, John Irvings The World According to Garp was probably the book which most captured the publics imagination. Perhaps just as remarkable as its commercial success is the fact that Garp is much more than a highly readable potboiler, peopled with dozens of engaging and memorable characters though it is that, of course. Like Dickens and Giinter Grass, two writers mentioned admiringly by Irving in the following interview, Irving is a natural-born story teller who transcends the categories of academic and popular fiction-writer. In all his fiction, though most effectively in Garp, Irving is able to sustain an entertaining narrative momentum without sacrificing attention to the rigorous demands of the craft of writing. Garp may be, above all, a funny and poignant family saga, but it is also a sophisticated metafictional investigation into the writers relationship to his work, the nature of art and the imagination; in addition it speaks to us forcefully about the dangers and hatreds lurking in our modern-day society, the mortality we all must face, and how art and love may assist man in dealing with death. Irvings first three novels-Setting Free the Bears (1968), The Water-Method Man (1972), and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974) all received good notices from reviewers but were virtually ignored by the reading public. Although Irving speaks out in this interview against fiction that emphasizes style at the expense of content, his first four novels rely on rather complex and sophisticated narrative approaches the unreliable narrator in The 158-Pound Marriage, the subtle interplay and juxtaposition of different historical eras in Setting Free the Bears, the elaborate time displacements and montage effects in The Water-Method Man, and the book-within-a-book