The 158-Pound Marriage (John Irving) Conclusion

So, Audrey Cannon turns out to be a co-worker that Severin once had an extra-marital fling with.  A betrayal of trust like that casts some doubt over whether his wife, Edith, would realistically have ever considered the arrangement we are reading about now.   Or maybe it’s a contributing factor; hard to generalize women’s feelings on this point.  But Edith is obviously still greatly upset about it.

I mentioned earlier that the technique of “skipping around the timeline” was not my favorite technique used by authors.  The structure of the plot in this book, for instance, has us getting to know the characters in the “present” before showing us some of the more salient features of their pasts, including the shared pasts of the characters as they met and got married.  To me, the skipping-around technique feels like a “red flag” that says, “THIS IS FILLER.”  It’s as if the author, upon realizing that his finished work was going to be a little skimpy, decided to puff up the book a little by giving us amusing anecdotes from the characters’ pasts that really don’t add much to the story we’re reading.  Sure, the back-story can give us a more complete perspective on what’s happening in present time, but do we really care about it at this point?  Wouldn’t it be better to go back and put the “filler” earlier in the story where it chronologically belongs?  Or is it only interesting in connection with what we have already read?  Do some authors agonize endlessly over which passages should be placed where in the narrative, like Beethoven tearing out his hair over whether to add those two extra notes to a melodic phrase?

The other “red flag” that seems to go up when too much back-story is wedged into the plot is the one that says, “This is a more about the character(s) than the ideas/premise like you’d hoped.”  Books about the character or characters are alright, if that’s what you’re in the mood for.  Many years ago, they would sport titles that began, “The Adventures of …” followed by the name of the antagonist.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a superb example.  It wasn’t really about a trip down the Mississippi on a raft; it was about the “Life and Times” of the boy it was named after.  One of the earliest examples (I think I read somewhere it may be considered THE earliest) was Don Quixote.  Eventually, authors would just name the book after the character:  Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Tristram Shandy.

I hesitate to go into too much detail about the sexual details of our foursome here (which is one of the reasons for the diatribe above) though it is mostly what the text consists of.  But the predictable outcome of the four-way relationship – the real message the story ultimately conveys – does come home to them with a vengeance.  This would not have been an easy section to write, but it is done about as well as it could be.  Not only The Narrator, but the reader as well, senses the ugliness and pain of the relationships falling apart.  Utch, seemingly the simplest and most emotionally stable character up to this point, is the one that takes it the hardest, and our hearts really go out to her.  We really do see four separate versions of crushing emotional pain as the characters realize it’s over.

What’s the worst that could happen?  Well, murder; but our characters are a little more stable than that.  Divorce?  Utch leaves The Narrator, taking their children, but it’s not clear whether this is permanent.  Hatred?  At one point, The Narrator brings that up; ‘”All this hatred isn’t necessary,” I said.  “Don’t be stupid,” Severin said.  “You’re doing it yourself.  You’re trying to make Utch hate me, and you’ll succeed,” he said cheerfully.   “Just be patient.”’  And, yes, the next to last paragraph seems to confirm it; “Yesterday Utch wrote that she saw Edith sitting in Demel’s eating a pastry.  I hope she gets fat.”

March's book of the month:

“Heart of Brass,” by Kate Cross!

Ladies, if you like Romance Novels, this one’s for you!  The Steampunk element should be a big plus as well! 

"Fabulously entertaining—a great romance in an inventive, believable steampunk world!" — New York Times bestselling author Stephanie Laurens

“Riveting! I couldn’t put it down. I can't wait for the next book!”  — #1 New York Times bestselling author Victoria Alexander

Week 1:  Chapters 1-6

(First post, 3-6-15)

Week 2:  Chapters 7-11
Week 3:  Chapters 12-16
Week 4:  Chapters 17-End


[Watch for a new format in April - a major change in how the club operates! If you have suggestions about how it should be run, now is definitely the time to chime in. Thanks!]

 

 

 

The 158-Pound Marriage (John Irving) Chapters 6-7

Chapter Six begins, ‘Then one night Severin took Utch to the wrestling room.’  This is an odd enough thing to do, but it seems to have some special significance to Severin and, as we will presumably find out later, to Edith and Utchka as well.  When Severin comes home and it’s time for The Narrator to go home, Severin seems particularly giddy and mentions that The Narrator will find his house “neat as a pin.”  This seems somehow ominous to The Narrator, and in a moment of doubt, his trust in Severin is badly shaken:  ‘I was chilled in the car.  I had a momentary vision, terrible and clear, of coming home and finding Utch murdered in our bed, her limbs twisted and tied into some elaborate wrestler’s knot; the rest of the house would be “neat as a pin.”’

As mentioned before, this is one of those plots that skip all over the time line to provide back story on the characters.  Not my favorite technique as a reader, but John Irving does it so well.  Each of our four main characters gets the spotlight shone on their past, and the times when the two couples first met are outlined as well.  The passage on the meeting and subsequent marriage of The Narrator and Utchka is especially interesting.  Their journey as newlyweds back to the United States coincides with the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination.  One paragraph is particularly fine:

‘When we landed in New York, some magazine had already printed the picture of Mrs. Kennedy which was to be around for months.  It was a big color photograph – it was better in color because the blood really looked like blood; it showed her stunned and grieving and oblivious of her own appearance.  She had always been so concerned about her looks that I think the public liked seeing her this way.  It was the closest thing to seeing her naked; we were voyeurs.  She wore that blood-spattered suit; her stockings were matted with the blood of the President; her face was vacant.  Utch thought the photograph disgusting; it made her cry all the way to Boston.  People around us probably thought she was crying for Kennedy and the country, but she wasn’t; she was reacting to the face in the photograph, that grief, that look of being so totally had that you just don’t care anymore.  I thing that Utch was crying for Kudashvili, and for her mother, and for that terrible village she came from, which was just like any other village.  I think she empathized with the vacancy on the face of the President’s widow.’

The humor in this story is often quite subtle.  The description of how the ladies sleep is a nice example: ‘She [Utch] did not curl tight and protect herself; she sprawled.  If you wanted to cuddle against her, she didn’t mind, but she herself was not one to cuddle.  Edith slept like a cat – contained, a fortress, snug against you.  Utch spread herself out as if she were trying to dry in the sun.  When she lay on her back, she didn’t seem to notice where the covers were, and she lay on her stomach like a swimmer frozen in the instant of the breaststroke kick.  On her side she lay like the profile of a hurdler.  In the middle of the night she would often lash an arm out and swat the bedside lamp off the night table or bash the alarm clock across the room.’

It is during a discussion of this quirk between The Narrator and Edith that he mentions the fact that Severin took Utch to the wresting room at night.  Edith freaks out and we suddenly have a little mystery on our hands.  Apparently there is a secret that has been withheld from him about someone named Audrey Cannon.  We end chapter seven with The Narrator demanding of the other three to tell him who Audrey Cannon is (and, subsequently, why the name seems to stir up such emotions in the others!).

March's book of the month:

“Heart of Brass,” by Kate Cross!

Ladies, if you like Romance Novels, this one’s for you!  The Steampunk element should be a big plus as well! 

"Fabulously entertaining—a great romance in an inventive, believable steampunk world!" — New York Times bestselling author Stephanie Laurens

“Riveting! I couldn’t put it down. I can't wait for the next book!”  — #1 New York Times bestselling author Victoria Alexander

Week 1:  Chapters 1-6

(First post, 3-6-15)

Week 2:  Chapters 7-11
Week 3:  Chapters 12-16
Week 4:  Chapters 17-End


[Watch for a new format in April - a major change in how the club operates! If you have suggestions about how it should be run, now is definitely the time to chime in. Thanks!]

The 158-Pound Marriage (John Irving) Chapters 4-5

Irving’s interest in and knowledge of wrestling is on display once again, and includes an interesting passage on wrestling as an acquired taste.  ‘I understood perfectly what Edith didn’t like about the wrestling.  She was attracted by an aspect of Severin that could also weary her; she liked his cocky sureness, his explosiveness; she wasn’t that way, but she liked it in him, except when it seemed too strong, threatening to suck her up in it.  And that aspect was strongest when he was involved with his wrestlers.  How crazily committed all Severin’s wrestlers looked to her!  They seemed hypnotized by themselves, drugged in ego, which unleashed the moment their physical frenzy was peaking.  It was too loud, too serious, too intense.  It was also more struggle than grace; though Severin insisted it was more like a dance than a fight, to her it was a fight.  To me, too.  Also, more to the point, it was boring.  So few of the matches were really close; often you just watched someone maul someone else – the only issue in doubt being whether or not the obvious winner would finally pin his victim or have to be content with just rubbing him all over the mat.’

The sexual undertones in passages like these are obvious if you’re looking for them.  More blatantly, in a discussion of one of the black wrestlers:  ‘”Why do you like him?” Edith asked her; she meant Tyrone Williams.  “He’s just my size,” said Utch, “and I think he’s a wonderful color.  It’s like caramels.”  “Yummy,” Edith said, but she didn’t mean it.’

The description of The Narrator (who never identifies himself by name) and Edith “making love” in the shower at the beginning of chapter 5 provides an interesting contrast to the descriptions in the few Romance novels I’ve read.  In Romance novels, there is a curious mix of literal depiction and eye-rollingly trite clichés applied to the “love-making” scenes.  This makes me wonder why such scenes written by (and for) women would be so much more graphic than those written by men.  Men are supposed to be cruder in their desires, right?  I question that.  Even in the gritty, futuristic crime novels of J. D. Robb (a.k.a. Nora Roberts), the sex scenes are as trite as the ones in her love-story novels written as Roberts.  Of course, they also say that men find pictures of scantily clad women sexier than pictures of completely naked ones.  “Leaving more to the imagination.”  Do men really have more highly-developed imaginations than women?  I question that, too!

Why do I put quotes around “making love” and “love-making”?  Well, it seems self-evident to me that what’s really going on here is copulation.  You “make” a sculpture; or a coffee table.  “Having sex” is almost as semantically awkward; you’re not “having” something; you’re “doing” something.  It’s an “act,” not a hamburger.  But “copulation” sounds too clinical and that takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it?  I guess that’s why I’m not a Romance writer.  This is related to the point that Severin was making in chapter 3; ‘”No, I think it’s sex,” Severin said suddenly.  “It’s just sex, and that’s all it can be in a thing like this.”’

The long sequence at Edith’s mother’s isolated house “on the Cape,” with no children around, contained passages that could be considered pornographic.  It also developed the personality dynamics between the four characters that made for some of the most interesting reading so far.  It’s a good example of Irving’s uncanny ability to create a sense of reality through the use of odd details.  (“This has to be true; you can’t make this stuff up.”)  Of course, some of it may well be borrowed from personal experiences...




Next Week:  Chapters 6-7

Week 4:  Chapters 8-10

The 158-Pound Marriage (John Irving) Chapters 1-3

John Irving is one of those authors who take very much to heart the old advice given to would-be writers that one should “write what you know.”  His novels almost always contain a healthy dose of more or less autobiographical content.  They are typically set in his neck of the woods, Maine, and often deal with wrestling to some extent; his other main love besides writing.  On the back of my copy of this book, a blurb states, “One of the most remarkable things about John Irving’s first three novels … is that they can be read as one extended fictional enterprise…”  His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, and his second, The Water-Method Man, deal with much of the same contextual ideas that this one does.  They aren’t sequels, by any means, but they do share backgrounds and themes to a great extent, especially in giving the characters childhood memories of World War II.

‘In 1945, just before the Russians got to Vienna, the entire zoo was eaten.  Of course, as the people got hungrier, small raiding parties had escaped, mostly at night, with an antelope or a zebra here and there.’  This historical event was the crux of the first book, in which the main characters schemed to set all the zoo animals free (especially the bears, for some reason) late at night so that they wouldn’t be used as food by the hungry townsfolk.  That book also dealt a little with the idea of “sharing” a lover.

Normally, I don’t read prefaces or even book jacket blurbs before starting a book because they often contain spoilers and I would rather discover what the book is about as I read it.  So I went into this one not realizing that the premise was about wife-swapping (or husband-swapping, depending on perspective - the spoiler on the book cover refers to it as a “menage a quatre”).   I find that a highly intriguing premise, but please don’t read too much into that – it sounds like a recipe for disaster to me!  In the last paragraph of chapter one, Edith, the “other wife,” looks at our narrator and, ‘She smiled at me.  Of course I knew, then, where her smile was from and where we were all going.’  Ideally, that should be the reader’s first clue; not the book jacket.

Irving is also one of those authors who skip all over the plot line, patching together a seemingly random stream of anecdotes that eventually come together in a kind of literary collage in order to tell his story.  Before reading this book, I had read a story by another author that followed one main character through a more or less strictly sequential plot line, along with another story that skipped back and forth between two parallel plot lines that eventually merged.  Here, this “collage” technique (I’m sure a Literature major could give us standardized terminology for these approaches) can be off-putting for me.  I’m more comfortable with sequential plot lines, although in the hands of a master – Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind – the “collage” technique can be very entertaining.  Irving is a little thornier, takes a little more effort on the part of the reader.   In works of his I’ve previously read, such as A Prayer For Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules – both absolutely brilliant works – this approach works admirably well.

At one point, Vienna, Austria, where much of the early action takes place, is referred to as a city ‘that “never took the twentieth century seriously.”  The remark is quite true.  Once I asked Severin if he regarded the new so-called Sexual Freedom as a fad.  “I regard the twentieth century as a fad,” he said.’  Those of us who live in a nation that is only a little more than two hundred years old might find this attitude a little hard to fathom.  Observations like this one help make the book a stimulating read!

Next Week:  Chapters 4-5

Week 3:  Chapters 6-7
Week 4:  Chapters 8-10