I read an interview last night with John Irving. I'm looking forward to his new book in May, IN ONE PERSON, about a bisexual man struggling through life. Irving says some awesome things in this interview, mostly about how he's irritated with this obsession people have with asking or assuming his writing is autobiographical. He says readers have less imagination these days; they are less likely to take that leap with an author into a fictional realm.
Do you agree? I admit I fall into that trap while reading a novel--wondering what is drawn from real life and what is completely fictional. It's almost like a game to me.
I don't agree with Irving when he says that real life and events can be improved upon through fiction, or that memoir lacks the imagination of novels. But I love how writers all have different perspectives on how to tell a story. Some will choose to tell it through nonfiction, others will choose to completely fictionalize it.
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The first person narrative voice isn't the only thing Irving's new novel and "Owen Meany" have in common. In fact, one could almost say that IN ONE PERSON is, in many ways, the literary antithesis of A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY. The characters in both novels get involved with theater: Tabby and Dan get to perform in some interesting plays together in "Owen Meany"; and the yearly habit of performing Christmas plays leads to some of that novel's most comical moments. With IN ONE PERSON, the involvement with theater is even more complicated, with Mary Abbott (nee' Dean) working as a prompter (the person who helps actors recall forgotten lines) and Richard Abbott often playing leading man roles. Irving also makes use of various plays to comment on his ongoing narrative, with Shakespeare's "The Tempest" being the most important of that lot (since the play is, in many ways, about transformation and embracing ones own destiny and self worth). And there are other, small similarities and parallels: the way both women (Tabby and Mary) meet the father's of their sons on trains; or the way children in the both novels (Johnny and Owen, then Billy and Elaine), snoop in the rooms of the prep school boys); and so on. Or the fact that IN ONE PERSON is structured like a memoir, with novel-like narratives scattered into the body of the text, while "Owen Meany" is a straightforward narrative with memoirs (from Johnny Wheelwright's diary) tacked onto the end of several chapters. But the most important similarities between the two novels come in the form of the narrators and their immediate families.
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