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
Juan Diego, an aging and well-established author, is taking a trip to the Philippines to fulfill a promise to someone from his past. During his journey, he takes a trip of a different kind: he messes up his heart medication, which causes him to have vivid dreams and strange experiences. Memories of his childhood in Mexico, living at the dump and then an orphanage, and then a circus, overwhelm him. He meets two unusual women who then pop in and out of his journey and seem real and ghostly at the same time. I haven't read John Irving in awhile. I forgot how much I like his characters and his unique touch and way of looking at the world. This is a splendid book about religion, fate, dreams, literature, memory ... all the big things. It's a bit too long, and could have been edited a bit more tightly, which may turn off some readers. But if you commit to reading it, you will be rewarded. The typical oddities of an Irving book are here: a circus, transgender characters, an orphanage, and quirky but thoughtful people. You will laugh out loud at times, blush a few times (at least I did), and ponder your views on organized religion, sexuality, the meaning of dreams, and the power of good literature.
