IRVING REVISITS OBSESSIONS
Avenue of Mysteries John Irving Knopf Canada
It’s roughly 300 pages into John Irving’s new novel, Avenue of Mysteries, when chaos erupts at a Mexican circus.
The passage involves two seminaked dwarf clowns named Paco and Beer Belly, a naked teenage skywalker named Dolores and our young hero, Juan Diego, attempting to steal a peek at her in an outdoor shower.
There’s also an elephant pulling the carcass of a dead horse and an angry lion tamer arguing with 10 police officers. The outdoor shower collapses, the spooked elephant runs and the naked skywalker, temporarily blinded by shampoo, trips over the dead horse.
Beer Belly suggests it would have made a funny clown act, which it would.
But it’s also classic Irving: an imaginative slice of absurdist slapstick in the middle of a sprawling, generations-spanning tale that incorporates orphans, the perils of aging, religious fanaticism, the AIDS epidemic, sexual misadventure and, like most of his novels, plenty of death. The broad comedy of the passage may seem over the top when considered out of context.
But in the universe the 73-yearold author has created, it all makes perfect sense.
“The problem with comedy is that if you can do it, you can’t not do it,” says Irving. “I am, and will always be, a comic novelist. Does that mean my novels aren’t sad? Does that mean my novels don’t make people cry? No, that’s not what it means. It means that even something that is headed to a tragic place, I don’t know how to not be funny. I don’t know how to not see that this is essentially a funny situation even though it ain’t going to end as one.”
For those familiar with the New Hampshire native’s near half-century of work, it’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that Avenue of Mysteries will eventually head to that tragic place. The novelist admits he “does not write, for the most part, happy endings.”
But he does write his endings first. The last line in Avenue of Mysteries was the first Irving wrote, which is how he has written all 14 of his novels. And, as with all of his novels, much of the chatter around Avenue of Mysteries will likely focus on how nicely it fits into Irving’s towering canon of tragicomedy classics, which include The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Avenue of Mysteries begins with Juan Diego, a 54-year-old successful, but frail novelist, en route to the Philippines to fulfil a boyhood vow to a U.S. hippie who had died in Mexico 40 years earlier. Along the way he befriends a mysterious mother-daughter duo named Miriam and Dorothy. Because he is taking medication that affects his sleep, Juan tends to drift back to his upbringing in Mexico.
The second story the novel tells is of Juan as a 14-year-old boy, who lives on the edge of a dump in Oaxaca with his mind-reading sister, Lupe. She speaks a strange language that only her brother can understand. She also believes she knows the future.
For Irving fanatics, Lupe’s belief she knows her fate puts her in good company. The author hints she has “ancestors” from his other novels., most notably Owen in a Prayer for Owen Meany and Lilly Berry in A Hotel New Hampshire.
“I think the whole notion of giving to one of my characters a partial gift of what I always know about my characters as their so-called creator, does come from the fact that my novels are ending-driven,” Irving says. “They all are, from the writer’s point of view, predetermined or pre-destined. It isn’t so much that I believe in the existence of fate or pre-destination, but as a writer I certainly do. As a writer I follow that path. I get endings first and I don’t begin until I have endings. I love foreshadow and I, frankly, see no way to foreshadow a story if you don’t know what’s happening. You can’t fake that.”
Even something that is headed to a tragic place, I don’t know how to not be funny. I don’t know how to not see that this is ... a funny situation even though it ain’t going to end as one. John Irving