In One Person by John Irving

Previously published in The Herald Magazine.

In a recent interview with Esquire magazine, American writer John Irving is quoted as saying, ‘[A]ll of my characters, in all of my novels, are on a collision course. In this novel, AIDS is the collision in waiting’. The novel in question is In One Person - Irving’s thirteenth novel since his first, Setting Free the Bears from 1968. In this novel, as in his others, Irving   has not just characters on a collision course, but for those familiar with any of Irving’s earlier works, In One Person will feel like a multi-textural, mutli-arced mash up of Irving’s favourite tropes and themes. 

Let’s just count these off right away: this is a sprawling family epic set mainly in New England, there is a boys boarding school, wrestling, ‘deviant’ sexuality in the form of pan-sexuality/cross dressers across generations/transgenders, fatal accidents, sudden suicides, incest, sexual abuse, an absentee father, morality in metatheatre, a protagonist who is a writer. This is a non-chronological narrative, a bildungsroman that follows the natural tangents of memory rather than the forced ones of a strict memoir, there are constant literary references to Dickens, Ibsen, Rilke, Williams, Flaubert and masses of Shakespeare. There may have been a many review claiming In One Person is Irving’s most sexually transgressive novel yet, but to anyone who has read and enjoyed Hotel New Hampshire, nothing in In One Person will shock or disgust. This is what Irving is good at - this is what he knows he can do well. There’s no arguing that, but the fact that this time he’s earnestly proving a point is just eventually a tiny bit boring. 

In One Person is essentially about the relationship between a boy and an older transsexual, a relationship that will easily influence, if not define every other relationship bisexual Billy will grow to have. Bill Abbott does not initially know that Miss Frost was once Big Al, a champion wrestler at the same private boys school he attends, and while Billy is confused when he finds out, it does nothing to curb his desire for the librarian. ‘My dear boy,’ says Irving’s brutally complex Miss Frost to Billy on the single instance he attempts to box her gender and sexuality, ‘please don’t put a label on me - don’t make me a category before you get to know me!’ This line is important enough to Irving (and more importantly, to the novel) to place twice - just in case you didn’t get the point the first time. 

In Miss Frost, Irving really has created a riveting character. He admits to being confused about who the most important character was, and who the lead character was. Billy may well be the protagonist here, but Miss Frost is by far the most important - she is the sole drive behind Billy’s narrative, and indeed, much of his future. There are plenty of interesting and complicated characters other than her, and yet much of the narrative’s thrust goes back to her life and the brief time she spent with Billy. 

Does Irving still have a cynical view of America’s understanding and in/tolerance of sexuality? In One Person would show that he does - here is a book about wandering sexual preferences, the AIDs crisis and people whose lives have been dramatically effected by the sexual preferences of others. Irving is perfectly at ease with accepting all sorts of sexual meanderings and their byproducts, but he’s adamant to point out that America is not.