Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving

This month’s review found me drawing straws.  Fall seems to be the time of the year that all of my favorite authors tend to publish. Within the last three weeks I have read the newest Rushdie novel, Geraldine Brook’s latest, and one of my favorite authors, John Irving, published last Tuesday.  I was of two minds on which book to write my blog on, but finally settled on John Irving’s novel Avenue of Mysteries. Not necessarily because it’s the best offering of the three, but simply because I was so thrilled to see Irving again.  This novel, as many of Irving’s works, centers on the life and experiences of a burgeoning male adolescent.  No one writes children quite like Mr. Irving.  He never shies from burdening his child characters with a full range of emotional and physical experiences (horrors).  His newest protagonist, Juan Diego a “dump” kid from Mexico City, is no exception. From the present perspective we learn that Juan Diego is a successful writer (he has been able to retire from a career of teaching at Irving’s oft mentioned Iowa Writing Workshop), who dwells on the past to avoid a present wherein he finds himself somewhat “diminished” by a regimen of Beta Blockers prescribed to mitigate heart issues.  Diego’s main bone to pick with the pills is that they seem to interrupt a stream of dreams wherein he is able to relive the formative events of his early adolescence.  All of this begins to change soon after Diego embarks on a trip to the Philippines, where he plans to fulfill a promise made when he was just a boy. At the airport he meets two mysterious women who seem to have an odd, manipulative effect on him, both body and mind.  As he allows himself to be led on this here-and-now journey by two strange, yet strangely familiar women, he gives in ever more readily to the siren call of the past.  Diego’s vivid memories introduce the reader to a cast of characters only an Irving fan could love: Two dogmatic Jesuits, a transgendered prostitute, an atheist surgeon, a loveable priest, a flagellating scholastic, a mind reader, a cripple, a circus troupe, and the usual assortment of thoughtful children and dogs.  Despite growing up on Mexico City’s dump until a fateful day during his fourteenth year, Juan Diego describes his childhood as a happy one, self-taught by reading books left for burning, and translating the speech of his younger, twelve year-old sister Lupe, the “dump reader” reminisces fondly. Lupe, a mind reader, of the unreliable prescient sort, with an unknown speech impediment, becomes increasingly inscrutable as she and Diego fall victim to a series of unfortunate events. Fantastic and charming, Avenue of Mysteries reminds me why I fell in love with John Irving twenty years ago.

-Jennifer Wilson