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