The title [The 158-Pound Marriage] comes from one of the characters who evaluates everything in terms of college wrestling weight classes; it indicates moderate approval. Although the novel is also middleweight in both size and subject, it is all muscle, all confidence and speed and sure grip. (p. 1187)
John Irving knows what he is doing, and his confidence is reflected in his decision to start his novel with two epigraphs, one from Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, the other from John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges—two excellent novels with this same subject. Irving does not suffer in the comparison. He resembles Hawkes, however, in more than mere subject. His narrator, for instance, keeps the same distance between the reader and the story as a Hawkes narrator, neither directly taking charge of his story nor idly reminiscing but telling his experiences in bits and pieces, framing each event in impersonal analysis and personal asides, eventually coming up to the open present and its possibilities. Never totally able to assess the significance of what has happened but admiring its drama and offering interpretations, slightly lost but trying to be helpful, he still seems to hold something back—not because he is trying to conceal any secrets or mislead the reader, but because he is still within the story he tells at the present and hasn't yet completely formed his own opinion about its importance. Another resemblance is the way the characters keep returning to the college gymnasium with its womblike tunnel…. Like the obsessive, pregnant landscapes in a Hawkes novel, this gymnasium is an oversignificant inner mental construct held together more by psychic force than by the rules of architecture, an estranged dream in an alien world of consciousness, a lonely building placed under a spell. Overall, Irving is not quite as sensual, surreal, or mannered as Hawkes, but he has inclinations in all these directions. Both authors view comedy the same way, as a formal dance around the edge of a deep well. (p. 1188)
Charles Nicol, in National Review (© National Review, Inc., 1975; 150 East 35th St., New York, N.Y. 10016), October 24, 1975.
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