The best of John Irving’s novels have a powerful narrative
impulse. You can’t stop reading them. One reason is that Irving plants clues about
what is to come. The anticipation or
dread pulls you along. This was
certainly the case with The World
According to Garp (1978) and A Prayer
for Owen Meany (1989). Added to this
narrative pull are his distinctive, sometimes lovable, sometimes eccentric
characters. The reader grows fond of
them, and this is certainly true of the leading character Juan Diego in Avenue of Mysteries (2015). This novel contains many elements from Irving’s
earlier novels: a dead mother, ambiguous concerns with religion, anticipation
of an event that is telegraphed from the beginning but that doesn’t happen
until the end, transsexuals, abortion, sex, an array of interesting characters.
I have read various discussions about whether Irving is a truly literary
novelist, or whether he was at his height simply a pop culture phenomenon,
popular in the same way that the Beatles are (or were) popular. Irving is certainly a “literary” writer, that
is, a serious novelist who explores with skill and finesse important ideas. His
method right now may not be fashionable, but being in fashion and being a
significant novelist are not related concepts.
Juan Diego is a novelist who resembles Irving in a curious
sort of way. He has written a novel about abortion, and another about an Indian
circus, for example. He spends much time thinking back on his early life, and
it is easy to imagine that Irving may have examined through Juan Diego some of
his own concerns as a writer who has entered his later years. But in other ways
Juan Diego and Irving are not alike. The
novel moves back and forth in time between Juan’s early life in a Mexican
garbage dump and his later years as a highly successful novelist travelling to
a cemetery in the Philippines to pay homage to a man killed in the Second World
War. He doesn’t know the man’s name or
exactly where he is buried, which creates a challenge for him, but in making
this trip he is keeping a promise to a drunken hippy whom he knew in his early
days in Mexico. Avenue of Mysteries
does not describe Juan Diego’s middle years, only his life as a child and as an
older man.
Avenue of Mysteries has
a particular interest in religion, spirits, mindreading. Above all, it’s
interested in death. By the end, almost
everyone who has passed through its pages has died. Juan Diego dies. To say this is not to give anything away
since the novel hints at his future end from the beginning. He has stopped taking his beta blockers on a
regular basis, for instance, so as to increase the effectiveness of the Viagra
which he also takes. He grows increasingly fatigued, is sometimes confused,
feels nauseous—these are ominous signs. Irving
mentions the beta blockers often enough that it is too easy to describe them as
clumsy foreshadowings. He wants the
reader (I think) to notice these clues, to recognize that they are leading
towards Juan’s final mortal moments, to make them part of the novel. Life has
both a beginning and an end.
There is at least one miracle in the novel involving a
statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. (Juan
is named after the farmer who first had a vision of the Virgin 400 years before.) Juan’s sister Lupe can read minds and
sometimes see the future. She speaks in
a garbled tongue that only Juan can understand—he serves as her translator.
There is a sacrifice (reminiscent of the one in Owen Meaney). Just as it was possible to find an underlying
Christian meaning in Owen Meany, we
can do the same in this novel. But there
are other religions at issue here: the Aztec religion, to which the Virgin of Guadalupe
may be related. And perhaps some strain
of Buddhism or Shintoism: two women—a mother and her daughter, both very lusty,
trail Juan throughout his travels in the novel, and at some points he realizes
they cast no shadow and produce no reflections in mirrors. The function of these woman and possibly
other elements reminded me of Haruki Murakami.
A highpoint is the scene in which Juan’s mother Esmerelda, a
simple-minded prostitute who works her trade near the garbage dump, dies while
cleaning the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The tone of this novel is light and whimsical. Despite its
subject, it is not dark.
The
New York Times reviewer
wrote that “More often this novel is so life-affirming you want to hurl
yourself into bus traffic. The things that for a while were magical in Mr.
Irving’s writing long ago came to seem, instead, like tricks. From the reader’s
perspective, this is magic ordealism.”
[1] I
disagreed with this review, which while not entirely dismissing the novel disparaged
its methods and messages as too obvious and hackneyed.
Irving may be following a formula of sorts
that worked for him in his earlier novels, but it does not fail him in
Avenue of Mysteries.
Juan Diego is a remarkable character.
