John Irving, poolside in 1998.
Review by
When "The World According to Garp" was published more than 30 years ago, John Irving found himself on bestseller lists for the first time. Since then he's won a shelf of awards, including an Oscar for the adaptation of his novel "The Cider House Rules" into a screenplay. His new book, “Last Night in Twisted River,” our reviewer Daniel Mallory writes today, is "full-throated, hot-blooded and clear-eyed.... Majestic yet intimate."
Digging into our archives, we found that Irving spent time at the pool at Shutters on the Beach with David L. Ulin. Here's that 1998 piece in its entirety:
He's Wrestled With Life . . .
. . . And come out on top. John Irving has another bestseller, two film scripts and 'Garp' is marking its 20th anniversary.
John Irving loves to talk. Sitting shirtless in the sun at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, the 56-year-old author takes a series of simple questions and expands on them, tossing off digressions as if conversation were a literary form in its own right.
Ask him about his experience writing screenplays, and he'll tell you what he thinks of Hollywood, and why a book is always better than a film. Mention his predilection for tragedy -- his work is marked by dead children, plane crashes, bad things happening to good people -- and he'll segue into a treatise on the difference between sentimentality and emotion.
Even the silver-dollar-size tattoo etched into his left shoulder, a green maple leaf bleeding to red at its edges, inspires a story about the history of tattooing, his own rotator cuff surgery and the research that went into his ninth novel, "A Widow for One Year," currently riding the bestseller charts. Listening to him, one thing becomes increasingly obvious: There's a reason why his books are so long.
These days he has a lot to talk about, beginning with the publication of "A Widow for One Year" and the Modern Library's simultaneous 20th anniversary edition of "The World According to Garp," the novel that put him on the literary map.
Then there's the six-hour-long adaptation of his novel "The Cider House Rules" (1985) that will open at the Mark Taper Forum next month; in September, a film version of the same book, with his own screenplay, is scheduled to move into production after more than a decade of false starts.
As if that weren't enough, yet another Irving novel will go before the cameras in January: "A Son of the Circus," also with an Irving script. All in all, it's a concentrated period of exposure for a writer who tends to deride such distractions of modern literary life as antithetical to the purpose he has defined for himself: working seven days a week, eight hours a day, to produce one substantial novel every four years.
"I'm certainly grateful," he says, "but I don't credit the various adaptations of my work with being that important. In fact, they've taken me away from my day job. For all the time I've put into those two screenplays, I could have written another novel. That's the line I look at, and that's the truth."
Photo: John Irving
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