A Widow For One Year

by John Irving

Borrowed this book from A., who says he's one of her favorite authors. Somehow, in my mind, I think I'd confused John Updike with John Irving, and so this book was WAY different than I expected. It was fun to read, and interesting, and a lot of weird things that made me laugh. Of course, it also creeped me out in a lot of ways. Ah, the Modern American novel. It's also got this sense of novel-within-a-novel, and it's a book where the main character is also an author, which can make self-conscious (maybe self-indulgent, but it's conscious of being self-conscious in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way just about the time that it gets to be too much - to me, it didn't get stuck on the wrong side of the border). But there were a few points in there about the nature of writing that I particularly liked.

"Graham was the ring bearer, but he'd misheard the word. The boy expected to be the ring burier. Thus, when it came time for him to hand over the rings, Graham was outraged that an important part of the wedding had been forgotten. When was he supposed to bury the rings, and where? After the service, since Graham was in despair over what he believed was the botched symbolism of the rings, Ruth let the boy bury her and Harry's rings at the roots of the privet that towered over the swimming pool. Harry paid close attention to the burial site, so that after a certain solemn passage of time, Graham could be shown where to dig the rings up."

"Here she was, espousing the purity of imagination as opposed to memory, extolling the superiority of the invented detail as opposed to the merely autobiographical. Here she was, singing the virtues of creating wholly imagined characters as opposed to populating a novel with personal friends and family members - 'ex-lovers, and those other limited, disappointing people from our actual lives' ... The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened...

Ruth hated herself for providing them with a theory of fiction about which she now had sizable doubts... Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstances."

"The fat girl was hitting the window with the big pink dildo that Ruth had earlier seen in the hospital tray on the table by Rooie's bed. Once the young prostitute had got Ruth's attention, she stuck the end of the dildo in her mouth and gave it an unfriendly tug with her teeth. Then she nodded indifferently to Ruth, and at last she shrugged, as if her remaining energy allowed her only this limited promise: that she would try to make Ruth as happy as Rooie could make her.

Ruth shook her head no, but she gave the prostitute a kindly smile. In return, the pathetic creature repeatedly slapped the dildo against the palm of her hand, as if marking time to music only she could hear."