John Irving

NOVEL UNTIL I FIND YOU By John Irving. Random House. 819 pages. Skeptical critics, ever-mindful of literary fashion, underrate him, but John Irving, a perennial best-selling novelist, has continued to rebel valiantly against the fictional demands of postmodernism. Until I Find You, his brilliant 11th novel, finds Irving once more in the realm of realism, and, with 819 pages, at a length rivaling that of Tom Jones and Moby Dick. Not for Irving are the pale, cardboard quasi-characters of the postmodern novel nor the death of the authorial persona.

Until I Find You By John Irving Ballantine Books / 825 pages / $15.95 For those who can't get enough of John Irving, there is a great deal to have of him here in a humongous novel about a man born to a tattoo-artist mother and an absconding, church-organist father. "Irving remains loyal to his models, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy," Joan Mellen wrote here last year. "Fiction for Irving, as for those masters, is biography, the full life of a protagonist, engaging if also substantially flawed."

Until I Find You By John Irving Ballantine Books / 825 pages / $15.95 For those who can't get enough of John Irving, there is a great deal to have of him here in a humongous novel about a man born to a tattoo-artist mother and an absconding, church-organist father. "Irving remains loyal to his models, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy," Joan Mellen wrote here last year. "Fiction for Irving, as for those masters, is biography, the full life of a protagonist, engaging if also substantially flawed."

NOVEL UNTIL I FIND YOU By John Irving. Random House. 819 pages. Skeptical critics, ever-mindful of literary fashion, underrate him, but John Irving, a perennial best-selling novelist, has continued to rebel valiantly against the fictional demands of postmodernism. Until I Find You, his brilliant 11th novel, finds Irving once more in the realm of realism, and, with 819 pages, at a length rivaling that of Tom Jones and Moby Dick. Not for Irving are the pale, cardboard quasi-characters of the postmodern novel nor the death of the authorial persona.

A SON OF THE CIRCUS. By John Irving. Random House. 63 pages. $25.FARROKH Daruwalla is a perpetual foreigner. He feels at home in neither his native India nor his adopted Canada, and he identifies with neither his profession as an orthopedic surgeon nor his advocation, screen writing.Like the high-wire circus artists he so admires, Dr. Daruwalla's life is a continual balancing act between conflicting loyalties.In some ways Dr. Daruwalla resembles his creator, John Irving, in whose eighth novel "A Son of the Circus" he is the main character.

Don't let national political tedium cloud your mind. Everybody loves a fight -- a good, nasty, freewheeling slugfest. So, when the Updike-Irving-Mailer vs. Wolfe brawl went very public, bookish fans from the bleachers to the skyboxes leapt up in standing waves, screaming for blood. "Book biggies break bones!" World Wrestling Federation thugs crumpled in limp-wristed shame. There's history behind it. But the spark that ignited this one was Tom Wolfe's novel "A Man in Full." John Updike's review in the New Yorker dismissed it as beneath even "literature in a modest aspirant form."

Fiction: "Beach Music," by Pat Conroy; "What I Lived For," by Joyce Carol Oates; "Closing Time," by Joseph Heller; "None to Accompany Me," by Nadine Gordimer; "Tales of the Mayfair Witches," by Anne Rice; "The Informers," by Bret Easton Ellis; "Fatheralong," by John Edgar Wideman; "A Son of the Circus," by John Irving.Nonfiction: "Rainbow People of God," by Desmond Tutu; "The Ransom of the Russian Art," by John McPhee; "All the Trouble in the World," by P. J. O'Rourke; "Saturday Night Live: The First Twenty Years," by John Head; "The Delany Sisters' Recipes for Living," by Sarah and A. Elizabeth Delany; "Baseball: An Illustrated History," by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns.

Simon Birch is a little guy dealing with big issues. Like, why did God put him on this Earth?Given that he was the smallest baby ever born at Gravestown Memorial Hospital, and that his survival constituted something of a miracle, this is no small issue for Simon. Surely, he reasons, God has a reason for creating someone so special. Surely, Simon is destined for some heroic purpose; if only he knew what it was.lTC Such is the central mystery behind "Simon Birch," an old-fashioned tearjerker in the best sense of the term -- a shamelessly manipulative heartstring-tugger that defies the viewer to maintain a dry eye. Few will rise to the challenge.

No, there aren't any bears or wrestlers in John Irving's eighth novel, but even without those signature marks of his early work, his fans will feel at home here. His countryless characters don't, though. This book has orphans and doctors and writers, a whole circus full of animals, irony and sexual ambiguity galore. It has humor. It has violence. It has Mr. Irving's usual crowded, Dickensian universe and, if not World War II itself, the moral equivalent.For Mr. Irving is a moralist. This is clear now, though it wasn't always.

Boston. -- It is rush hour when I pull up to my mother's apartment. I am still speeding internally through the after-work time zone. The momentum of the day is pushing me forward long after its engine has turned off.Tonight however there is a job to be done, items on a list to be crossed off, a mission to be accomplished. My mother is moving, downsizing from one apartment to another, and we have all pledged to help.My assigned task is to begin to triage the stuff of her life. To pare down and sort out which items from the past will go with her to the future.

In his new novel, John Irving seems to have attempted either (1) a fictionalized essay on the abject superficiality of television news, its perpetrators and its audiences; (2) a romantic redemption novel that suggests that decency and even maturity latently lurk deep in the otherwise tawdry spirits of arrested adolescents; or (3) a satire on contemporary novels that are fixated on the obsessively priapic nature of Modern American Man. After a very careful, patient reading, for the life of me I cannot divine which -- if any -- of these presumable intents was in Irving's mind.

Don't let national political tedium cloud your mind. Everybody loves a fight -- a good, nasty, freewheeling slugfest. So, when the Updike-Irving-Mailer vs. Wolfe brawl went very public, bookish fans from the bleachers to the skyboxes leapt up in standing waves, screaming for blood. "Book biggies break bones!" World Wrestling Federation thugs crumpled in limp-wristed shame. There's history behind it. But the spark that ignited this one was Tom Wolfe's novel "A Man in Full." John Updike's review in the New Yorker dismissed it as beneath even "literature in a modest aspirant form."

In Hollywood, aspiring screenwriters are taught to pitch their stories in short bursts of snappy prose. If you can't knock the moguls off their feet in 75 words or less, you might as well shred your script and get a real job. In recent years the book business has also fallen under the spell of the "high concept" story, and that's a real boon for authors who want to write screen treatments disguised as novels.At first glance, Sena Jeter Naslund's "Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer" (Morrow, $28, 666 pages)

Simon Birch is a little guy dealing with big issues. Like, why did God put him on this Earth?Given that he was the smallest baby ever born at Gravestown Memorial Hospital, and that his survival constituted something of a miracle, this is no small issue for Simon. Surely, he reasons, God has a reason for creating someone so special. Surely, Simon is destined for some heroic purpose; if only he knew what it was.lTC Such is the central mystery behind "Simon Birch," an old-fashioned tearjerker in the best sense of the term -- a shamelessly manipulative heartstring-tugger that defies the viewer to maintain a dry eye. Few will rise to the challenge.

Boston. -- It is rush hour when I pull up to my mother's apartment. I am still speeding internally through the after-work time zone. The momentum of the day is pushing me forward long after its engine has turned off.Tonight however there is a job to be done, items on a list to be crossed off, a mission to be accomplished. My mother is moving, downsizing from one apartment to another, and we have all pledged to help.My assigned task is to begin to triage the stuff of her life. To pare down and sort out which items from the past will go with her to the future.

A SON OF THE CIRCUS. By John Irving. Random House. 63 pages. $25.FARROKH Daruwalla is a perpetual foreigner. He feels at home in neither his native India nor his adopted Canada, and he identifies with neither his profession as an orthopedic surgeon nor his advocation, screen writing.Like the high-wire circus artists he so admires, Dr. Daruwalla's life is a continual balancing act between conflicting loyalties.In some ways Dr. Daruwalla resembles his creator, John Irving, in whose eighth novel "A Son of the Circus" he is the main character.

In Hollywood, aspiring screenwriters are taught to pitch their stories in short bursts of snappy prose. If you can't knock the moguls off their feet in 75 words or less, you might as well shred your script and get a real job. In recent years the book business has also fallen under the spell of the "high concept" story, and that's a real boon for authors who want to write screen treatments disguised as novels.At first glance, Sena Jeter Naslund's "Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer" (Morrow, $28, 666 pages)

In his new novel, John Irving seems to have attempted either (1) a fictionalized essay on the abject superficiality of television news, its perpetrators and its audiences; (2) a romantic redemption novel that suggests that decency and even maturity latently lurk deep in the otherwise tawdry spirits of arrested adolescents; or (3) a satire on contemporary novels that are fixated on the obsessively priapic nature of Modern American Man. After a very careful, patient reading, for the life of me I cannot divine which -- if any -- of these presumable intents was in Irving's mind.

No, there aren't any bears or wrestlers in John Irving's eighth novel, but even without those signature marks of his early work, his fans will feel at home here. His countryless characters don't, though. This book has orphans and doctors and writers, a whole circus full of animals, irony and sexual ambiguity galore. It has humor. It has violence. It has Mr. Irving's usual crowded, Dickensian universe and, if not World War II itself, the moral equivalent.For Mr. Irving is a moralist. This is clear now, though it wasn't always.

John Winslow Irving, looking thuggish in a sweat shirt and bristling with a morning growth of beard, has sailed through questions about alienation, personal success and his own literary voice. But he hesitates when asked about his daily regimen.The author says he sticks to a rigid routine at his Dorset, Vt., home, consisting of an early morning wake-up call, a day of banging away at his trusty IBM Selectric and a late afternoon workout.So, where, the former wrestling coach is asked, does he work out?