With social distancing being the hallmark of life in the Age of Covid-19, my thesis is that John Irving turned himself into a super-successful novelist by practicing emotional distancing.
When a writer as good as John Irving keeps his emotional distance from his characters, we care about them more, not less. Readers are attracted to a story where the author uses unadorned, brutal language to describe the story's supposedly most poignant moments.
In John Irving's Prayer for Owen Meany, we have eleven-year-old Owen Meany, who is best friend and schoolmate of Johnny Wheelwright, hitting a foul ball during a little-league game that kills Johnny's mother who's seated in the spectator stands. The story's narrator Johnny loses his mother and becomes an orphan in the same instant. Is it tragic? Absolutely. But I contend that the way Irving writes it largely skips over the tragedy and instead concerns itself with cold, clinical details. Yet readers adore his writing. But why?
My belief is that in John Irving's capable hands, emotional distance not only creates reader involvement; it goes beyond, and gives rise to comic effects that can be extremely attractive.
What's the Difference between comic writing and comedy writing?
Irving doesn't play his characters and their difficulties for laughs. If he did, we might think of him as a comedian or a stand-up comic.
Instead, we think of Irving as a serious novelist because, instead of playing his material for laughs, he plays it for pathos, which can variously be thought of as poignancy, tragedy or sadness, or all three at once.
Read how Johnny mother's death is described as she dies in front of her son as we look on: "The ball struck her left temple, spinning her so quickly, one of her high heels broke, and she fell forward, her knees splayed apart, her face hitting the ground first…" That language might appear to be right out of a true crime thriller, except for that detail about the mother wearing high heels. What mother of a young boy would wear high heels to a little league game? This is John Irving at work adding a comic touch.
That's the only description of Johnny's mother's death we have, that single sentence. Then:
"No, Johnny! No, Johnny!" Mr. Chickering said, "You don't want to see her, Johnny," he said.
At that point we're treated to a short treatice on memory:
"Your memory is a monster; you forget, it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you. You think you have the memory; but it has you!"
We glimpse a young boy's mother killed in front of her son. Is it funny? No, it's anything but funny. But is it comic? Yes, it is, because it's so poignant and tragically sad.
In the immediate aftermath, there's a conversation between the police chief and the team manager: "Where's the ball?" (It turns out it's missing.) "Well, it's the murder weapon." Indeed, it is. Seconds later in a terse interchange, it's called "the instrument of death." The tension crackles, but then dissolves when the team manager says to the police chief, " Don't be an asshole, Ben." To me that conversation comes off extremely plausible; also funny and entertaining.
And this: "All the players had been made to stand behind the bleachers while the police took photographs of my mother." They were taking photos of a deceased woman, a chance victim in a tragic accident, but by Irving using the phrase, "photos of my mother," we're brought up short. Once again, that's Irving's comic touch.
In Irving's The Cider House Rules, we likewise see the life of an orphan, Homer Wells, play out as he grows up at "the boy's division at St. Cloud's in Maine. There's enough tragedy in Homer's life for five orphans. Each time he tries out a new set of adoptive parents a new horror ensues. One set of parents can't stand the fact that Homer doesn't cry, so they torture him until he wails. That's Irving's comic writing, for you. It's cold and calculating, I'd say.
Irving's description of The Winkles, an adventure-loving couple looking looking to adopt a young boy with whom they can share their adventures, is quite funny (in a comic way). The Winkles string a rope across a raging river so they can go bouncy-bouncy in and out of the river's white water rapids. They're having a grand time until the paper company that's upstream launches a load of logs down the same river:
"Suddenly the Winkles looked upstream... So did Homer, in time to see the log drive when it was about twenty-five yards away… The mass of logs, each as big as telephone poles, moved swiftly downstream with a wall of water in front of it…"
"Homer Wells was still running when he reached the road… He turned in time to see the logs surge by. A line from the tent had been attached to the Winkles' survival rope, and the entire tent and everything in it were swept downstream in the pounding flow and charge of the logs. The Ramses Paper Company wouldn't recover Billy and Grant's [the Wikles's first names] bodies for three days; they found them nearly four miles away.
When Homer Wells returned to St. Cloud's, Dr. Larch the head of the boy's division, comments, "You didn't give the Winkles much of a chance." Only after Homer explained what happened does Dr. Larch say, "You mean the Winkles are gone?"
A fun-loving couple, the Winkles, are gone, but do I cry for them? No. Do I mourn them? No. The scene strikes me as being both comic and entertaining, the exact opposite of compassionate and caring. All in all, it's rather cruel, wouldn't you agree?
John Irving is always going for comic effects, and that's the brutal, cold, hard truth. What's amazing to me is that John knew at a very early age that the less emotion he invested in his characters, the more passionate his readers would feel about them. In my view, at a very early age, John Irving had that extremely brilliant insight, He realized he could leverage off the good will of his readers to turn them into his readers' champions. That's something Charles Dickens understood; but it's somethjing many writers today can't begin to understand, no less master.
Next month: Still more of what I learned from John Irving.
