SOURCE: "Dr. Daruwalla and the Dwarfs," in The New York Times Book Review, September 4, 1994, pp. 1, 22.

In the following review, Towers offers praise for A Son of the Circus.

A dozen or so years ago, the newly revived Vanity Fair ran a color photograph of John Irving in his wrestler's outfit that seemed to reveal more about his fiction than about the wrestler himself. A bold frontal stance, a (mostly) good-natured aggressiveness, muscularity, an inclination to show off, to take risks—these are qualities we have come to anticipate in Mr. Irving's novels since The World According to Garp first hurtled him to fame. Like Dickens, to whom he has often been too facilely compared, he is a "big" novelist, unafraid of extravagant plots, of grotesque or freakish characters, of sensationalism, of sentimentality. He is also, as his 1989 novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, demonstrated, willing to confront religious...