{"id":1667,"date":"2013-02-24T23:06:59","date_gmt":"2013-02-25T07:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1667"},"modified":"2013-02-24T23:06:59","modified_gmt":"2013-02-25T07:06:59","slug":"review-in-one-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1667","title":{"rendered":"Review: In One Person"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Irving writes a John Irving novel better than anyone else does.\u00a0 That&#8217;s more of a trick than it sounds like.\u00a0 More than many writers, Irving pays explicit homage to his influences and has become closely attached to a set of symbols and touchstones.\u00a0 Having such a strong and imitable voice will attract parodists and rip-off artists at a surprising rate. It&#8217;s easy for a rip-off to become more noticed than the original; ask <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bill_hicks\">Bill Hicks<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s amusing that Irving has chosen to practically parody himself in <em>In One Person<\/em>. Reading it isn&#8217;t so much a game of &#8220;spot the trope&#8221; as looking for ground that hasn&#8217;t been covered by Irving before. It&#8217;s a misleading game, though.\u00a0 Even as I was checking the boxes (there&#8217;s a cross dresser, there&#8217;s a wrestler, it&#8217;s a New England Prep School, Dickens story, oh, look Austria) it never felt old. It&#8217;s a nice way to make the point that individual characters and people are individuals, even if they share experiences.<\/p>\n<p>And really, what Irving does better than anyone is build his characters lives that bring them into sharp focus.\u00a0 There&#8217;s usually an issue of the day to address as well, of course.\u00a0 The man is a Dickens disciple, after all.\u00a0 While his well-wrought characters generally illuminate that issue, I always enjoy them just for their clockwork completeness and emotional verisimilitude.<\/p>\n<p><em>In One Person <\/em>has a lot to say about the lives of non-heterosexuals (that sounds PC, but Irving covers a fair amount of this ground) that is certainly worth hearing.\u00a0 Irving says it all by walking a real person through that world and inviting us along. Writers have been doing that since Dickens (at least), but few as well.<\/p>\n<p>Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Irving writes a John Irving novel better than anyone else does.\u00a0 That&#8217;s more of a trick than it sounds like.\u00a0 More than many writers, Irving pays explicit homage to his influences and has become closely attached to a set of symbols and touchstones.\u00a0 Having such a strong and imitable voice will attract parodists and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1667"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1671,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions\/1671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}