John Irving’s ‘In One Person’ exposes human frailty
"You make all these sexual extremes seem normal — that's what you do and then you expect us to sympathize with them," the son of a high-school friend tells novelist Billy Abbott, the bisexual narrator of John Irving's 13th novel, In One Person.
"Yes," Abbott replies, "that's more or less what I do."
The same could be said of Irving. Ever since that car coasted up the driveway with the lights out in The World According to Garp, you could craft an epilogue to the Kinsey Report with all the unusual impulses, desires and peculiarities that Irving has tenderly humanized.
In One Person is a plea for acceptance. Billy grows up in the familiar Irving milieu of New England, a fictional town called First Sister, Vt. (It's an Irving novel, so there's gender bending, wrestling and a trip to Vienna as well, but the only bears, ahem, are of the hairy and male variety.)
His father has disappeared; his controlling mother is now married to the English and drama teacher at the town's prep school. Billy's oddball family includes a grandfather who loves to dress as women in theater productions, so mom's on the lookout for any signs of deviance.
Even as a 13-year-old in the mid-1950s, when this erotic history begins, ever-questioning Billy talks openly of his "dangerous crushes" on the "wrong people."
They include feelings for his stepfather; his therapist at school and her daughter, Elaine; a male classmate; and the town librarian, Miss Frost, whose large hands (barely) conceal a secret of her own. And that's before he travels to Europe and San Francisco after high school!
It's only fitting that so much action in First Sister revolves around the theater, because this is a novel about role-playing, or as Billy puts it, how he was "formed by how long I kept the secret of myself from the people I loved." And formed by desire for both men, women and those somewhere in between, Billy is viewed suspiciously by everyone.
Irving is a master of the big-hearted social epic, but the earnest tone sometimes wears (as do Billy's usual reactions to new adventures: "I liked it a lot!").
His mothers all go over the edge. When a nearly 70-year-old Billy returns to that present-day prep school and saves a young transgender student with the wrestling moves he learned from Miss Frost, it's a little too full-circle.
But before that easy ending comes two devastating chapters set during the 1980s. They grapple with death, AIDS and with profundity and quiet dignity, a parade of loss that's Irving at his best: unbearably sad, unforgettably narrated, painfully human.