Backlisted - The World According to Garp by John Irving

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

John Irving's fourth novel The World According to Garp (1978) is the subject of this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to explore this unlikely bestseller and discuss its contemporary relevance are author Nikita Lalwani (You People) and novelist and screenwriter Matt Thorne (8 Minutes Idle), both returning to the podcast after their joint appearance on episode #63, Something Happened by Joseph Heller. This week John has also been reading Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage by the late Tim Robinson. And with so many Bob Dylan fans gathered together for the show, it was inevitable talk would turn to the Nobel Prize winner's first new songs for eight years, 'Murder Most Foul' and 'I Contain Multitudes'.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)18'48 - Stones of Arran: Pilgrimage by Tim Robinson24'32 - Bob Dylan's 'Murder Most Foul' and 'I Contain Multitudes'.30'23 - The World According to Garp by John Irving* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. you've seen that twitter thread bookcase credibility in which zoom callers are analyzed based on their bookcase background. I have heinous bookcase credibility at the moment because I'm in a child's bedroom.

That's your bedroom. That's not a child's bedroom. That's a child's bedroom. Come on. But I think you've got decent bookcase credibility from what I can see, Andy. Are your books locked away, Andy? They look like they're in a glass case or something. Is that keeping that special? That would be

Oh dear No, they're not in a glass case but you are perceptive because those shelves came with doors but I just didn't use the doors Right So the shelving units

That's an aesthetic choice you made I didn't ask you here to judge me Laowani but thanks have you ordered them

alphabetically that's frowned upon I think in bookcase credibility no I working in a bookshop for many years

cured me of that I keep the I keep authors together. Oh, that's interesting. Mostly. I don't do anything more formal than that, which means I do spend a lot of time not quite knowing. I mean, every room in the house has got books in it, so I don't quite know where things are half the time.

What about you? We never really talked about this. I've been to your house, John. I know you've got books everywhere and not in any particular order, you uh no only because I'm too lazy to do that and also because I don't know like you bookshops and what I can't I can't ever quite get my head around other people who color code their bookshelves like Nicholas Royal he's mad about isn't he his pictures on Twitter of like one room's all green one room's all blue i mean i you know i wouldn't judge but it must make it quite difficult to find things even more difficult than

my than my i always know where books are that's one thing but i just sometimes it takes ages because there are too many i still haven't got enough bookshelves do you ever worry that the bookcase will be gazed upon by visitors? I don't worry about that. I've got one downstairs. Less so at the moment. Yeah, exactly. It's not such a big issue. But I've got one to use the C word. I've got one curated, definitely bookshelf downstairs,

where I've got, which I call, because the boys, for some reason, they stuck a couple of green men figures on there, sort of dad's old country weirdo crap shelf, which is full of books. That's a name for a TV show, isn't it? Full of books, which I haven't talked about this on the podcast, with books like this on it, which I have to say. Witchcraft, Secret Societies of Rural England, The Magic of Toadmen, Plow Witches, Mummers and Bonesmen.

Bonesmen. Yeah. It's brilliant. Yeah. I've got a lot of that kind of stuff. And how do our guests deal with their books? Nikita, your so-called child, I see, has a fairly lackadaisical approach to shelving.

That's right. The child has put nail polish at the front of the books. I put authors together, but they're not alphabetical. And I definitely curate the bookshelves as a kind of pastime so I will just walk past a bookshelf and take one off that's not really visible and place it in a visible but I don't really know who's gazing that's the existential question around the bookshelf I just keep putting I keep dragging books out and putting them on show but I don't know who it's for. Do you? Yeah. So is it, let's, let's, let's return to your childhood.

No. Is that because you want to, do you like, what we would have called in the bookshop a face out? Do you want like a face out to just vary up a bit for your day to day existence? Or is your brain thinking wow it would be amazing if if i don't know uh jeanette winterson called in i think it's both both things are going on if i'm i feel lockdown provokes a kind of honesty i try to answer the question as honestly as possible now great um that's interesting that's not like that so i would i dream of a high profile high status gazer gazing person to come in but also i am trying to create an aesthetically pleasing

uh bookshelf day to day you're right i hadn't thought about that before. I'm doing both because a lot of the time a high-stakes gazing person doesn't enter the room. Well, you know what they say, file your books like nobody's watching. Yeah. We did some bullshit research back in the day at Waterstones about this and unsurprisingly I think books came up ahead of clothes as um the things that people felt most spoke of their true selves which i've always thought that's one of those things that people obviously say in research things you know to try and make themselves look cleverer and more

interesting and deeper um you know like a great quote of kafka is you know a book is an axe that breaks the frozen sea within us well sometimes france i mean sometimes it's just a merry christmas it's just yeah it's just a something it's just something entertaining we take on holiday surely that's all right but yeah i notice you are in a room with dead media behind you. Is that dead media? Yeah, I know. It is dead. Well, there's a mixture. There's various types of different dead media, I guess.

Yeah, so our filing system, our family filing system, which involves everything from vinyl to CDs to DVDs to books to whatever, 8-track, is that so Leslie and the children very carefully put everything into alphabetical order when we moved house. As soon as we had one room that was just full of A to D, we realised how much rubbish there was at the beginning of the alphabet. No offence to writers who were at the beginning of the alphabet. The recklessness of what you just said.

Well done. So we had to mix it up a bit. So, yeah, it's a bit like Nikita said. It's kind of a curated thing. But then, you know, I say to somebody, well, this room's just the, you know, when one of these high profile, whatever they are, MVP people that Nikita has come around, you know,

I always say to them, well, this is the room where I just put the rubbish and then realise that their book's on the shelf. So, you know, so no, I mean, and that's the other thing is that if you've got a writer coming round to your house and I speak, you know, I've experienced this myself, do you want to see your book on their shelves or do you and and and equally if they're coming around are they going to be embarrassed if

they suddenly see all of all of their books piled up or they're going to be delighted it depends on the author right I mean so I think John Irving would be delighted very happy if he went into a house and he saw all of his books in a row. So you're going around to a friend's house, Matt, and you know they've got at least one or more of your books. Do you hope to find it in the living room or in the spare room? I think next to the bed is the dream, isn't it? All the time. In that pile that they return to all the time.

Always there. For 15 years, it's always been on their bedside. 15 years it's just stayed there. I'll read that book one day. What about on the landing? I've seen my book on that sort of strange small bookshelf on the landing. Do you know that one? Yeah, I know exactly.

Is that a sort of nice things that the guests might want to read? Yeah, yeah. Now I understand. It's sort of that. It's also no man's land as well, isn't it? This is a book I own, but I don't feel particularly vested in, that kind of thing. Well, I don't know where it's supposed to go.

You know, it's like it might be useful. Yeah. Has anyone ever found their books in a holiday cottage or an Airbnb? All the time. Once. I've seen it once. That felt exciting. Very exciting.

Did you sign it? I suppose so. You should have signed it, Nikita. Yeah, I should have. You should have said, I was here. I stayed here. Yeah. Signed it in a really audacious way.

Overly intimate. An overly intimate signing. Yes, I'll never forget you. Let's get on with the show. We've got so much chat. Loads of chat. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books.

Today you find us in the stolid, mis-damped streets of post-war Vienna, hurrying past half-empty restaurants and pastry shops in search of a lost child, while near us, just out of sight, there lurks the sinister, warty-skinned creature known as the Undertowd. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today for the second time on Batlisted is the double act of Nikita Lalwani and Matt Thorne. Hello. Hi Andy. Hi. Hello. And Nikita and Matt were last here, unbelievably, two years ago to talk about the terrifying Something Happened by Joseph Heller, which some of us are still recuperating from.

It still haunts me, that book. It really does. I think about it. I doubt a week goes by when I don't think about it, the ghastly Bob Slocum. But we really love that book book and we love that episode. And when we all went to the pub after the recording and we knew it was a good one,

we had a conversation where we said, oh, it would be great to get Matt and Nikita back. But this time, like, because I think Matt chose something happened. So it's Nikita's turn to choose something. And Nikita, what did you choose? The World According to Garp by John Irving. So we've all been in lockdown reading The World According to Garp.

And I can tell you from the conversations that have already taken place off air that everybody has thoughts that they wish to express in the next hour or so. So we'll get to it as quickly as we can. So let me introduce our guest first. hour or so so we'll get to it as quickly as we can so let me introduce our guest first Nikita is the author of three novels including her latest You People just out from Viking and which I talked about on our last episode for those of you listen to that if you haven't listened to the last episode please listen to me talk about how much I loved Nikita's novel on that the reason I did it last time is because I slightly wanted to spare her blushes this time but it was such a great book wonderful wonderful book I finished it this week as well nikita i'm really really full of admiration for it well thanks so much guys no thank you for for making me uh get out of kent for a bit

that's what i say to anyone now that's my new way of saying thanks for your book, which is thanks for getting me out of Kenya. Getting me out of Kenya. Anyway, You People has been optioned for television by World Productions, creators The Bodyguard and Line of Duty. Nikita is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and her work has been translated into 16 languages. And the thing I wanted to ask you, Nikita, is what's it been like publishing a new novel now in the middle of all this?

It's been very different week to week. So obviously the book came out on something like April 2nd, so lockdown had just begun. And initially there was that palpable loss of not being able to touch the book in a bookshop, which actually is quite important to me. I didn't realise that that was the visual I was getting. No launch and chance to kind of celebrate in person, but that felt like a small thing, given what everyone was going through and what we were all going through together. I feel like the book community has really come together in really moving ways to promote books at the moment. So there are all kinds of platforms

and initiatives and writers supporting writers. Lots of video sharing and discussions going on, lots of stuff happening on podcasts and on the whole radio circuit. And reviews have started happening. And that's exciting. And now there's a whole conversation about people wanting to read in lockdown. So I feel like the book is very much discussed, even though it's not in a physical bookshop. It feels like it's on a virtual shelf somewhere. Yeah, on the landing. It's on the landing. It's on the landing of someone's house in a virtual bookshop. And most importantly, in what formats can we or listeners buy You People at the moment?

So, yeah, it's available in hardback with various booksellers now. So it's in stock and it is turning up after about a week if you buy it online. Good. And you can buy it as an e-book too. So You People is also an audio book as well. So there are three different ways to experience it. But that's also exciting that it's in stock

and booksellers are sending it everywhere. So as I say, the feeling goes up and down because it's not communal in a physical sense, but there is this really cheering communal experience going on in terms of the dialogue around it. Wow, thank you. That's really upbeat. I turn to Matt now to bring us down. That's what I'm here for.

So Matt is also a novelist with six books under his belt, including Eight Minutes Idle, which was adapted into a film by BBC Films. He's also written three children's books, and his most recent book was a critical study of the pop star Prince, and that was published by Faber. Matt, I'm going to ask you the question that you shouldn't really ask writers at the moment,

but are you getting any writing done? I wasn't. Well, it's been a weird lockdown for me, as I'm sure it has for everyone else, but initially I was reviewing for the Catholic Herald, and I'd been given a pile of books that were completely appropriate for the lockdown. The first one was about solitude, and then there was a second one

about death, and then the third one was about the afterlife. So it... LAUGHTER That's it, that's the whole of human experience in three books there. Matt Thorne rubbing his hands together in glee. No, no, in terror. But, you know, it was something to do.

And it felt like, because I mean, you know, immediately all the columnists on Twitter have been saying, oh, these novelists will write novels about coronavirus and they'll be terrible, we won't want to read them. And there are even novelists saying things like, what's that guy, Alex Preston, he was saying that we'll all be writing adultery novels. It will all be about, you know, somebody's gone in the lockdown

and they can't get to see their mistress. Nobody's going to write these books. Well, maybe they will, but I feel that when this is over, people won't want to think about it for a while. You know, it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to take a while. It's going to be, you know, there's going to be a bit of reckoning. So I didn't really, and also there's a lot of people who haven't written before who are suddenly writing now.

I'm in a WhatsApp group and everybody's with my neighbours and they're all going, oh, we're all starting our novels now. This is important. let's remember history. No, no, this is the worst time to ever start a novel. Please don't, please don't. I mean, not only will you have all the books that were postponed from last year that will come out next year, you'll have all the books that people wrote during this time

and all the books by people who are starting afresh. So I was quite happy to be writing these reviews because it meant I could respond to what was happening and my own feelings, but with the venue of reviewing these books so it didn't feel completely self-indulgent or separated from what's actually happening. And then since I've... But as with a lot of these things,

the Catholic Herald has then reduced their numbers of issues and newspapers and magazines are, you know, going through a difficult time at the moment. So that's gone away. So then, fortunately, I do have a contract for a nonfiction book, so I'm working on that. So I'm quite happily working on nonfiction. It's a music-related book.

But in terms of writing fiction, I think it's impossible. I mean, I'm sure there will be people who write brilliant novels about this time, of course. I mean, that's always the case. But I do think we have to go through these stages of first understanding what's happened. And then I think the books that will be really interesting won't be the ones that remember this time,

but they deal with what happens after this. And I mean, I think what I've heard, particularly from TV people at the moment, what they're looking for is really upbeat stuff about things like that, what's he called? Colonel Tom or Major Tom or whatever he's called. Captain Tom. They're very different Toms.

Very different Toms. But, you know, everybody's going to want these really optimistic stuff. But I think it will be... There's also room for a kind of a noir response to it in that, you know, not dealing with any of the terrible things that happen, but what the world's going to be like after this when we're all starting to learn how to do things again for the first time, in a way.

And that world will be really interesting. I think that will make... Writing about that world will be far more interesting than writing about... Also, somebody pointed out there's not a lot of um spanish flu literature no exactly yeah yeah so it may well be as you suggest that that this period is not the period people want to write about and it's it's what comes next that uh whatever that's going to be john what have you been reading this week well i've been reading not in any kind of for any morbid reason but a fortnight ago uh tim robinson um died uh of covid uh complications um he was he was

suffering from parkinson's as well but and he was um i guess he was in his uh i guess he was in his 70s late 70s um but uh he is uh an artist and a writer and a map maker and he's moved to um the aran islands in 1972 he He was born in Yorkshire and lived in various places in Europe and moved with his wife Merid to the Aran Islands, where he set about making the most incredibly detailed physical maps of pretty much every stone, every rock on the island, but also gathering stories and researching history and owning that particular tiny little place on the planet in order to tell an amazing epic story of evolution and of kind of philosophical development and he produced a series of books but the two the one I wanted to talk about today is the first one which is called Stones of Arran Pilgrimage which is his account

of a journey sunwise around the largest of the Arran Islands. This was published in 1986 by a small Irish publisher Wolfhand Press and then he was taken up by Lilliput Press another small Irish publisher and eventually he came he was published in penguin it won all kinds of awards he's like the spiritual godfather of the whole of the what you might call the sort of robert mcfarlane school of of uh of writing it's a beautiful rich i mean he's better than almost anybody who's ever tried to do it because he takes one place you know i kind of like i've always said in this i like the practitioners i like the people who are shepherds or who make dry stone walls who live in the landscape because it's their job although he was an out an outsider nobody has has I mean he learned

the language he totally soaks himself in this tiny little bit of land and he spins out of it the most amazing the most amazing stories it's a beautiful book he was a remarkable man he came over to London uh with his wife and uh and then he got ill and he couldn't go back and he died and his wife died two weeks after he died they had worked together for 50 years on this extraordinary project it's an story. I'm just going to read you a tiny little bit because, which turns out to have a slightly kind of John Irving-y feeling to it, but it gives you just a feeling for the prose. A last impression. A stumpy-legged dog, white with brown blotches, mainly gundog, but with a bit of seal in him, according to his owner. Our adopted

pet, Oscar, dearly loved and sadly missed, as the death notices put it. I used to throw a ball for him on the strand, a game that almost killed the neglected creature with delight. If I stood forgetful with ball in my hand, lost in my musings over the riddles propounded by the sea to the sand, he would wait patiently at my feet, looking up, and very delicately place a paw on my toe to recall me. Then I would glance down and catch him saying, there are just two ways, or perhaps three, in which you can hope to give supreme pleasure to another living being.

You can go home and make love to her who loves you, or you can throw that ball for your dog. This is the time for the second alternative, for the third is to go on trying to perfect your book, which I do not believe you have it in you to do. No, dogs do not speak, the sea does not riddle, dolphins do not pray, the vagrant bird neither trusts nor distrusts Robinson, waves never sign anything, what I myself witness is my own forgery. One should forgo these over-luxuriant metaphors that covertly impute a desire of communication to non-human reality. We ourselves are the only source of meaning,

at least on this little beach of the universe. These inscriptions that we insist on finding on every stone, every sand grain, are in our own hand. People who write letters to themselves are generally regarded as pathetic, but such is the human condition. We are writing a work so vast, so multivocal, so driven asunder by its project of becoming coextensive with reality that when we come across scattered phrases of it, we fail to recognise them as our own. Beautiful.

Yeah, that's quite good. And quite Irving-like, I thought. That whole, so multivocal, this sort of trying to turn the world into something that is intelligible. It's our own handwriting, but we don't recognise it. Andy, what have you been reading? Well, what I've actually been reading is another novel by Sheena Mackay called Heligoland

but I'm not going to talk about it partly because I've got something else to talk about but also because I loved it so much it's one that I've put on the in the fire You loved it so much you put it in the fire? No, no, no

In the landing I put it in the fire. No, no, no, no. In the landing. On the landing. I put it on the landing bookshelf. On the landing. Because I hope we might do a full episode on Sheena Mackay or on that novel. I've never read it, but I love her with the intensity. But also because we've got Matt here and because an exciting don't blame me don't blame me for this

i've been reading i contain multitudes and there's another much longer one called murder most foul and murder most foul has um one of the historic things about it apart from the fact it's 17 minutes long is it is it matt is it bob dylan's first number one single in the states yeah i think i think that's true isn't it yeah i think it's the first time he's ever got to number one incredible wow um before i turn to matt who is a dylan aficionado nikita are you a dylan fan yeah i'm a huge dylan fan and when i was listening to that then I just felt a deep fondness I know deep pleasure um just the you know it's so mischievous it's Bob just mashing it all up shaving off all hierarchies yeah um I I like fast food and I drive fast cars I mean it's really audacious. I picture him doing both those things. He's daring you.

I mean, it's a daring, you know, it's chew on this. You know, I dare you not to smile. I dare you not to laugh at this absurd practice of making art. Something like a little bit reminded me a bit of his Nobel Prize speech, actually. Yeah. I'll tell you what it reminds me of is Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby's Got Back. You know, it's like, I like big butts and I cannot lie.

It's not a great literature. Also a great song. I Contain Multitudes is ironically named because it seems to have only one note. The whole melody is one note. But what you hear on that clip is really fascinating classic Dylan thing there of a lot you were saying Nikita from one line to another you know that some of them are silly you know the the use of the phrase

those British bad boys the Rolling Stones right but right? But then suddenly it switches into something really Dylan-y and melancholy and timeless. Moving. And moving, yeah. William Blake. So William Blake. Yeah, Matt, what were you saying about these songs? Well, you know, I understand that some people have made these arguments

and a lot of people seem to agree, but for me it just sounds like he's on the landing of his house, looking down the books and just reading them out. Which was also a criticism made of the Nobel speech, wasn't it? Well, yeah, you know, it's like Charles Dickens. Anyone could do it. Like Charles Dickens of having it well yeah you know it's like like charles dick anyone could do it like charles dickens of having hard times you know like like like george elliott there's no mill on my floss it's easy you know you just gotta get in the right order but apart from that it's uh you know i mean this is a lot more knowing this is like him saying i'm standing he was standing in the

doorway looking like the jack of hearts i think it's more like that. It's very curated, sculpted, put together. It's not deranged in the way you're suggesting, Matt. Look, I've got his notes. Matt, I've got his notes here. And what he's written is he's written, like you were saying, Floss Mill something something Mockingbird kill. He's trying to work towards that no no i mean that's been the thing for years hasn't it that he he has just bought and people don't mind but you know he

has just borrowed from lots of books there were the japanese novels where he borrowed all the lights but i think he's reached the stage now where he really doesn't care you know i mean that because murder most foul as well that's a book about jeff k isn't it that's where he got the the uh the title for the song from was that there was this book about JFK. Amongst the Dylanologists, though, that is sort of, you know, he'd always said he would never write about the assassination because it was too important to him. And then he has.

And it's fascinating to watch the kind of the cascading discussions online of, but what is he really saying? I mean, I don't know. I love the levity he has in these songs. It's just great. Do we know if these are new or if they've been sitting around for? Well, I mean, the story is that they've been sitting around since about 2012.

And there's a couple of songs like this, aren't there, on Tempest. There's one about the Titanic and then one about John Lennon. And I think, you know, charitably, I would like to think that he wrote maybe 100 of these in the same style. And he's finally, he's parceled them out and he's thought, okay, well, you know, let's just put out a couple now. The landing takes.

Put out eight more in a few weeks. What I don't want is a whole album of this. It's going to be terrible. Matt, I want a double album, side one, Murder Most Foul, and three more songs, one per side. And each... It's a Christmas album.

Yeah, and each cover... Maybe there'll be a song about Spanish flu, which will last 17 minutes. I think he's taking John Lennon, he's taking the big iconic subjects. It's great. With a sort of, you know, as you say, Andy, one, maybe two notes. It's great.

Isn't he just acknowledging that all writing is a form of plagiarism when he does this? I do think he does it on purpose. It feels so rhythmically put together. It's not an accident, is it? It's not just all falling into a page of cuttings. It's the folk tradition, TM. It's the folk tradition.

That's what he always says, isn't it? But, you know, given that he actually knows the Rolling Stones, couldn't he come up with a better way of describing them than the British bad boy? He's using vernacular. What's wrong with that? There's a lot of this going on with Bob all the time, isn't there? Everything.

Well, Nicky is saying five minutes are up, but Nick, I think this should be 17 minutes long, this bit. We'll pick this up again after some adverts. Stay tuned to this. Let's turn to the main event, which is The World According to garp by john irving first published in 1978 by dutton in uh the us and galant in the uk and i'm going to ask each of us in turn, and I'll start. I last read a book by John Irving in 1990. Mitch, when did you last read a book by John Irving? I think I can beat that.

The last John Irving I read was in 1989, which was A Prayer for Owen Meany. And did you see him read from it at Waterstones in Charing Cross Road, as our friend Jonathan asked yesterday? I did. I did. It was one of the great nights, actually. It was absolutely one of the best readings I've seen by anybody. And that sequence of readings at that shop,

which had started some years earlier with uh tobias wolf the sort of dirty realism to it and richard ford but um irving absolutely knocked it out of the park it was amazing doing the very high pitched capital letter voice kind of um of owen meanie uh it was brilliant and nikita when when did you last read a book by john irving other than this one? I think I read Owen Meany about two years ago, yeah. For the first time or rereading it? For the first time. So I first read John Irving only six years ago. Okay.

So we'll come to that. We will. That's fascinating. And, Matt, when did you – you're a fan, aren't you? You're an Irving fan. Yeah, within reason. I mean, I tried to find before I came on here, the last one that I reviewed, but because newspaper databases have all disappeared now, I reviewed one for the Independent. I can't remember, which probably isn't a good sign, whether it was Until I Find You or A Widow for One Year.

But I did read Last Night at Twisted River, which I think was a couple ago, but I haven't read the last one. The last one I didn't, I mean, the last one didn't appear to be on the radar at all. I don't have any kind of recollection of that even coming out, to be honest. But I was reading him pretty regularly up until the one, there's one where he's just working in a restaurant and he actually did go and work in a restaurant. And the first a hundred pages are about him making an omelette or something. And I just couldn't read anymore. That was where I gave up. I guess I feel for a lot of people that John Irving sort of, if you're our generation,

lots of people read Irving in the 80s or early 90s and he's carried on of course being tremendously successful author publishing um published 14 novels he's he's still widely read but I think there's a sense that uh perhaps he slightly belongs to that era that era when he first rose to prominence and when you guys suggested we do Irving and do Garp on here I was thinking oh that'll be interesting uh it'll be nice to to hook up with John Irving again after such a long gap because I I had really enjoyed the books of his that I'd read and coming back to it I I thought wow this is totally fascinating this is not the book I thought it was going to be or by the author I thought John Irving was so there you go that goes to show what I should

have I should have kept paying attention over the last couple of decades Matt when did you first read Irving or Gart or both well I mean um when I was a kid my um my mother used to go to this place called the settlement which was sort of a it was a bit like my mother used to go to this place called The Settlement, which was sort of a bit like Jenny Fields' kind of encampment in the book. And I remember this book really hit all those people there really hard. This was in the 70s. I guess it was probably about 79. I would have been about five or six, maybe a little bit older.

And there was a real buzz about this book. And I remember thinking, I really want to read this book, even though from an early, I was too young to do it. And then when I was about 12 or 13, it was in the school library. And I immediately, I was just drawn, you know, there's that cover that had a kind of fetus on the cover. It looks a bit like a sort of a razorhead fetus. So I had no idea what the book was. It looked like an entire book about a baby. And everybody was getting really upset about it and really passionate. And I just remember these people, somebody said, how dare you read that book? He says such terrible things about women. And then somebody else was saying, you know, but it's such a feminist novel. He's the most important feminist writer there is. And I just, you know, seeing

literature cause that kind of fuss made me maybe want to read it as soon as I possibly could. And Nikita when did you so if you started reading Irving about five or six years ago when did you get to this one? So I started with this one so it was that very exciting thing of reading something in adult life that completely takes you over in the way that you might develop passions for reading a writer I don't know the way you might feel that when you're 16 or in the sixth form or at university those are very particular sweet fallings aren't they the ones that you do in your early journeys of literature and literature loving and also you really hate writers then and then later when

you're writing I mean you love and hate you know in that sort of very Irving Garp-esque way um the feelings are very strong and then when I read this which was six years ago I was actually teaching creative writing and was already a writer and so I wasn't expecting anything to really bowl me over in that way and I saw it on a list of a course that another writer was teaching James Halls and he was a colleague and I thought oh I've never read that maybe I'll maybe I'll read that now maybe now's the time to finally read it of course the book was very much in public consciousness I thought and I knew about it I knew about the film I hadn't seen the film either and so I read it then and just the bombast of it and the humor and the politics and the unapologetic absurdity and the somersaulting bravura style I just you know laughing and crying as i read it often in the same page um i thought it

was amazing certainly it is amazing i think i don't think anybody who could read it would not be amazed by uh just the the sheer chutzpah of the book is it's unflagging, I think. Incredible. One of the things that totally surprised me about it is I think I thought it would be like reading a Tom Robbins novel. You know, it would have that slightly 70s-ish kind of vibe, right? It would be a sort of like or a slightly dice man he kind of feel to it a book that would have zany on the cover yeah yeah matt that is exactly right zany and what really blew me away is how contemporary it felt in terms of some of the issues that it deals with unbelievable yeah and we've got a clip here of john irving talking in 2018, when the novel was reissued, about why it might speak to people now.

I even imagined as I was writing this novel more than 40 years ago now, that it would be out of date before I finished it. It seemed to me that the kind of sexual discrimination I was writing about was truly too backward to last. Well, I was wrong. Things may be better, but in many areas of the world, in my birth country, the United States included, women are still treated as if they were sexual minorities. And from the sympathy I've always felt for women being, actual sexual minorities, gay men, lesbian women, transgender men and women, were treated even worse. I'm dismayed that sexual intolerance is still tolerated, 40 years after I was writing about it. But it is. That's why I say it's not, to me, entirely good news that The World According to Garp is still relevant

and why I say it should be a period piece. So that's what I mean. I mean, I was completely, I thought we were getting a period piece and we get this full on assault on, it seems to me anyway, on attitudes to gender and sex roles and all those things that you might expect to read in a very contemporary novel now. Yeah. And I mean, violence all the way through it.

It's unbelievable. Like Matt, you were saying like that, that people were saying to you when you were a kid, you shouldn't be reading this because of some of the things that he says about women, but other people were saying to you when you were a kid, you shouldn't be reading this because of some of the things that he says about women, but other people were saying, well, you shouldn't be reading it because he says the opposite to what the first group of people were saying. You know, when you came back to it now,

how did you feel about reading it as a grown-up in 2020? Well, I think there are two levels that the book is interesting on. You know, one is for writers, you know, because it's so much about writing, even though Irving says, you know, it's not about writing. That's not the most important thing. That's not true. It is about writing. You know, that's very important.

And the other thing is the sexual politics. And the thing is, the books that he'd written up until then do have a very sort of 70s feel about their sexual politics. And it is, you know, it is all that zany thing where everybody's having an orgy every chapter. And, you know, it's all very sort of disturbing. And there's a bit of that in this, but it's so different to the sexual attitudes in a John Updike novel or, you know, Saul Bellow novel or Philip Roth novel. You know, he does, he really gets involved with gender

politics fearlessly and without sort of steering it towards the male camp as other male writers do. But at the same time, there are, there is a sort of incredible sexual graphicness about it. And he does write so much about rape and abuse and about men doing terrible things to women. But at the same time, you've got a character who's going around sleeping with prostitutes, and that's just part of the parcel, that's fine and it's okay you know it's a very unusual form of sexual politics you know it feels on one hand very enlightened but on the other it's written in a time where you know i mean maybe because it's pre-aids maybe because it's pre that kind of that kind of morality it it feels very sort of confusing in that way you know i mean and and also obviously the

autobiographical connections you know he went to, and also obviously the autobiographical connections, you know, he went to university in Vienna. So lots of his novels have sections set in Vienna, but the idea of going with your mother to Vienna and your mother buying prostitutes for you. And I mean, when I, when I read, I mean, it's a bit like when something happened, I was saying it was really weird reading it as a child and thinking that's what the adult world is like, you know? So, so when I read that when I was too young, not to know any better,

I was just thinking, oh, well, maybe when I'm 18 I'll go off to Vienna with my mother and, you know, she'll arrange these prostitutes and that will be fine and everybody will think it's lovely. And was it? I must ask, Nikita, what did you make of the sexual politics of it when you read it in the year 2014? Well, it's interesting because just the fact that Matt read it at 12, John Irving, in that foreword that you just quoted him reading

from to the 40-year anniversary, I think, or one of the anniversaries, he says that he gave it to his son to read when he was 12 and he was worried and nervous about what the son would think. And I'm thinking now, was he worried that we all essentially read fiction thinking that it's a guide or a manual to living? So like Matt wonders when he's reading it at 12 whether he'll go to Vienna and have sexual favours delivered to him courtesy of his mother's purchasing powers,

whether John Irving thinks that's going to happen to his child. It's really interesting when you read it. I think that the sexual politics are very honest and warts and all. And he kind of is so under the skin of feminism of that time and so respectful of it at so many points in the book and also just really hates it, just really hates the fact that the feminist who feels most kind of endearing to me, which is his mother, who's a very strong Marmite-ish character and annoys a lot of readers, who's a very strong Marmite-ish character and annoys a lot of readers, that she can constantly quiz him on male lust and constantly interview him about male lust and constantly ask about it and not know it. And he's just like enough already with the male lust questions.

But he also is so sympathetic to feminism and to the trans situation. And he said somewhere that he keeps, well, he kept writing the trans character into all his books. Roberta turns up in some form or another in all of his books. women and women's politics, femaleness and the primacy of female needs, urges, discrimination, all of that is done actually very respectfully at many points in the novel and then it's torn down by Garp in moments of sort of pitiful anger or he's not very sympathetic when he tears down feminism. Don't you think it felt to me like a book clearly written?

And I think what you're both saying is spot on, actually. It's a book written in America in the 70s where many writers are trying to make sense of what's been shaken down by the so-called permissive societies, what's happened in the 60s. And what I think is so interesting about reading Irving is he might not get it totally right, but he's a lot more respectful, as you suggest,

of lots of aspects of it, of seeking to find balance in a way that I think other more lionised male American writers probably weren't trying to do. You know, they're trying to see exclusively from what does this mean for men? That's not what's going on in this book. Yeah, he's trying to do it whilst also acknowledging that identity politics are, by their nature nature that sort of 70s essentialism is infuriating so to be reduced to just one of many plural identities is infuriating so he is trying as you say infuriating that's right that's that's right that's one of the key notes isn't it it's the book is infuriated as a series of things pass before the narrator's eye, which infuriate him. And Garp is himself infuriating and Garp without giving everything

away. But he pays for that in the most in the ultimately by being a kind of a kind of a gadfly. I mean, it's a brilliant book, I have to say, about family life as well. It's a brilliant book about parenting, about the dread, the constant existential dread that all parents have of wanting to try and control their children and trying to steer them away from danger, but at the same time knowing that in some part that you have to expose them for danger for them to grow.

He did say, didn't he, he said that he alternated all the time between which character he liked the best in the novel. And for a long time, Jenny field, Garp's mother, was a more important character to him than Garp. And she is a kind of magnificent character in lots of ways. But as you say, Nikita, definitely Marmite. You know, definitely. There's nobody in this book you can confidently say,

that's the calm, steady, moral core of the book. definitely Marmite, you know, definitely. There's nobody in this book you can confidently say, that's the calm, steady, moral core of the book. They're all fucked up in different ways. Well, I think he's a very messy writer, isn't he? I mean, that's one of the, I mean, the people who don't like him, they don't like his prose and they don't like the way that he writes and structures things. And I think some of that mess is left in the book. You know, he talks again in that introduction Nikita mentioned.

He talks about how he originally started it in 1786 and then he started it with Jenny and then he started it with Garp. And, you know, that's still there. You can see that these are all sort of broken pieces that aren't completely put back together. You know, it's not... I mean, I think those are the two problems that people have with him are the quality of the prose and and that kind of insistence on a Dickensian structure without

really the underpinnings to do it but he somehow manages to get through all of that and produce stuff that's so good the sort of chapter by chapter and incident by incident that you don't care you know the quality of the prose is almost irrelevant i want to to talk later on about that Dickensian thing, about how he uses plots, not what the plots are in his books, but how he uses plot. I think that's one of the things that really distinguishes Irving as a writer. It's almost the sense you were talking about things being

in quotation marks. Plot in Irving's books is often in quotation marks. A thing needs to happen now, reader. And so I'm going to put a thing before you. Boy, does it. Always. It's also about whether he'll pull it off, though, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, you know, that whole thing of putting massive chunks

of novels in your book and short stories. I mean, hardly anyone has ever done that because, you know, unless it's things like, you you know back in the classic era like maybe you know to cameron or don quixote but you know to just have so much of a different novel in your book i mean if you took those bits out the book would collapse it only really works in a way and that's where the film had some problems because it's a method of delivering all these other stories at the same time i'm gonna read the blurb as we do traditionally on That Listed. And what I've got is the Jack is the Flap copy from the US first edition.

So before this book was a bestseller, and this was John Irving's first bestseller, before John Irving had a great reputation and this book's arrived, you know, we're sort of familiar with what Irving represents but that readers publishers 42 years ago I was thinking how did they market this book right so here's what they here's what was on the jacket of the US first edition and this will set it up for listeners who haven't read it as well like the great novels of the past that moved us profoundly and still echo in our minds. Now that's starting high.

The world, according to Garp, creates a populous world and persuades us to dwell in it for an extended time. Garp's world is an imagined one, but it lights up the real world for us with all its terrors and delights, its themes of rage and love, its alternation between comedy and tragedy. New para.

The main story in The World According to Garp, brackets, and it is a novel filled with stories, close brackets, is of a man with a famous mother, a man who reaches toward fame himself. Jenny Fields is the black sheep daughter of an aristocratic New England family. She becomes, almost by accident, a feminist leader ahead of her time.

Her son, T.S. Garp, named for a father he never saw, has high ambitions for his artistic career, but he has an even higher obsessive devotion to his wife and children. Surrounding Garp and Jenny are a wide assortment of people. School teachers and whores, wrestlers and radical radicals editors and something i can't read editors and writers transsexuals and rapists and husbands and wives it is john irving's special gift that all his characters even the least lovable among them, are portrayed not just vividly but affectionately. The pace and language of this novel are edited to Garp's life and career, explosive with energy, full of

rivalry and a sense of drama. In three previous novels, John Irving established himself as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. With his new novel, he has taken a quantum leap forward. The World According to Garp is a work of extraordinary narrative power, rich, humorous and wise. I mean, I'd like to think John Irving wrote that. What's interesting is that there's a lot of positive visualisation going on in Garp because Garp writes a bestseller, doesn't he, which is virtually called The World According to Garp.

It's called The World According to Something Else. So weird. But he writes a bestseller, and then this becomes a bestseller. I kind of like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's the same thing Nabokov used to do, where he puts his novels in, you know, sort of fictionalised versions of his novels.

But the thing is, you think that maybe this is the first time he's writing about being a writer, you know, because you might think, well, OK, he'd reached that kind of point in his career where he wanted a bestseller, so he wrote about a bestselling novelist. But his other earlier books are about novelists as well, you know, so he was always writing about himself right from the very beginning. And I think a lot of people don't like books about writers.

I love books about writers, but I think writers often do. But I think there are two ways that he makes it acceptable in this. One is that he writes in the third person, so you don't have the sense of connecting Garp and John Oving too closely. And later on, he rewrote another book into the third person because he worked for that very same reason. And the other thing is that he surrounds himself with normal people who come up...

Well, when I say normal people, you know, with, you know,emen and and regular everyday characters who come up to him and have an argument with him and say you know why should anyone be interested in what your your nonsense is so we have a sense of the real world being around him and I think that's probably what made it one of the things that made it a bestseller is he puts he makes the writer seem like a desirable job but then puts it in a world of other jobs that are equally desirable and doesn't make the writer this incredible hero figure. He makes him a kind of tragic, doomed person

rather than, you know, what would happen in other... When, you know, when Roth, for example, writes about writers and he always wins the argument and he's always the best character and everyone else has to bow down to him. With this, he makes God the butt of lots of what's happening. Yeah, that's it, yeah. Hey, Nikita, I found a list on the internet of things one can expect to find in John Irving novels.

And so I'm going to read this out to you and I want you to choose your favourite, right? Brilliant. So which of these is the thing you most look forward to finding in a John Irving novel? Is it Bears, New England, hotels, Vienna, wrestling, sex, violence, or writing fiction? Ooh.

or writing fiction? Ooh. So it's... I mean, it's definitely not Bears Vienna or the other one early on. New England. New England, right. I'm not looking for New England in a John Irving novel. It's probably sex.

Because sex delineates character in this incredible way and is also part of plot. All of the tension is usually concentrated in what happens during sex and also the recompense for the sexual act, isn't it? People are punished or rewarded for their sexual misdemeanours and that is very interesting. And there's a lot of humour around it, probably sex. Crime and punishment, that's a big thing for Irving, right?

Yeah. And the death wish. The death wish is a thing in this book which seemed, you know... When I was rereading it, I was thinking about the death wish is a thing in this book which seemed you know when i was rereading it i was thinking about the death wish and i was thinking i'm not so sure it's i think isn't it just straight up fear of death uh so he puts it in to tackle the greatest fear um part of the plot is linked to trying to believe that you could live on after that greatest fear is experienced. But also he does that thing of some characters he kills for drama.

Yeah. Some characters he kills for thematic necessity. And those that he hasn't killed for drama or thematic necessity, he does a round-up at the end of the book to give you all their deaths. Yeah. He feels the book hasn't ended unless... He can't write the end and underline it in good bold

unless he's killed everyone. I mean... Right? I mean, plot spoiler, but, yeah. Sometimes he jumps forward as well, though, doesn't he? So, I mean, that's what I find very unusual. I mean, some other people have done it, I think probably influenced by him as well, where he'll describe a character in the middle

and then he'll say, and that character died in this way 10 years later or 20 years later. So he does weird things with time. He's constantly moving. He's always looking, like every time he meets somebody, he looks at the whole of their life, even if they're just a sort of small character. You know, you have a character who crops up.

He loves tying everything back together, doesn't he? He loves tying up loose ends, doesn't he? He's got that kind of Dickensian thing, definitely, of wanting to make sure that you know all the, you know, right to the very last pages of the book, that you know where everybody's ended up. So God was Irving's fourth novel. And here he is in 2018 again,

talking about what the publication of the novel meant for him. It was my fourth novel. I had learned something from the experience of writing the first three, I had learned something from the experience of writing the first three, but it was my first novel with a social subject, my first political novel, my first protest novel, as I would describe it. Yeah. And it was written at a time, personally, of considerable duress. I was a full-time wrestling coach, a full-time English teacher, and I had two young children. And I was lucky if I got to write for as many as two hours a day and not every day of the week. So whatever I think of Garp with hindsight, I'm eternally grateful to it because it is the book that made me a full-time writer. It is the book that eventually enabled me to write seven hours a day, eight days a week.

It freed me from having to have other jobs. eight days a week, it freed me from having to have other jobs. And I never imagined at the time I was writing it that I would ever be self-supporting as a writer. I had no reason to think I would be. Nikita, could you read us a little bit of this implausible bestseller? Well, the bit I was going to read is actually all about this idea that Matt was referencing earlier, where

the act of writing is torn down several times and the writer is put in his place, or in her place, regularly in the book. So, it's about halfway in, and it's when Garp gets some hate mail of his own for his second book.

Oh, yeah. Okay, good. Good, good. Which is called... It was a lively letter by someone who took offence at second wind of the cuckold. That's it. It was a wonderful book title. It was not a blind, stuttering, spastic farter, as you might imagine, either.

It was just what Garp needed to lift himself out of his slump Dear shithead I have read your novel you seem to find other people's problems very funny I have seen your picture with your fat head of hair. I suppose you can laugh at bold persons.

And in your cruel book, you can laugh at people who can't have orgasms and people who aren't blessed with happy marriages and people whose wives and husbands are unfaithful to each other. You ought to know that persons who have these problems do not think everything is so funny. Look at the world, shithead. It is a bed of pain, people suffering, and nobody believing in God or bringing up their children right. You shithead, you don't have any problems, so you can make fun of people who do. Yours sincerely, Mrs I.B. Poole, Findlay, Ohio.

That letter stung up like a slap. Rarely had he felt so importantly misunderstood. Why did people insist that if you were comic, you couldn't also be serious? And it goes on to talk about how he thinks that people mistake being profound for being sober. But very amusing section. And he engages, doesn't he?

There's so much, again, the resonances for today with kind of social media and trolling and, you know, not getting yourself locked into... There's so much of this book that feels, as you said right at the beginning, Andy, incredibly contemporary. When you were reading it, Nikita, I was really pleasantly surprised at how funny the book is on the atomic level, that he's got such a good ear.

It's quite muscular, the prose. Matt was saying about the question marks around the prose, but he has got a really good rhythmic ear for landing a gag and landing a one-liner. Just the fact that that's Mrs IB Poole and she calls him shithead again and again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know that he had that letter, right?

I mean, I don't know if he did, but it just feels as if he must have had a letter like that. Absolutely, yeah. Just like you know he got his names from telephone directories directories yeah this is Irving talking about being a funny writer I think I I learned this best from the persona of my old mentor and first reader of my first novel Kurt Vonnegut who was one of the funniest writers alive and one of the most depressed men I ever knew. And terrible things happened in his novels too. But if you have an instinct for comedy,

you can't control it. If you are a comic writer, you will be comic, even and perhaps especially at the most awful times. In literature, I've always felt that the better time the reader, the audience, is having right up until the car hits the wall, the more emotionally unprepared they are for the car hitting the wall. I like the idea of telling a story in a way that makes my audience feel, oh, this is fun. This is until it isn't. So, Matt, that speaks to what we were talking about,

about Irving's humor and also what he does with plots. How do you feel that he uses plot in Garp and in some of the other novels? Well, it's interesting. I was watching the film with my son the other day to prepare for this, and I'd watched it before, but I wanted to watch it again, and he was saying that he felt like the entire film

was about a side character that you would have compared to the films he watches. He just felt like, why is it all about this man? I mean, it's a very low-key performance from Robin Williams and it's very good. But I kind of feel that up until this point, well, I don't think you can sort of generalise about plots across his books,

because I think the earlier books are plotted in a fairly conventional way. Then this one isn't because he has this weird breakthrough where he starts to put in other books and other stories. And, you know, and if you took all of that out, it would sort of fall apart. You know, it's really just a sort of I mean, I think his structure overall is his lives, you know, the whole of people's lives, like we were saying. his lives, you know, the whole of people's lives, like we were saying. But then I think as he goes on after this, and I'm slightly less keen on the books after that, because I think he became too obsessed with the idea of being Dickensian.

I think probably a lot of people said, oh, you're like Dickens. And then he started wanting to be like Dickens and then started putting in much more convoluted plots. I mean, he has like later on there are murders and crimes and there's much more of a sense that he's working very hard to plot it. What I like about Garp is it's almost sort of plotless, but it's full of incident. There's the pattern of it,

that people come in on page one, and they do something terrible at the end, but there's no real sense, and there is, as you said earlier, about people being punished for sexuality or bad behaviour and things like that, but there's not really much for sexuality or bad behaviour, things like that. But there's not really much... No, he likes making stuff up. You can feel that.

He's really just enjoying, oh, I can do this. Let me see what happens if I drop this in. You feel that the book is kind of... I mean, it's not exactly sprawling, but it's never stable. You don't feel that you're in the hands of somebody who's calmly narrating you through. There are times when you feel it has the potential, it might just all fall apart.

I've got a quote here from his Paris Review interview where I think every single part of this, I would ask you as I read it, it's very short, to think that what he means is the opposite of what he's saying. John Irving, I'm not a 20th century novelist i'm not modern and certainly not post-modern i follow the form of the 19th century novel that was the century that produced the models of the form i'm old-fashioned a storyteller i'm not an analyst and i'm not an intellectual yeah i mean that's not true is it i mean he

and that's just a lie i don't think any of those things are true right but also he realizes that in the book because he's got helen who you know uh garp's wife who's who's an academic and is constantly giving lectures on narration or narrative or all that you know and he's throwing that in you know almost as a way of saying look i know all this stuff but i'm not going to do it but i don't get a bit of what was steven Stevens yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah so you know and the books that got even the plotting of the books that Garp writes they sound like crazy books I mean like they they have some relation to his his previous books but they're much madder versions I mean these books couldn't exist in the in our world nobody would

read second wind of the cuckold or or the other the mad one you know can I Can I read a bit? Is that OK? Yeah, yeah, please, please. What I wanted to read is John Wolfe, who's his editor, his response to receiving one of Garp's books, this crazy book. So he's written this crazy book full of rape and violence. And John Wolfe, who seems like a very decent man, he's one of the characters that I like the most, I wish there were more of his kind in the real world decent and

decent and stable decent and stable, exactly so this is how he responds to receiving this nutty book and also my wife who's an agent when she was watching the film and it's constantly Gart walking into a publisher's office

and saying, just publish my book exactly as I wrote it. Keeps saying, that's not how publishing works. But clearly in Garpland, this is how publishing works. So this is John Wolfe's response to Garp's crazy novel. What do you mean this is chapter one? Garp's editor, John Wolfe, wrote him. How can there be any more of this? This is entirely too much as it stands.

How could you possibly go on? It goes on, Garp wrote back. You'll see. I don't want to see it, John Wolfe told Garp on the phone. Please drop it. At least put it aside. Why don't you take a trip? It would be good for you and for Helen, I'm sure. And Duncan can travel now, can't he? But Garp not only insisted that this was going to be a novel, he insisted that John Wolfe try and sell the first chapter to a magazine. Garp had never had an agent. John Wolfe was the first man to deal with Garp's writing

and he managed everything for him, just as he managed everything for Jenny Fields. That's good. i mean that you know the thing about garp and you're saying nikita about that i mean it life imitating art i mean this was a massive bestseller i mean three million copies sold and um you know sat on the top of the of the bestseller lists and was um shortlisted for the national book award and was in the running for the pulitzer was pipped to the post by cheever i mean it was it it not only gave him as he rather modestly said financial security it made him incredibly wealthy wealthy

enough to you know buy a place in the hamptons and couldn't find a house he liked so he moved a house from new hampshire you know and rebuilt it on the hamptons i mean it's it's the sort of literary fame. And I'm sure some of the problems that people have with Irving is because he was so successful. I mean, he's kind of almost like the sort of the archetype of the great white American male novelist of the late 20th century. I've always found it strange that a book like this could be a bestseller though don't you think it's such a strange book if you're going to break out from an elite literary all of the things he just said in his quote where he says i am not post-modern i am not the following i'm not experimental it's like the opposite of the

bob dylan song where he says i am x y and Z. He's saying I'm not, but he is. It's sort of like a postmodern joke in saying I'm not. How can that be a bestseller? Somehow it doesn't feel like a bestseller. It's very hard to summarise it. Even the blurb was failing at summarising it, really. So when you read John Irving now here in 2020, which writers does he remind you of?

Murakami. I mean, I think they're friends and they sort of exercise together. And I think they do. They do. I think Murakami has translated Irving and I think he fed into his early style. But I think the indulgences and problems with later Murakami are there in Irving as well.

They've almost had exactly... And they've had exactly the same careers, you know, that sort of, you know, with Murakami writing Norwegian Wood and that selling two million copies. You know, it's exactly the same career. It was like four or five early books, then a big breakthrough, then these wayward later ones. And constant sort of anxiety about their status

in the literary canon. Yeah, yeah yeah as a sort of an american original he reminds me of randy newman he has this ability to to create character and to make you you know that thing that randy newman does that his his songs are popular with the people he's satirizing i can sort of see that with with um with irving because he is he takes into Irving, because he takes, particularly in Garb, he takes so many risks. He's on both sides of, as we say, loved by feminists, despised by feminists. And I just think he's, I mean, he's,

I don't think he's 19th century at all. I think that was brilliant that you're reading that passage out. I think he is really, really, really. Nonsense. I mean, this is this is this is a modernist a strange kind of it's totally sui generis in some ways even even within his other books i mean i you know i haven't read as many as matt but i i think garp is is something apart i tell you who he reminds apart i mean obviously coming to him now and we heard that clip of him

talking about vonnegut i can see a lot of Vonnegut in this book particularly. I don't know about other ones, but in Gart particularly. The writer that he reminds me of, John, who we did on Backlisted last year, stylistically doesn't really remind me of, but in terms of, because I listened to lots of Irving interviews when I was preparing for the show. And the figure he reminds me of is Ray Bradbury. Yes, that makes sense. They both have a strong sense of, as writers and as American writers

and as American writers in the media, they have a strong sense of their public persona and their figure, right? That kind of American philosopher salesman. That's what Bradbury was. And that really feels to me like what, before we came there, I was saying, we've got so many clips of Irving because he's so good at curating his own um persona so when you listen to that

always be closing right always be closing always be closing that's why he shuts down all those characters at the end of the book you know I I'm I'm hitching up the wagon to the back of the to the horse and getting out of here I think that, that's why it's so satisfying as a book, Garp, that he does finish it and so many literary novels just build up setting, psychology, character and then fall off a cliff the minute something interesting happens.

But he's quite nice about writers and writing, isn't he? Because that Alice character who doesn't finish a novel, she's still treated quite respectfully. Every writer, and it's not, I mean, that's one of the things, Nikita, when you were saying about reading it as a writer, I mean, it's quite nice because it doesn't make, even, you know, you don't feel like Irving

where he sold two million copies. You know, Gart publishes three books and two of them are complete failure. His agent's constantly saying to him, you're just a literary writer, you're never going to sell any copies. Yeah, and there's all that jealousy of his mother that's just nakedly displayed in a really unappealing unattractive way for garth i just wanted to do that look there's a little bit

where he i think this whole thing about the popular and the and and the literary where, as often with Irving, I think he gets a minor character to kind of carry that sort of debate forward. There's this brilliant character who is the cleaner for the publisher in the book, Jilzy Sloper. And, you know, he's asked her, she occasionally, only twice has she ever wanted to keep a copy of the book. The first was with Jenny's book, Garp's mum's book, and the feminist book.

And the second was this mad novel that John Wolfe, the publisher, had sold. He got serialised in Crop Shots, a porn mag, because he despised it so much. But she likes it. And he says, why do you like it? She says, well, I like it because i read it because i want to know what happened and then she asks rather kind of shyly asks him for a copy and

says why she said well you know you go i thought you were so now you know what happens in it why would you want to read it again and she said i don't know i might need to lend it to someone she said and so he says well would you ever read it again yourself, John Woolfast? Well, Jilzy said, not all of it, I imagine. At least not all once or not right away. Again, she looked confused. Well, she said sheepishly, I guess I mean there's parts of it I wouldn't mind reading again. Why, John Woolfast?

Lord, Jilzy said tiredly, as if she were making, finally impatient with him. It feels so true, she crooned, making the word true cry like a loon over a lake at night. It feels so true, John repeated. Lord, don't you know it is, Jilly asked him. You don't know when a book's true, Jilly sang to him. We really ought to trade jobs, she laughed now, the stout three-pronged plug of the vacuum cleaner cord clutched like a gun in her fist. I do wonder, Mr. Wolfe, she said sweetly, if you know when a bathroom was clean, she went over and peered in her wastebasket, or when a wastebasket was empty, she said,

a book feels true when it feels true, she said to him impatiently. A book's true when you can say, True, she said to him impatiently. A book's true when you can say, yeah, that's just how damn people behave all the time. Then you know it's true. That's my favourite scene in that novel, I must say. So listen, we have to wrap up. We have to, I know. So before we go, I'm going to ask each of you in turn.

Nikita, I'll start with you. So listeners who haven't read John Irving, maybe they've read him before, they've read Garp, they've come back to Garp. Which John Irving novel should they read next? Probably A Prayer for Owen Meany, I'd say. That would be a good one to go to next. A good compare and contrast if you're going to go deep.

Well, that's the last one. No, that's not the last one I read. That's the first one i read when it came out and i you know i can still remember whole chunks of that book remarkably clearly which obviously i can't for lots of things i read 30 years ago so yes matt a more recent one maybe maybe until i find you i think that dickens influence hit hard with side house rules in the next few and then i think he gets back to his weirdness and oddity and all the strangeness in that until i until i find you but it's it's too

long and it's too rambling and it and it makes garp seem completely sensible i mean the fact that you know garp really only covers his life to about you know mid 30s in in this book it goes right through so it's twice the length because his life's twice as long um but i think if you liked garp and wanted more of the same i think until i find you would be the one that i'd recommend following it up with i'd just like to add that it was only when i was uh reading the world according to garp that it occurred to me that uh you know because irving there have been several films of Irving's work. He wrote the screenplay for Cider House Rules. There's the film of Garp. Matt, you were recommending Door in the Floor,

which is an adaptation of Widow for One Year. And it was only when I was thinking about those things and thinking, wait a minute, now what is this book reminding me of? Oh, yeah, it's reminding me of Forrest Gump, except Forrest Gump is rubbish. You know, Forrest Gump is like, this explains what Forrest Gump, except Forrest Gump is rubbish. You know, Forrest Gump is like, this explains what Forrest Gump is. It's a rubbish John Irving film that's not written by John Irving. You're reminded of the ambition behind Forrest Gump.

Yeah, and also the idea of a titular character who has a thing wrong with them, who opens up a vista of american history except and this is a tribute to john irving it's no good and it's also really conservative and whatever you know reservations we've we might have expressed about irving yeah he's a fair writer nikita this goes back to what you were saying at the beginning he is prepared to see things from all sorts of points of view even things that you the reader might not immediately identify with I do think that that's down to his honesty he's it's as though he's made a pact with himself to be honest and not to lie and therefore there's an ugliness that has to come out but there's also a deep river of respect that comes out so he's always trying to be honest or even-handed even in each

situation even though as has been said he does get it wrong sometimes and he you know he can be really sort of not politically correct but then you know when did you ever read a book that was good that was deeply politically correct all the way through john let's wind up that is a brilliant brilliant place to end that's it thank you to nikita and matt for taking us back to that strange and violent but weirdly familiar land of america in the 70s to nikki birch for juggling distant voices and weaving them together with the skill of a great american novelist and to unbound for once more furnishing our virtual kitchen table you can download all 110 episodes of this plus

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