James Wood A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR by John Irving (Bloomsbury, R130)
Realism gives John Irving a good name: he is lucky to hitch his wagon to it. Since The World According to Garp (1978), Irving has been praised for the “realism” of his novels – for their tossed plots, for the fat suffusions of these big books, for the reliability of his solid characters, and for the salve of his gassy comedy. He is often likened to Charles Dickens. Humanly, these are not negligible qualities; but they do not, perhaps, amount to literature.
Realism has proved itself beautifully flexible and longeval, but that longevity has depended on the novelist’s ability to flex it anew, to wrestle fresh postures from its strength. Irving merely relies on the conventions of realism as one relies on punctuation: he writes fiction as if reality were transparent, as if characters’ consciousnesses simply float to hand – as if reality were as manageable for the writer as are the conventions of realism.
It is, of course, an artistic triumph to write like Dickens only in the age of Dickens; to do so at the end of the 20th century marks Irving as, at best, an unimportant realist: to believe as heartily in fictional transparency as Irving does seems artistically trivial. But this is not a mere aesthetic quibble; it goes to the human centre of Irving’s books.
Though his novels are terrifically busy, with enforcements and diversions of all kinds, they are actually deprived of true struggle, because his characters struggle only with situations, and not with themselves. His characters have an inch of consciousness, and with this inch Irving is seductively gymnastic. But his characters exist for us only in practised simplicities.
There is much that is delightful about his latest novel, A Widow for One Year. It tells the story of Ruth Cole, and her strange entanglement with Eddie O’Hare. In the summer of 1958, Eddie, who is just 16, arrives at the house of Ruth’s parents for a summer job. Ruth is only four; her parents are in the middle of a vicious divorce, and young Eddie soon finds himself having a passionate affair with Ruth’s beautiful mother, Marion.
None of the protagonists really recovers from this gross incursion, at least not until the very end of the novel; the rest of the book is a history of damage. Marion disappears for years. Eddie devotes his adulthood to the memory of Marion. Ruth is incapable of happy relations with men.
Both Ruth and Eddie, who become friends as adults, are strongly drawn. In Ruth, Irving relaxes his exuberant comic literalism, and allows indirection a little sway. But neither is a truly deep creation. This is because Irving, though a “comic” writer, does not believe in a comedy that demands very much from either his characters or his readers.
The tone may be gauged from a sentence about Eddie’s first month at the Coles’ house, while his youthful obsession with Marion is growing but has not yet been consummated: “For the first month of that summer, Eddie O’Hare would be a Masturbating Machine.” This phrase also heads the same chapter, A Masturbating Machine. Irving is always thumping his characters with his own sense of comedy, rather than rewarding them with their own. It is difficult for a real adolescent to emerge from the authorial guffaws; he is, precisely, a machine – a machine of comedy.
In other words, Irving’s comedy tends towards farce because it is situational rather than characterological. Comedy in literature arose out of satire, and in particular out of the exposure of hypocrisy. But it has its root in individuals, and lives on the principle not that people are funny, or that funny things happen to them, but on the contrary, that people are serious. Irving’s comedy trivialises his characters because that comedy is not unique to them; it could have happened to anyone.
One example will have to suffice. Eddie, who grows up to be a somewhat bumbling and pathetic man, does not meet the adult Ruth until 1990. Ruth is now 36 and a celebrated novelist; Eddie is 48 and a very minor novelist. He has long rehearsed what he is going to say to the woman he knew as a toddler, “My goodness, how you’ve grown!”
But when he enters the room he is flustered, and says “My goodness, how you’ve grown!” to the first woman who approaches him. Of course, this is not Ruth Cole, but Melissa, an organiser of the event, and Irving squeezes the situation with his characteristic vitality (and italics): “Melissa, who had not grown – she was not pregnant at the time, either – was somewhat taken aback.”
The question is not whether this is funny; it is whether this kind of comedy could possibly illuminate Eddie’s soul rather than the situation he has stumbled into. Of course, it illuminates his confusions, his nervousness; but these are the simplicities of character, these are where a novelist of depth begins, not where he ends.
A Widow for One Year streams with charm and life, and hustles the reader on a wonderful voyage, from Long Island to the red-light districts of Amsterdam, and back again. It is rich and buoyant. Yet neither in its conception of reality nor in its warmth of comedy does it ever fail to be uncomplicated. And for once, one wanted a novel to fail a little.