John Irving: The Scene Interview

"If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love," John Irving once wrote, "you have to find the courage to live it."Live it he has. Irving is the author of such best-selling novels as The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, not to mention a screenplay adaption of The Cider House Rules, for which he received an Academy Award in 2000. Along the way, he has become, perhaps more than any other living writer, the sort of Novelist for whom the term was always capitalized a hundred years ago: a crafter of rich, complex books that chronicle not only the lives of the people who populate them, but also their generation. In many ways Irving is the quintessential voice of Americans who came of age in the 1960s and '70s.

With the same obsessive drive he once brought to wrestling—a sport in which he competed until the age of 37—the 66-year-old writer has time and again mastered the "big" novel, shaping and revising each book over a period as long as five or six years before letting it go, almost always to immense popular and critical acclaim.

This weekend, Irving will be in Nashville to receive the fifth Nashville Public Library Literary Award. (Previous recipients include novelist John Updike and journalist David Halberstam.) In honor of his visit, Mayor Karl Dean inaugurated Nashville's first "Citywide Read" of Irving's books, and the Nashville Public Library Foundation is honoring him with a black-tie gala to raise funds for the library. (Tickets are $500 each; call 880-2610 for more information.) Irving will also give a free public lecture at the Ryman Auditorium 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 8.

In advance of his talk at the Ryman, Irving agreed to be interviewed by the Scene via email. Writing from his home in Vermont, he shares candid insights on his forthcoming novel, the state of American publishing and people as varied as Sarah Palin and Kurt Vonnegut. (Spoiler alert for anyone still catching up on the citywide reading assignment: Irving discusses the fates of several of his early characters.)

Scene: As you may know, Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has encouraged a "Citywide Read" of your work; several of your novels, such as A Prayer for Owen Meany, are often taught in literature classes. How does it feel to be required reading?

Irving: I know that the mayor of your city is a reader of my novels. He's invited me to work out with him in his gym, and given that he's a reader—it also helps that he's a Democrat—I'll probably take him up on it. It's ironic to me that the three of my eleven published novels most taught in A.P. English classes in high schools, and in colleges and universities, are the same three novels that have been banned in various schools—and in some libraries. (A Prayer for Owen Meany is the most frequently taught at the high-school level; The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp get more exposure in colleges and universities.)

As for the "required" part—well, I have mixed feelings about that. I remember—this was mainly in high school—hating some of the novels I was required to read, though in most cases these required books introduced me to many of my favorite authors. In the area of Vermont where I live, I visit schools where my novels are taught; I've attended a fair number of A.P. English classes, just to talk to the kids and answer their questions. I'm lucky, as a writer, that I've always maintained a very young audience; that my novels are taught in courses, both in high school and at colleges and universities, helps to keep the age of my audience young. That matters more to me at sixty-six than it once did.

Scene: In the epilogue of The World According to Garp, one character says of Garp, "He was just beginning to write about the whole world again; he was just starting. And Jesus, Duncan, you must remember he was a young man! He was thirty-three." Do you ever wonder if you should've let Garp the character survive—in the manner, for example, of Updike's Rabbit, who made it to the fictional 1990—to comment on what the world has become in the 30 years since the book was released?

Irving: I'm past the age where I can realistically imagine writing a trilogy, which once interested me. I love Robertson Davies—his trilogies, especially. And I loved Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet, too; I read those four novels in the order in which they were written, and then in every conceivable order. (Maybe I was the right age, still a student, when they were first published.)

No, I never considered keeping Garp alive. That novel's last sentence—"In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases"—was the first line I wrote of that novel. Garp has to die; it's what the book is about, a double assassination of a mother and her son. More to the point: a woman who is killed by a woman-hating man and a man who is killed by a woman who hates men. That was where I saw the so-called sexual revolution going—to sexual polarization.