The Book: Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, by John Irving

The Story: This is a collection of short works by John Irving.  The first few are autobiographical and tell about his life growing up.  There are stories from his life growing up on a farm, but mostly the “memoir” section is about his life as a wrestler.  This includes but is not limited to seemingly every wrestling match he ever wrestled in, watched his kids wrestle in or officiated.  The middle section contains a handful of short stories.  In “Interior Space,” neighbors go to war over a tree that sits on their property line. The short story that Garp wrote in The World According to Garp was also included in this collection.  The last section was a couple of pieces John Irving wrote about Dickens that were included as forwards in different books.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this was kind of just a hodge podge- little bit of this, little bit of that.

What I Thought: If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know that I have a think for short stories.  There’s just something about a good short story question that just does it for me.  I love being able to sit down and take in a whole story in one sitting.  When I found this at a thrift store, I was thrilled.  I’ve been in the mood for John Irving and I love finding out more about author’s lives.

I was not disappointed.

My favorite part of this collection was the memoir section.  I read some reviews on Goodreads that talked about how maybe all the wrestling was too much, but I sort of loved it.  My brother wrestled when I was younger so I’ve been to my fair share of wrestling matches and I really got into John Irving’s play-by-plays.  I don’t really know how he remembers absolutely everything, but that in and of itself is pretty impressive. Some of the stories he told about wrestling- especially reffing- had me cracking up. So funny. His experience at the White House?  Also quite funny…

Having read quite a bit of John Irving, I loved knowing the origin of a lot of the themes that he focuses in on in just about every book.

The fiction section was hit and miss for me.  I loved the Garp story (which, for the life of me, I can’t remember the name of) and Interior Space, but looking back over the table of contents, I have to admit that there are a few that I don’t even remember.  Not at all…. and that’s never a good sign.  I’ll say this though: The ones that I liked, I really liked and they really made up for the ones that seemed to fall flat.

Probably what I loved most about this collection was that after each story there were a few words from John Irving about what inspired this piece, how he saw it then, how he sees it now and so on.  I frigging loved this.  Even with the stories that I didn’t enjoy, I loved getting to the end and finding out what the author thought of them.  In several he said that he felt that they were not great and almost embarrassing to publish. For me, this made this collection just that much better.

Conclusion: If you love short stories and/or John Irving, this is for you.  As in any short story collection, you have to take the bad with the good, but it’s worth it.

The Book: The Fourth Hand, by John Irving

The Story: Patrick is a news anchor for one of those shows that cover kind of stupid, fluffy news.  He is doing a story on and Indian circus when a lion chomps his hand off.  It’s on live TV and people go crazy for the footage.  It’s watched by everyone everywhere and Patrick is all of a sudden way, way famous.

A woman in Wisconsin hears this story and becomes a little bit obsessed with it.  When her husband dies several years later, she decides to donate his hand to Patrick on one condition- she gets to maintain contact with her husband’s hand.

The surgeon who ends up doing the job is Dr. Zajac.  He is a middle-aged divorced man whose biggest obsession is keeping dog crap off of his yard.

All these quirky little worlds collide and- waa laa- you have yourself a John Irving novel.

What I Thought: So I kind of have a thing for John Irving.  The first book I read by him I had to start 3 or 4 times before I got into it.  I think I just didn’t get his sense of humor or his writing style or something.  After that, I kind of fell in love with him.  I think that he’s one of the only modern writers whose work I could pick out from a writing sample.  He just has this really unique style.  I think that it has to grow on you, but it really is good stuff.

Like in a lot of his books, the characters that John Irving wrote for this novel are just totally over-the-top, almost to the point of being just absurd.  The situations that they find themselves in are way crazy and not believable… but it’s a book, right?  It’s not alway supposed to be believable.  It was written like this on purpose and I love it.  It’s like a movie that is overacted on purpose to be funny.  I think when John Irving is criticized, this is the part that they are missing.

What I loved about this book was just the connections.  Friendships, doctor/patient, lovers, spouses, children/parents, employee/employer, just to get started.  While the situations that everyone found themselves in were pretty crazy, the way that the reacted to each other and how they treated each other was very real.  There were parts of this book that really , really spoke to me.

As a bonus, Charlotte’s Web and Steurt Little make a brief cameo in this book and that’s always good!

Conclusion: Do not, I repeat, DO NOT make this your first John Irving book.  If you’ve read and enjoyed other books by him, you’ll love this but this is by no means a jumping off point.

“But books, and sometimes movies, are more personal than that; they can be mutually appreciated, but the specific reasons for loving them cannot be satisfactorily shared.

Good noels and films are not like the news, or what passes for the news- they are more like items. They are comprised by the whole range of moods you are in when you read them or see them.  You can never exactly imitate someone else’s love of a movie or book, Patrick now believed.”

That’s good stuff, huh?

I know that I’ve talked to you guys a little bit about this before but I get like this big time.  Sometimes I’m almost reluctant to share my favorite books or music because I know that it shows too much of who I am and that the other person will never appreciate it the same way I do.  In Atlas Shrugged, Dagney throws a statue down a stairwell because she thought it was so beautiful that no one else should be able to see it.  I totally get that.

I also get the last part.  I’ve loved a book and been crazy about it at one time in my life and then re-read it and just kind of walked away confused.  Why did it mean so much to me at one time?  It’s funny how our life situations and our mood can influence how we feel about a book.

Does this hit home with anyone else?

The Book: The 158-Pound Marriage, by John Irving

The Story:  The narrator and his wife Utch meet in Vienna, marry and come back to New England, where the narrator works as a college professor.  He is also a writer.  They meet another couple, Severin (who I called “Steven” in my head while I was reading) and Edith Winters.  He is a wrestling coach at the same school as the narrator teaches at.  She is a writer, although she has yet to finish anything.  They meet at a faculty party and become friends.  Outside of working together, they do have enough in common, they both met their spouses in Vienna, they both have two children, to start a tentative friendship.

As their friendship progresses, the narrator develops a crush on Edith, and Utch a crush  on Severin.  Before long, at the end of their dinner dates, they are swapping partners, do-si-do.  It starts off as this “fun” little thing and then a system of rules creeps in as different members of the little group start to become jealous and obsessive.  The whole thing ends up in a death-spiral, and John Irving explores the emotions and feelings that come with that falling out.

The title refers to the 158-pound wrestling class- which Steverin says is the most elite wrestling class.  He also tends to rate other things in “wrestling class” terms.  A 132-pound novel. Stuff like that.

What I Thought:  I have read a handful of John Irving novels.  I tend to like them, but not love them.  I’m a fair-weather fan without a doubt.

This book kind of set my teeth on edge.  I actually was less uncomfortable with the partner swapping than I thought I would be.  There were only a few smutty scenes (however, when he went smutty, he went seriously smutty), and just the way that it was presented was less lewd than I would have thought.  What I was uncomfortable with, however, was every single character in the book.  They weren’t “human”.  Nothing about them rang true for me.  How they acted, how they talked, how they felt, how they made decisions.  They just didn’t ever seem like real people.  They had bizarre histories (which were somehow drawn out to annoying levels, and this is a short little book), they made crazy choices, they didn’t even eat normal things…. I could go on and on. They were just not real people. And that bothered me.

I was annoyed that they left their children on the back burner so often.  In one scene, the narrator is hooking up with Edith at Edith’s house and their daughter (whose name I won’t even TRY to spell) comes into the room because she’s scared.  She notices that the man’s clothes that are all over the room are not her dad’s.  Meanwhile, the narrator is hiding down under the covers while Edith comforts her daughter.  This made me much  more uncomfortable than the fact that Edith and the narrator were sleeping with each other.   I don’t even know if we ever learned the narrator’s kid’s names. They were characters, but  not really.  I just kept wondering “where are their kids in all this?” but never really found out.

This is not to say that I hated this novel. I really didn’t.  I love the way that John Irving writes.  It’s almost like he’s sharing a private joke with his readers that are smart enough to get it.  His humor is kind of subtle, but I think that he is really funny.  I think that what makes me keep coming back to his books is the tone that he takes.  Maybe it is the word choice or the length of paragraphs or… I really don’t know what it is, but he writes in a way that is interesting and different.  I think that I could pick out one of his paragraphs without even knowing it was his, and that says a lot.

Conclusion:  If you have never read John Irving before, don’t make this your first one.  Try The World According to Garp or Cider House Rules.  If you enjoy John Irving already and want to read something from before he got famous with Garp, try it out. The major draw for me was that I wanted a shorter book, and this really is.  My copy is less than 300 pages, so I just read the whole thing in one big bite on a day off.