If anyone were to pose the question to me, "How did John Irving write so many best-selling novels?" (No one ever has.) I would answer that, at least in the case of two of his books, Prayer for Owen Meany and Cider House Rules, he did it by portraying innocent, orphan children being subjected to abuse while he writes about it in a matter-of-fact way. By using this recipe, John Irving strongly motivates his readers to want to protect the innocents (while they may have secretly been entertained by the description of the abuse) which, in turn, creates an extremely strong and nuanced emotional bond between the reader and character.
As an example, I would point to Owen Meany being lifted aloft by his Sunday school class and being passed from student to student while he protests mildly. This short scene, which appears early on in Prayer for Owen Meany should be considered the key visual for the entire novel. A screenplay or movie of the book would almost have to open with this scene. By the end of the scene, I would wager most readers are ready to nominate Owen for a "Christ Figure Oscar," if such an award existed, while at the same time we're not only allowed but encouraged to be entertained by this scene of child abuse.
I believe most readers, if they were truthful with themselves, would probably admit that if they were a child attending a Sunday school class where this "passing around scene" actually took place, they might have taken part in the abuse and even enjoyed doing so.
(Please don't tell me you would have run from the class and told the teacher who was reportedly on a smoke-break that something bad was happening back at the class. Please, don't. Would you really have done that?)
My opinion: By writing the scene in as an enticing manner as he does, John has placed you in a morally compromised position.
(When we were friends, I always called him John, and I mean no disrespect by calling him that here.)
John forces you to take sides. You have little choice. If you have a pulse, you are involved. And the instant you admit to yourself you would be having fun cruelly abusing Owen Meany by passing him around, your parent-side kicks in, and you say to yourself, "Kids can treat each other so horribly. Sunday school was so horrible. I hated the whole experience." And once again, John's got you involved and morally compromised. Now you're ready to ban Sunday Schools all together. No, better yet, ban religion! Why do we do these horrible things to our own children who we supposedly love?
(And I'll have you know, this is being written by someone who taught religious school for seven years, and, cruelly abused his own children by bribing them with doughnuts with sprinkles on top to attend.)
When I was an innocent student of John's at The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, John gave each of us fair warning. I can even hear John now saying, "You really want to be a novelist? Prepare to spend your life in a room alone abusing, mutilating and murdering the ones you love, i.e., your characters. Prepare to cut off penises and fingers in furtherance of getting readers to sign on to reading your 500+ page novels.
For God's sakes, give up being nice to your characters. If you want to be a novelist, prepare to perform unspeakable acts to your characters. Isn't being a novelist fun? Don't you love it? Of course you do. You can't get enough. That's why you're here."
(Just think about this for a moment: Isn't it uncanny how a novelist, as soon as he or she detaches a body part from a character, causes the reader to feel more attached to that character? Crazy, huh?)
When John said all that to us, he should have been costumed in a black suit playing the part of a somber, sober New Hampshire undertaker at the wheel of a very long, black Cadillac limousine.
I wouldn't listen to him. Not me. I was in the "I think I'll go easy on my characters and just pretend I'm going hard on them" school of novel writing. Well, that's a recipe for failure. It only took me some forty years to come around to John's persuasion. Let's hear it for the New Hampshire Undertaker. (The New Hampshire Undertaker. What a great title for a John Irving novel, agreed?)
Next month: Still more on what I learned from John Irving.
