In One Person by John Irving

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I admit, I am a long time John Irving fan—starting with ‘Cider House Rules’ which I read when it came out in 1985, and ‘A Prayer For Owen Meany’ in 1989.  From there I went backwards, reading ‘Water Method Man’ (I had since moved to Iowa City, where the book takes place, so reading this one was just a bit of catching up on local folklore), ‘Hotel New Hampshire’, and ‘The World According to Garp’.  At that point I could see that he was a man committed to humanizing the most bizarre and marginalized amongst us.  Nothing about ‘Until I Find You’, “the Fourth Hand’, or ‘Widow for One Year’ changed that impression.  He is the Pedro Almodóvar of American fiction.  He has main characters like none you know in your everyday life (well, I am in mental health, so I get a glimpse at some of them some days)—they are circus performers, tattoo artists, sex workers, dwarfs, mentally ill, autistic, and so on.  I am not exaggerating.  In fact, I may be downplaying the degree to which his characters are at once recognizable and unknown to us.   

So ‘In One Person’, a book inhabited by gay, bisexual, and transgendered characters is just a natural extension of Irving’s fictional world.  He loves those who are misunderstood, feared, humiliated, and marginalized on the outside, and depicts them as people that we can completely identify with on the inside.  That is the place that he writes best from.  The starts off in the 1950’s, so the tolerance for any kind of non-straight sexual preferences is not high—but William Abbott comes from a long line of gay cross dressers, so he is surrounded by people who figure out who he is before he does.  So there isn’t a lot of hazing and taunting,  It is not that sort of book about  sexually differences.  It really focuses on how much William is just about as messed up as any other teenager coming of age, and that once he figures out what turns him on, he goes for it.  No hiding it, living a lie, any of that stuff.  Just trying to get to know him is all. The other things you might expect are here—there is a lot of wrestling, and the action takes place largely in a New England prep school.  No bears, no dwarfs, and plenty of serious stuff when he gets to the HIV era, it is sad, but not overly sentimental.  He wants to marginalized to be understandable.