Book review: In One Person, by John Irving

Epigraphs: who needs them? Damned by polymath Barry Humphries as “a high falutin’ mannerism”, they too often seem superfluous – fiction’s bling.

In One Person

by John Irving

Doubleday, 426pp, £18.99

John Irving has, happily, bucked the trend, adorning his novel, In One Person, with a single apposite quote from Shakespeare’s tragedy, Richard II: “Thus play I in one person many people/ And none contented.” It is a perfect encapsulation of what follows, portending a tale of multiple selves, of many people, most of them playing.

Here is the story of Billy Dean, born in 1942, who becomes William Abbott (after his step-father), as he looks back on a lifetime’s winter of discontent. Regular readers of Irving’s fictions will be unsurprised by telling dabs of autobiography: the recurrent absent father, the powerful mother, sexual precociousness, suppressed self-righteous aggression, the all-consuming pursuit of identity. Irving’s fans may be disappointed by the book’s brevity; at 426 pages, it’s half the length of some of its predecessors. Nonetheless, it is so overblown, you can still hear the contents rattling inside.

Billy – like others of Irving’s lead characters – is a novelist who is given (as is Irving) to digression. The book’s byways sub-divide, darting through time, from past to distant past, to the present, without warning, touching randomly upon Billy’s forays abroad, his high school year book, productions of Shakespeare staged at school, or plays put on by the First Sisters Players, the local rep, which mirror the internecine angst that pervades the politics and relationships in the little Vermont township – a cauldron of gossip – from which the drama group takes its name.

Billy’s immediate family existence is full of babble. His Grandpa Harry could fit in The Waltons were it not for his love of cross-dressing and playing women’s roles exclusively on stage. The family’s women are highly strung. Billy’s Mom attracts the high school guys. She’s “a moral and educational failure”, having flunked school many years before, becoming pregnant to Billy’s (now absent) then schoolboy father. Billy’s father had joined the forces in the Second World War and never returned, but Billy embodies his father’s penchant for older seductresses, being in thrall to the town librarian, Miss Frost, a statuesque, all-seeing sphinx who introduces him to Dickens, and later to something more addictive.

The novel’s “action” such as it is, veers from the library to the First Sisters Players rehearsals. The lens of scrutiny through which Irving (using Billy as its eye) surveys these characters tends to exaggerate their foibles and proclivities. In adolescence Billy discovers bisexuality, the attractiveness of boys being focused in particular on Kittredge, a star wrestler at Favorite River College, the local school.

Through the school he meets Elaine who becomes his best friend; he is stalked by Tom Atkins, a student-cum-acolyte with whom he spends a gap year bumping through Europe encountering sex in its rich array of salacious guises. But his bisexuality is best served by Miss Frost. Through the several surprises and complexities of their dealings Billy discovers there’s more to gender than meets the eye.

The book’s few “surprises” you see in advance. Everything hinges on the quality of the characters, and of the writing – which hinges in turn on Billy’s perceptiveness and voice – attuned as Irving buffs will expect to a readable slipstream of frank disclosures which has pointed to comparison with Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut, however, could build a narrative to a crescendo. Here Irving ambles. Even the potent matter of whether or not Billy’s father will reappear is suppressed by the noise of characters hamming up their roles.

The novel’s heartland, from the beginning, is Billy’s deliciously fraught 1950s adolescence, but much is also made later on of the deaths of friends in the 1980s as the AIDS epidemic takes root. In the chapter “Not Natural Causes” a virtual massacre occurs to add to the car crash (one of Irving’s favourite motifs) that earlier claims his snappish Aunt Muriel and his increasingly flaky mother.

The book is neatly constructed, a jigsaw with most of its pieces intact, some two-faced. It is crammed with Irving’s signature cleverness and wit. Alas, it doesn’t know when to stop talking.