Roof Beam Reader

In One Person by John Irving

Final Verdict: 3.25 out of 4.0

YTD: 18

Plot/Story:
3 – Plot/Story is interesting & believable.

Irving is known for his bold approach to sexuality and the social/familial “other.”  This latest is no exception to that well-established reputation.   Meet William Dean Abbott, a teenage boy with a speech impediment.  And meet the first love of his life, Miss Frost, the town library.  William (or Bill, or Billy, depending on who we’re talking to) develops at a young age a love for reading and writing – the answer to that primordial question “What do you want to be when you grow up,” is, for Billy, “A Writer.”  He divulges this secret to just one person, Miss Frost.  It’s no wonder that a boy who loves to read and write might develop a crush on the town librarian, an attractive middle-aged woman.  Except, there might be quite a bit more to Miss Frost than meets the eye.  The story is essentially a fictional memoir, with Billy as narrator looking back on his life and works.  It takes us along Billy’s journey from boyhood to manhood and into old age.  We watch as he comes to terms with and explores his bisexuality and particular interest in transsexuals. Along the way, the reader is exposed to a variety of Billy’s friends, family members, and lovers – some male, some female, and some transgendered.  There are marriages and divorces, deaths and rebirths, supportive folks and terribly antagonistic ones.    

Characterization:
3 – Characters well-developed.

The characters in this book are one of its greatest charms and, simultaneously, one of its greatest issues.  While one can expect, from Irving, a blunt and over-the-top approach to any sensitive topic (in this case, bisexual & transgender people), what I found disturbing was the overabundance of both.  Billy, for instance, is a bisexual who finds himself attracted primarily to transgender women (“the best of both worlds”).  As it turns out, Billy’s father just happens to be gay – the effeminate kind, and Billy’s grandfather also thoroughly enjoys dressing up as a woman.  Billy’s mother, too, has sexual peculiarities of her own, though I will leave those for the reader to discover, since they are a particularly interesting aspect of the back-story which is revealed later in the book (it’s not the biggest mystery in the world, but it’s fun to let it unfold naturally).  One could say this might just be an odd family, but considering Billy’s best friend, Elaine, their mutual love interest, Jacques, others of their schoolmates (revealed later in the book) and the town librarian are all either bisexual, gay, or transgender – well, maybe there’s something in the water in First Sister, Vermont! The plenitude of sexually “other” characters was not wholly believable and, for me, even detracted from Billy’s journey a bit (the main theme seemed to be about a bisexual writer calling for tolerance in a world of normalcy, yet most elements of his world, with the exception of a few people whose negativity seems less than bothersome to Billy, are largely the “other” world rather than the “standard” – so where is the conflict?).  That gripe aside, the majority of the characters are more than interesting – as Irving’s characters usually are.  There are a plethora of personalities, from the butch lesbian to the effeminate old man, to the teenage boy trying to figure out what he is.  There are overbearing mothers, alcoholic uncles, and hilarious foreigners who can’t pronounce anything right, especially when they’re excited.  Although one might find it hard to believe that virtually every person Billy meets could actually be in some way queer, the journey itself and Billy’s interaction with all these people are still worth the ride.   

Prose/Style:
3 – Satisfactory Prose/Style, conducive to the Story.

As with characterization, the overall experience with Irving’s prose was positive, but there were some elements which irked me, two in particular.  First, the narrator had a penchant for repetition.  He would re-tell certain parts of the story multiple times, like an old man reminiscing with his friends or grandchildren about life-gone-by, sometimes forgetting that he had already told parts of the story twenty minutes ago.  The second issue was his tendency to skip around in the timeline.  The narrator is writing this as a memoir, looking back fifty or sixty years, but rather than following a clear trajectory through boyhood, the teenage years, manhood, etc., he often skips around so that one moment he is a college student in Europe, and the next he is a boy again, getting ready for his school play.  This, at times, disrupted the flow of the story so that it was difficult to relax and sink-in completely.  That being said, there was also an endearing quality to it, when all was said and done.  The language and prose itself matched the characterization in that it was clever, witty, and sharp.  The dialogue was often the most interesting element of the story, and Irving’s ability at description certainly shows – it is perhaps the glue that holds the entire novel together, when it seems to be jumping around.

Additional Elements: Setting, Symbols/Motifs, Resolution, etc.
4 – Additional elements improve and advance the story.

What I found most difficult about this novel is that it is written by a heterosexual man who seems to be trying too hard.  Granted, Irving certainly has a history of exploring sexuality and human nature; still, because it was so over-the-top (almost every character had to be at least a little “gay” in someway) it almost felt like Irving was pandering to a particular audience.  That being said, Irving is also doing what his narrator is accused of doing by some of the more bigoted characters: He is demanding tolerance.  This I respect to the utmost and, in the end, I was able to put aside the fact that almost everyone in the book carries a “Different and Proud” card because so many moments in the book were pure, sensitive, and hopeful.  The story tackles the specific difficulties that bisexual men and women face, separate from general homophobia; for example, that they are distrusted by the gay community and treated with prejudice by the straight community.  Ultimately, this book puts bisexuality and transgendered people on center stage in the literary world, in an empathetic and intelligent way.  There are very few examples of high literature approaching these topics (few examples even in the YA or other genre categories, to be honest), so Irving’s In One Person is a welcome addition both to the LGBT canon but also to contemporary literary fiction in general. 

Suggested Reading for:
Age Level: High School+
Interest: Gender, Sexuality, Coming-of-Age, Transgender, Transvestite, Cross-Dressing, Family, AIDS, Death & Dying

 Notable Quotes:

“We are formed by what we desire.”

“Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.”

“All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.”

“Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.”

“Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away; it keeps things for you, or hides things from you. Your memory summons things to your recall with a will of its own. You imagine you have a memory, but your memory has you!”