Word: wheelwrighting
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Maybe John Wheelwright should be in Stockholm," says John Irving, the former college wrestler who pinned the nation's attention in 1978 with The World According to Garp. Maybe, but Toronto turned out to be the perfect place. There one can be away but not away, close to home but not at home. The clean, well-lighted city on Lake Ontario is also where Irving, 47, met his second wife, literary agent Janet Turnbull. Irving and Turnbull were married in 1987, and maintain an apartment in Toronto's Forest Hill section. The author spends about a week each month north...
...putting Owen Meany's dialogues in upper case? Irving got the idea from editions of the New Testament in which Jesus' utterances appear in red letters. And John Wheelwright's inability to forget the country of his birth? "Even if you try hard to look away from the U.S., it is there in your face like a flag...
...literary hindsight, the mess of two decades is foreseen by a sawed-off Christly caricature, Owen Meany, a New Hampshire granite quarrier's son who speaks in capital letters and believes the sacrificial arc of his life has been plotted by God. The novel's narrator is John Wheelwright, Meany's prep-school mate and eventually his leading apostle...
...hagiographies and heroic tales, faith is tested by adversity. Wheelwright's challenge is vintage Irving, an event that is simultaneously horrifying and absurdly funny. It occurs during a Little League game in the summer of 1953 when Meany, in the lineup because his diminutive strike zone draws walks, swings away. He connects for a mighty foul ball that shoots toward the stands and fatally strikes Wheelwright's mother on the head. The game is suspended along with, it is hoped, the reader's disbelief...
...Wheelwright recalls this and subsequent apocalypses from his home in Toronto, where he has lived as an expatriate for 20 years. Assimilation is difficult; Canada is under the perpetual influence of a hot-air mass pumped in by media from the south, and Wheelwright is a U.S. news junkie. As one character puts it, "Television gives good disaster...