"In One Person" - John Irving

Published in 2012 by Garp Enterprises, Inc.

I really like John Irving, I like his repetitive themes about abortion, bears, and dysfunctional sexual relationships.  I like his stories about how families form and interact.  I even love his strange obsession with wrestling. But this was not his best.

The World According to Garp introduced me to his style of writing and I loved it.  The Cider House Rules introduced me to some of the most lovable hated characters I have read and was a beautiful story.  But this? This wandered, weaved, ducked, bobbed and nosedived into the floor.

I read this with no pretense, I received it without a book-jacket and started on page one without looking into it at all.  The writing style wasn't quite there and the way the narration looped around itself was distracting at best and confusing at worst.  While we follow the tale of a young man who is bisexual, his attraction to manly women, women with small breasts, men of all ages, and his best friend, it's easy to get confused as to which part of his life Irving is writing about.  The mother is a strange character who is confusing and never has her problem resolved in the story. The inevitable introduction of AIDS and the 100 pages that follow where every person we have been introduced to dies, is not a pleasant read and (Spoiler) when he finally meets his dad it feels thrown in like the publishers wanted some closure.

Overall, I wanted more, I wanted Irving.  But I did love that the Bears in this novel were far different than in any other.

Rating: **

Quotes:
"Like my grandmother, Aunt Muriel managed to be both arrogant and judemental without saying anything that was either verifiable or interesting: in this respect  both my grandmother and my aunt struck me as superior-sounding bores."

"Yet me infatuation with Miss Frost had certainly shown me that my penis had ideas that seemed entirely separate from my own thoughts. And if penises could have ideas, it was not such a stretch to imagine that breasts could also think for themselves."

"Isn't it perfectly possible that Nils and his wife are too depressed to have kids? The prospect of having kids depressed the shit out of me and I;m neither suicidal nor Norwegian"