Roughly in the present day, Juan Diego Guerrero, a fiction author, travels from his home in Iowa City to the Philippines. On the way he meets a mysterious mother and daughter, who both seduce and guide him. Meanwhile, his dreaming self remembers his childhood in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the characters that peopled it: a garbage dump boss who was probably not his father, a kindly Jesuit brother who brought him books, an overenthusiastic American missionary and the prostitute he fell in love with, and, most of all, his sister, Lupe.
Continue reading Avenue of Mysteries
I’m not going to pretend that Irving is anything other than a popular fiction writer (slash screenplay writer, I guess). This isn’t, let’s face it, literature. But still.
Although it’s a long time since I read Garp, I can still remember how, at the time, it was the first time I’d read anything like it. I think Irving’s gift really lies in the creation of his characters, which are not only unique and memorable, but which seem to have something otherworldly about them, to be somehow a signifier of an unknowable other. That gift is also at work in Owen Meany, and gives us the narrator, John Wheelwright, once impatient to leave adolescence, now living out his days in the frustration of hindsight; his grandmother, the family’s firm-minded old-money matriarch with her addiction to trashy television; his gentle but fiercely loyal stepfather, Dan; and Owen, the title character, a tiny, squeaky-voiced visionary who cuts to the truth others half-glimpse, and who believes he knows the date and manner of his death. Continue reading A Prayer for Owen Meany