Like the powerful narrative voice one finds in his novels, John was a powerful presence in the classroom. He was always empathetic to the plight of a novice, unpublished writer; always ready to share advice, tips, thoughts about writing fiction and living the writer’s life.
One of the tips he said more than once: “When you have no further use for characters, kill them. Knock ‘em off.”
This apparently useful if not ruthless advice for plotting a novel was of no use to me at the time. Sometimes, as in this case, his words were so boiled down, I wasn’t able to apply them in my writing, except as a “handy plotting tool.” That was the case until yesterday morning at 6:30 a.m. when I learned that in the hands of a great novelist, a beloved character’s death can elicit genuine emotion within a reader, which as Donald Maass says in his seminal work, The Emotional Craft of Fiction is why we read fiction.
I’m reading John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and at about 6:30 a.m. this morning. I was on page 128 when I came across a paragraph that broke my heart and gave me insight into how fiction works that I did not have when I was in my 20s. The paragraph describes Johnny Wheelright’s feelings (Johnny is the narrator-character of the novel) at his mother’s funeral after she was struck and immediately killed by a foul ball hit by Johnny’s best friend, Owen Meany:
“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time, the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone, forever. There comes another day and another specifically missing part.”
In the details mentioned, and the senses tapped into we grasp the totality of the emotion gripping John at the age of nine; a boy who loses his mother and who missed her on the day she died and on every day since. Not only did Johnnie miss her, and continue missing her in new ways, but I’m left with the impression that John, the grown-up version of Johnny who is narrating the novel, now a man in late middle-age, is still missing her in new ways as each day passes.
As a friend of mine says, those who lose a parent at an early age become members of a club to which no one wants to belong; nevertheless, this is an exclusive club of sorrow and mutual understanding to which these children have no choice but to become and remain members even as they grow old. It’s a club that sets them apart from everyone else, both those of us whose parents are still alive and those whose parents died after a long life.
My point with all of this: If you’ve been reading my ExcitingWriting Advisories (EWAs) of recent months, this passage points back to craft-points Donald Maass makes in his book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story behind the Surface.
In A Prayer for Owen Meany, when Johnny’s mother dies, she had only been married to a man named Dan Needham for a year-and-a-half. Dan has already adopted Johnny, and after his mother dies there’s no question in Johnny’s mind that he loves Dan and wishes him to remain his stepfather, and for them to live together.
It’s been said, and I believe it’s true, in one way or another, every story can be understood to be either about the formation or the dissolution of a family. Many story lines depict a family coming apart only to somehow be reconstituted in a new form by the end. This is so for action movies where families are often depicted as elite teams or sometimes as teams of criminals; in romantic comedies where singles come together despite fate always pulling them apart; in horror movies where families of friends or loving couples are torn apart. My point: This family formation/dissolution theme is the most frequently used method authors use to encourage their readers to make a connection with a story.In A Prayer for Owen Meany, we know at the end of the first chapter that Johnnie loses his mother to an errant foul ball hit by Owen Meany. In chapter two Dan is introduced; we see Dan and Johnnie’s mother, Tabatha, having a long courtship and finally getting married. Indeed, we cut directly from Tabithia’s wedding to her funeral a year-and-a-half later. Then we have the heart-wrenching paragraph I quoted above that begins, “When someone you love dies…”
The paragraph that follows directly after that one is telling because although clearly we already have a new family forming between Johnnie and his stepfather, the author resists doing the obvious of letting Johnny go home with Dan. Instead he lets the stepfather return to where Dan, Tabitha and Johnnie were living when Johnnie's mother was alive, and he lets Johnnie go in new direction that hints at Johnny seeking love and intimacy with a girl who is approximately his age. So there you have the hint of a new family forming. I find it to be extremely emotional and telling.
This is the paragraph that follows directly after the one I quoted above: “The evening after her funeral, I felt she was gone when it was time for Dan to go home to the dorm. (Dan is a teacher at a private school, and their home was literally an apartment within a dormitory.) I realized that Dan had choices… But as soon as I realized what they were, I realized that the choices available to Dan, regarding where he would sleep, would be imperfect, forever; and that, forever, there would be something unsatisfying about thinking of him alone, and something also incomplete about him being with me.”
This is the strength of John Irving’s storytelling: The truth of what he’s describing seems manifest to me: The only thing that sets us apart from animals is our ability to love. We have a choice: If we choose to love, in the end we will die, or we will be broken because the person we love will die before we do. If we choose not to love, we will inevitably be broken, beyond love; we will become asexual beings, touching no one, and untouched by anyone, truly an untouchable, hardly human at all.
Now when I remember John Irving saying in class that you must kill a character when you no longer have any further use for them in a story, he never pointed out what a powerful role the character’s death can play in the story after the death and after the funeral. Yes, there is an after-life, certainly in fiction there is.
To me, this is the stuff of a great novelist, John Irving, giving his readers strongly felt and movingly described, raw emotions. It was a moving experience that I began to understand all this at 6:30 a.m. in the morning. As though this was another layer of meaning John originally taught me forty-seven years ago at The University of Iowa.
John Irving and MeBy the time I first met John he had published two novels, The Water-Method Man and Setting Free the Bears, both of which had been well reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. While I was in Iowa City, he released a third, The One Hundred-Fifty-Eight Pound Marriage which was as I remember it was universally panned, and forthwith quickly removed to “the remainder tables.”
John was unfazed by this career setback. The faith he had in his writing talent was unshakable. I don’t think he ever expected all his novels to be successful. If they sold well, he was grateful. I got the impression he thought if some of his novels were not roundly criticized, even booed, he could not be doing his job, which included continually expanding the boundaries of storytelling in interesting ways and not relying on prefabricated formulas.
All this is to say: He gave himself permission to be a great writer.
The model he presented to his students—we were all in our mid-twenties while he was in his late-thirties—was that of an emerging novelist just a few years older than we who was doing a yeoman’s job of managing his career. To me he always appeared calm; he was and remains incredibly intelligent. Even now I don’t know how he did it all. Like his character Owen Meany he had tremendous strength of character and faith, only in the case of John Irving his “way” (like the Buddha “way”) was fueled by faith in himself to do his best, knowing his best was always improving. It was an honor to be in his student.
I was visiting him once in his home in Iowa City where he was spoon-feeding baby food to his youngest boy while talking to me about the writing life. His older boys entered the kitchen from outside saying the family cat had gotten out. I went outside with the older one (Later John coached them to be All American Wrestlers) and retrieved the meowing cat from under dense shrubbery in front of their house. Then we trooped back inside and, as I remember it, he and I went back to discussing fiction as he finished putting his baby down for a nap. As I said, I don’t know how he did it all.
Yes, he was a powerful presence in the classroom, but he never believed in class participation. He would talk non-stop for one-and-a-half hours. He had prodigious powers of concentration. He’d tell stories about writers, himself included. Some of his stories were fascinating. Some lulled me into a late afternoon nap.
He was mindful as a writer; he always knew, or seemed to know what he was about; he was committed to following his writing chops wherever they might lead him, even as it turned out to be on the stage of the 1999 Academy Award presentations where he accepted an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (based on his own novel, The Cider House Rules.
He was a sometimes tennis partner of mine. After beating me in a match, he would run home with the racket in one hand. I would drive home. Now I understand why he ran. For the same reason I ran home after exercising this morning, for the pure joy of doing it.
