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the complete review - fiction

In One Person

by
John Irving

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : fine bits of storytelling, but insistent sexual-identity-theme smothers too much

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Cross-dressing in Garp was at least partly played for laughs -- Roberta Muldoon was a former linebacker, for goodness' sake -- but Irving's tone this time is as earnest as a sermon. His prose, as always, is gorgeous, and Irving remains a master builder when it comes to constructing an epic plot filled with satisfying twists." - Benjamin Svetkey, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "The novel becomes a comic celebration of polymorphous perversity, and of literature. (...) William takes two-thirds of this substantial novel to grow up; the rest of it is episodic epilogue, with increasingly bleak but often still very funny fragments of scenes from the following half-century. (...) If a novel were simply a plea for understanding of sexual difference, it would be bad art; this book is elevated beyond the merely political by, among other things, the ebullient voice of its narrator." - Steven Poole, The Guardian
  
  
• "In summary, Billy Abbott's circular progress sounds like a manifesto built on paradox. Irving hammers home the values of plurality. Dogmatically, he defends diversity. Single-mindedly, he recommends self-doubt. Yet the freewheeling comedy neutralises any drift into preachiness. Loose-limbed but then suddenly tight-wound, this is a hard novel to classify but an easy one to like -- much like its protagonists." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
  
  
• "(T)he deeper we get into the novel, the less we believe it, seeing the people here as not quite three-dimensional, manqués for the larger issues the book means to address. (...) In One Person never delivers on that sense of freshness, settling for a posture of contrivance instead. (...) In the end, this is where In One Person stumbles, when it tries to fuse social commentary with art." - David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "What’s impressive about In One Person is its open fascination with bisexuality, cross-dressing, the politics of gender bending and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. What’s detrimental is the broad fancifulness of the clowning. (...) If In One Person were more coherent, Mr. Irving would not deliver his toughest punches from atop a soapbox. His blunt politicking for full understanding of gay and transgendered identity sits uncomfortably with his zany side." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times
  
  
• "In One Person is a story about memory. Inevitably it is also a story about desire, the most unsettling of our memories. And it is a story about reading yourself through the stories of others. (...) What’s not here is any biological woman we can get interested in. (...) The best women are, or were, men. Ah well. You can’t have everything in one book. In One Person gives a lot. It’s funny, as you would expect. It’s risky in what it exposes." - Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Irving is not a novelist who enjoys loose ends and he ties up each of his plot strands here one by one until they form a satisfying pattern. His novel is many things -- a little slice of cruel history precisely told, a kind of back-to-front mystery in which veils of deception and self-deception are lifted one by one, a sort of love story in which love rarely travels in the directions you imagined. Most of all, though, it is another of this writer's bold hymns to individuality, to the great American quest of self-discovery" - Tim Adams, The Observer
  
  
• "Irving’s take on the AIDS epidemic in New York is not totally persuasive (not enough confusion, terror, or anger), and his fractured time and place doesn’t allow him to generate the melodramatic string of incidents that his novels are famous for. In the end, sexual secrets abound in this novel, which intermittently touches the heart as it fitfully illuminates the mutability of human desire." - Publishers Weekly
  
  
• "In One Person finds Irving energized and engaged, employing his familiar motifs and strategies to excellent effect. His compassion and belief in tolerance shine through, and his political points are made with more finesse than is usual for him. (...) There are moments in In One Person, however, that don't ring completely true and spoil the careful narrative web Irving has constructed." - Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Readers who enjoyed Irving's The World According to Garp will delight in In One Person, even with its rather limp last paragraph. Readers who are interested in transsexual wrestlers (or "transgender wrestlers", as Billy Dean is corrected by a member of a more politically correct younger generation), who are interested in high-school drama and cross-dressing from Shakespeare to the present, who are interested in American "civilisation" in the second half of last century, who are interested in the training bra as fact and symbol, will find much to savour in this energetic novel. (...) (R)ichly entertaining and morally serious" - Don Anderson, Sydney Morning Herald
  
  
• "For all Bill’s fierce defence of bisexuality, there’s no real sense of his own sexual desire for either men or women. The same goes for his supposed struggle against the forces of repression. Again, Bill keeps telling us how difficult this was. In reality, his progress seems weirdly untroubled. In One Person remains a big, entertaining and unstintingly generous read, bulging with incident and able to make every member of its large cast entirely memorable. Even so, Bill Abbott ultimately proves better at discussing Irving’s themes than at embodying them." - James Walton, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Irving is a master of the big-hearted social epic, but the earnest tone sometimes wears (as do Billy's usual reactions to new adventures: "I liked it a lot !")." - David Daley, USA Today
  
  
• "Mr. Irving is unfailingly respectful and broad-minded in exploring these subjects (...). But he fails to impose a real story on the scattershot reminiscences. (...) In One Person is like an inexpert drag queen: largely unconvincing but you can appreciate the attempt at transformation." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
  
  
• "This wonderful first section of the novel shows what a ringmaster Irving can be. His looping chronology gives the impression of aimless digression only until we catch up and find him on the trail of some larger truth. (...) The very end of the story, however, is more hopeful. Alas, probably too hopeful, infused with the triumphalism of a very special transgendered episode of Glee." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       In One Person is narrated by John Irving-aged writer, Billy Abbott. The biographical similarities between author and protagonist are distractingly hard to overlook: both were born in March 1942; both originally were named after their biological fathers -- Irving was John Wallace Blunt, Jr., his character in the novel William Francis Dean, Jr. -- and the men they were named after were immediately absent and did not really figure in their lives. Irving's stepfather taught at a New England prep school, as did Billy's -- and the small town of First Sister, Vermont, and its Exeter-stand-in of Favorite River Academy figure prominently in the novel. Billy's later life also follows some of Irving's stations -- notably a college year abroad in Austria -- and when at one point Billy quotes from several of his earlier works, well, yes, those are verbatim quotes from Irving's own novels. (Wrestling also plays a role in the novel, though young Billy is not the one doing most of the wrestling, and he wasn't a wrestler at school.)
       In In One Person the contemporary, near-seventy-year-old Billy is looking back on his life, recounting his life-story. Much of the novel is concentrated on Billy's years of sexual awakening, though Billy's account isn't strictly chronological, as he repeatedly jumps ahead and reveals significant facts before getting back to the thrust of his story. Billy was a somewhat confused boy, and much of what he was confused about was who he was attracted to -- he worried about having crushes: "on the wrong people" Among those he developed a crush on in his early teen years was the town librarian, Miss Frost -- someone he later realized his family had intentionally steered him clear of (it's his meddling future stepfather that takes him to finally get a library card and thus introduces him to the world of Miss Frost) and who was, indeed, someone that many would consider a 'wrong person' to have a crush on -- and not just because she was considerably older than Billy.
       First Sister turns out to be quite rife with sexual confusion, including regarding sexual identity. Billy's grandfather likes dressing up in women's clothes -- in part to play the women's roles in the town amateur theatrical productions, but not just ... -- and there are more than a few school-boys who have feminine qualities. And the town harbors larger secrets, too (still of the sexual variety): there's something about Miss Frost, of course, but then there's also the issue of Billy's biological father, about whom he learns precious little. As Billy notes: "A lack of candor was endemic in my family", and this is both a source of frustration and confusion. For all that lack of candor, however, the secrets inevitably do come flooding out -- though given there's a cross-dressing grandpa in the house not too much of it is really particularly shocking (or surprising).
       In One Person focuses on sexual identity. Billy figures out pretty quickly that he is bisexual -- though some of the details take a while to fall into place as, for example, he remains wary about vaginal sex until ... well, until he actually tries it (after that, he thinks it's great). He is not ambivalent about who he wants to sleep with; rather, he finds himself truly attracted to both men and women -- though that does mean he finds himself looked upon with a bit of suspicion by both his hetero- and homosexual partners. (His homosexual desire does also only goes so far, however: he is, emphatically, only willing to take the penetrating role, rather than that of the penetrated.) Once he has figured out he is bisexual -- and, as noted, that realization comes pretty early and fast -- he also doesn't really have any problem with it, or qualms about it: no shame or guilt trip for him, and he more or less merrily spends the rest of his life sleeping with both men and women. (But, yes, while the absence of any fuss about this is in some ways refreshing, the ease with which he acccepts the way he is -- in this respect -- also does take the wind out of the narrative, as his 'finding'/coming to terms with his (sexual) identity provides hardly any sort of tension -- and the other characters who have a bit more difficulty dealing with their own issues remain peripheral.)
       So Billy does come to terms with his identity with relatively little fuss -- and many other characters turn out to be homosexual, or are in other ways what used to be termed sexually deviant in this novel focused on sexual identity. Strikingly, however, -- and rather fatally for the novel -- Irving harps so much on sexual identity that sexual relationships figure almost only incidentally: Billy apparently goes through any number of lovers, but barely ever seems to be in a satisfying relationship that includes a sexual component. He is extraordinarily close to some one- and sometime lovers -- childhood friend Elaine, semi-mentor Larry -- but it's not sex that holds them together; indeed, they're closest when sex isn't really part of the equation. Among the few somewhat more extended descriptions of Billy actively in a relationship which also has a sexual component are a disastrous summer in Europe with a lover, and then his not very up-front relationship with a female fellow student in Vienna; neither lasts very long and both are clearly doomed from the start. Most of the other relationships in the book that have a sexual component also don't go very well, including former classmates who got married and lived a lie -- before succumbing to AIDS. And, of course, as far as sexual relationships that fail as real relationships go, Billy's own parents' very short-lived marriage is exhibit A .....
       Indeed, so focused on sexual identity is Billy/Irving that practically no healthy sexual relationship is shown. There are a number of apparently happy couples -- and a disturbing number of suicides by spouses after they lose their loved one, presumably a sign of complete devotion -- but these relationships all seem almost entirely sexless, at least as presented here by Irving, who never ventures into the bedrooms of these couples. Tellingly, for example, Billy gains a stepfather, but not, eventually, a sibling. Interestingly, too, Billy's generation goes largely childless: abortion is the closest any of the female characters get to having a kid, while the men that do procreate don't manage to get fully on-board with the heterosexual lifestyle -- and two of the kids, appearing only briefly on the scene, turn out very, very bitter about what their daddies got up to (though admittedly another one does turn out okay).
       Irving captures the sex act -- usually a somewhat unusual variation on coupling -- pretty well in several scenes, but these are literally almost one-offs; he is incapable (or unwilling ?) to present a sustained relationship that is both loving and sexual. Irving's characters seem marked -- and often gravely damaged -- by early sexual experience, beginning with Billy's mother (a character who Billy keeps at a great distance here, rarely offering much insight; his stepfather -- among many others -- seems to play a much more prominent role in his life, while Elaine's mother is much more of a mother-figure to him). Billy's interest in Miss Frost does not appear, in and of itself, to be damaging, but the reaction to it certainly devastates him, while Elaine is clearly marked not only by her first sexual encounter but the dreadful fallout from that.
       Ultimately, what Irving seems to suggest is that sexual identity isn't really an issue, but that once one has figured it out one should take great care before acting on it. The circumstances and environment should be just right -- requiring considerable maturity, he suggests. It's surely no coincidence that at the end of the novel, at the present-day Favorite River Academy -- which went co-ed a while back, but now also has its very own campus LBGTQ group -- the young student with the most obvious sexual identity issue (but very sure of herself, confronting it head on and in full control of the situation) is told:

     "Save the dating for when you get to college," Mrs.Hadley had advised her.
     "That's what I'm doing -- I'm waiting on the dating," Gee Montgomery had told me.

- M.A.Orthofer, 29 April 2012

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Links:

• Simon & Schuster publicity page
• Black Swan publicity page
• Profile in Esquire

• The Bookbag
• Boston Globe
• Chicago Sun-Times
• Daily American
• Daily Express
• Daily Mail
• Entertainment Weekly
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Kirkus Reviews
• Library Journal (scroll down for review)
• The List
• The Los Angeles Times
• New Zealand Herald
• Newsday
• The Observer
• Occupation: Gay
• The Onion
• Philadelphia Inquirer
• Publishers Weekly
• San Diego Union-Tribune
• San Francisco Chronicle
• St.Louis Post-Dispatch
• The Satirist
• Star Tribune
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Wales Arts Review
• The Washington Post

• Official site
• John Irving at The Guardian

• The Last Chairlift
• [Last Night in Twisted River]
• My Movie Business
• A Prayer for Owen Meany
• A Son of the Circus
• Trying to save Piggy Sneed
• Until I Find You

• See Index of Contemporary American fiction under review
• See Index of Erotic, Pornographic, and Sex-related books

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About the Author:

       John Winslow Irving, American author, born 1942. Born in Exeter, New Hampshire he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy. Author of numerous very successful novels, he first achieved widespread recognition with The World according to Garp.

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© 2012-2022 the complete review

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