SOURCE: "Catch-As-Catch-Can," in Times Literary Supplement, February 4, 1996, p. 9.

In the following review, Rosenheim offers a generally favorable assessment of The Imaginary Girlfriend.

Evelyn Waugh's Mr Pinfold maintained that "most men have the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery". One of the appealing things about the popular American novelist John Irving is his unwillingness to use any tricks at all, or to pretend that the same themes do not recur in his work. Bears, motor cycles, Vienna and, most of all, the sport of wrestling figure prominently and repetitively in his novels, and this curious set of preoccupations has spawned the imaginative plots that are this writer's greatest strength.

The Imaginary Girlfriend is a memoir, atypically short for Irving, which details the major (really, with writing co-dominant) role which amateur wrestling has played in his life. He is quick to admit that wrestling...