I still recall cracking open John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany for the first time and discovering that Owen’s dialogue was capitalized. The capitalization came as a bit of a shock, but it certainly set Owen’s speech off from all other dialogue, which was a brilliant device to underscore the fact that Owen had a voice and was a boy like no other. The capitalization never allowed the reader to forget how Irving described Owen’s voice, which in turn kept me aware of how utterly unique the character of Owen Meany was from beginning to end. A Prayer for Owen Meany was my first John Irving novel, and Owen’s dialogue was the first bit of magic Mr. Irving spun for me, but I’ve since been charmed and left in awe countless times by Mr. Irving, whom I consider one of the best writers of the last half century. Talented Mr. Irving surely is, but I get the sense that a good portion of his brilliance comes from a nose to the grindstone work ethic which, when married to prodigious creativity, has allowed him to take his stories to unimaginable places.
He's created larger than life characters and seen them through wildly imaginative novels such as Hotel New Hampshire, the afore-mentioned A Prayer for Owen Meany, and The World According to Garp. Scratch the surface of many of his books, however, and what you find in whole or in part, are coming of age stories. When I think of his work in this light, it comes as no surprise that Mr. Irving plumbs the depths of this formative period in our lives, filled with improbable situations and relationships that yield in turns laughter, tears, and insights about what it is to be human. There are several themes that he has revisited a number of times, yet he takes us somewhere new and unexpected every time. The creativity is remarkable, yet I suspect Mr. Irving reaches those heights by writing and rewriting until he pushes his work somewhere new and fresh.
I’ve been asked to characterize Mr. Irving’s work in terms of genre and the like; I’m not sure I can. While his writing is often referred to as literary, it’s also very accessible—I’ve never felt as if he was writing to impress critics, but simply telling a good story to the best of his considerable ability. There are touches of absurdity in his work, splashes of laugh out loud hilarity, plenty of pathos, and an element of the mystic or supernatural isn’t uncommon. Most importantly, Mr. Irving creates unique characters we care about deeply as they move through epic sagas that address universal themes that underpin the tapestry of his characters’ lives, and frequently mirror our own. I often find myself pondering a John Irving novel long after I turn the final page. That’s about as big a compliment as I can give to a creative work, and it’s true of almost every John Irving novel I have read.