At times, the whole thing feels like a mash-up, drawing elements from “Garp,” “The Hotel New Hampshire” and “A Widow for One Year,” although it doesn’t reframe those novels so much as it refracts them, tracing an unlikely line through territory we’ve seen before. This being a John Irving novel, there is the usual medley of wrestling, family dysfunction and single parenthood there are scenes set in Vienna, and much of the book, like “The World According to Garp” before it, takes place at a New England boarding school. Growing up in the 1950s in the town of First Sister, Vt., he is surrounded by a surprisingly gender-fluid cast of characters, from his Grandpa Harry, a cross-dresser who plays female characters in the local theater, to Miss Frost, the mannish town librarian, whose reserved demeanor masks the open secret of her past. In brief: Abbott is bisexual with an attraction to men, women and transsexuals. This may not be Irving’s intention, but the 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. You know that, don’t you, Billy?” asks another friend, Elaine, who has accompanied him.Īs for why this resonates, I want to posit that it tells us something about “In One Person” - not the plot of the novel so much as the mechanics of the plot, the construction of a narrative that itself seems orchestrated and rehearsed. It’s all in the timing, the way Abbott is barely allowed to get started: “It was entirely orchestrated - the whole thing was rehearsed. And yet, there’s something else at work, some sense that the moment isn’t quite authentic, that the situation, if not necessarily the emotions, have been staged. It’s the early 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and Irving evokes the deathly terrors of that period, a time when people seemed, literally, to evaporate, to become, in the words of the late David Wojnarowicz, “a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice … glass human disappearing in rain.”Īs Abbott shares with his friend’s 15-year-old son the story of a summer trip to Europe, the boy’s mother interrupts from the other room: “Peter! … Come here - let your father rest!” It’s an arresting moment, not least for what the friend is asking: that Abbott look out for his child after he and his wife (whom he’s infected) are gone.Ībbott and the dying man had a fling during that long-ago European summer, which brings an undertone of complicity, and recrimination, to the scene. Late in John Irving’s 13th novel, “In One Person,” the narrator, an aging writer named William Abbott, recalls visiting a high school friend dying of AIDS.

In One Person by John Irving