In One Person
IN PRINT / John Irving's smart new novel, at the intersection of sexuality and gender
Matt Mills / National / Tuesday, May 01, 2012

http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/In_One_Person-11918.aspx

Novelist John Irving became a household name with his 1978 novel, The World According to Garp. He solidified that success with A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules and many others. He has, for those works, conjured characters of variously ambiguous gender and sexuality, but he's never published a novel in which sexual outlaws and the glorious sexual and gender differences among people are centrally featured. He's never published a truly queer story; that is, until now. His 13th novel, In One Person, due out on May 8, is just that.

Readers first meet protagonist Billy Abbott in 1955, when he is a 13-year-old budding writer and sexual being who finds himself almost overwhelmingly attracted to his librarian Miss Frost, an older, transgender woman. When asked by Miss Frost what sort of stories he would most like to read, Billy replies, "Do you know any novels about young people who have dangerous crushes, crushes on the wrong people?"

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In One Person – review

An aspiring novelist struggles to come to terms with his sexuality in John Irving's memorable hymn to individuality

        Tim Adams
        guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 May 2012 06.22 EDT
     
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/04/john-irving-one-person-review

It has always seemed appropriate that John Irving is the only great contemporary novelist to have been inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. He goes about his writing much as you imagine he used to go about his former life as a college grappling champion and subsequent obsessive hobby as a coach. Subjects are faced down, language approached with muscular intent and no little adrenaline, and the whole eventually coerced into satisfying submission. It's not a criticism to say that he is the kind of novelist who carefully measures up a character from every angle and knows every trick in the book; the thrill of his books is the way he sets about establishing complex individuals who generally come out fighting.

[...]

That sense of a lost golden time inflects Billy's reminiscensces as he looks back on his life from the vantage of 65-year-old literary notoriety. What begins as a kind of coming-of-age memoir, in which he learns to be himself in the company of drag queens and transsexuals, in the bath houses of New York and opera houses of Vienna, becomes something far darker as Aids begins to destroy this likable masquerade in the early 1980s. Irving details the shift with candour; having spent half a life in beds rarely his own, Billy now sits at bedsides and has sad conversations with living corpses, lovers he used to know.

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Two Men Talking: Edmund White & John Irving
5.4.2012
By Edmund White and John Irving

http://www.out.com/entertainment/art-books/2012/05/04/edmund-white-john-irving-One-Person-jack-holmes

The novelists Edmund White, 72, and John Irving, 70, might not seem an obvious match, but their decades-long friendship is rooted in a shared interest in challenging America's puritanical attitudes. In one book after another, these literary lions have explored sexuality and identity in ways that challenge readers to examine their own prejudices.

White's debut, Forgetting Elena -- a mystery set on an island that thrums with Fire Island's all-too-familiar rituals -- was published in 1973. But it was his 1982 novel, A Boy's Own Story, that cemented his place as America's preeminent chronicler of the gay experience. His latest, Jack Holmes & His Friend, was published in January.

For Irving, international success arrived in 1978 with The World According to Garp, now published as a Modern Library edition, along with three of his other celebrated works -- The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year. His latest, In One Person, tells the story of a bisexual man attracted to men, women, and transgender women. Here, the two men discuss sex, gender, and why breasts separate gay men from straight.

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'In One Person' by John Irving
By Brock Clarke
May 06, 2012

http://www.greenhorizon-online.com/index.php/Insight/unwelcome-aboard.html

"In One Person" has many of the things that one expects from a John Irving novel: It is set, mostly, in northern New England (in the fictional town of First Sister, Vt.); its protagonist is a novelist (as was true in 1978's "The World According to Garp" — a book I loved, and the book "In One Person" most closely resembles in its themes, if not always in prose style). There are no bears, but there are wrestlers and a prep school. German is taught and spoken, and Austria is visited. There are big questions about the narrator and novelist Billy Abbot's father, who has been more or less absent since Billy's birth. There's lots of sexual awakening and questioning and questing, lots of gender bending, lots of sex.

I know this list sounds dismissive, but I don't mean it to be. Sometimes Irving seems haunted by his obsessions, and sometimes he seems merely fond of them, but in any case, they clearly matter to him. These obsessions might be familiar to devoted (or even casual) Irving readers, but that does not necessarily mean they are tired.

Irving Channels 'Garp' With Transsexual Wrestler in New Novel
By Craig Seligman - May 7, 2012 12:01 AM ET

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-07/irving-channels-garp-with-transsexual-wrestler-in-new-novel.html

Thirty-four years ago, in "The World According to Garp," John Irving created a transsexual for the ages in a former football player named Roberta Muldoon. (John Lithgow played her in the movie.)

In his 13th novel, "In One Person," he's created another one: a former wrestler, now a librarian, named Alberta (Big Al) Frost.

He doesn't allow Miss Frost enough pages, though. Instead, he devotes most of the book to Billy Abbott, a writer who is also the narrator and who, notwithstanding his bisexuality, has a lot in common with John Irving.

    May 7, 2012, 2:45 p.m. ET

The Dawning Of Desire
We're in familiar John Irving territory: prep school, wrestling squads, gruff New England wisdom—and taboo erotic yearnings.

By SAM SACKS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304743704577383922423958792.html

A chapter recounting the early AIDS crisis is the book's strongest section. Intervals of vivid social realism aside, however, this is still a John Irving novel. The rest of the book hews to territory familiar to the author's fans: prep school, wrestling squads, taboo erotic yearnings, gruff New England wisdom. Most of the novel reads like a puckishly meandering bildungsroman in the vein of Mr. Irving's "The World According to Garp" (1980) mixed with an oddball sex comedy, such as his "The 158-Pound Marriage"

Most of Bill's recollections take us back to his adolescence in rural Vermont, where he attends the Favorite River Academy prep school in the town of First Sister. His initiation into what he, mixing metaphors, calls "the bottomless pit of the universe of desire" is especially confusing for him, Bill says, because he has a habit of forming "persistent crushes on the wrong people." Those crushes include his stepfather, Richard; his hunky classmate, Jacques Kittredge; and the alluring school librarian, Miss Frost.

Bill feels isolated in his bisexuality, but he finds more support than you might expect in a small New England town of the 1950s. His grandfather is an actor with a knack for playing female roles. And Miss Frost, Bill discovers from an old yearbook, used to be wrestling champion "Big Al" Frost. Eventually she takes charge of his sexual education and is the reason he develops a lifelong attraction to pre-op transsexuals.

Weekend Edition May 11-13, 2012
John Irving's "In One Person"
Penis Envy
by CHARLES R. LARSON

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/11/penis-envy/

Much of his life, William Frances Dean Marshall Abbott—the eponymous main character of John Irving's wicked thirteenth novel, In One Person—has difficulty pronouncing the plural of the word penis, usually tripping over the word so that it sounds like penith-zizzes.  The difficult articulation is not only locked into his own childhood sexual fantasies and misunderstandings about sex but, additionally, a rather clever commentary on the story itself, mostly about a group of boys in the 1950s at a single-gender prep school,  where wrestling and drama were highlights of the school's extracurricular activities.

William, also known as Bill and Billy, has little trouble pronouncing the singular of the word, only the plural, but probably thinking of or seeing one penis isn't so unusual.   When there are many, be careful. To say that In One Person is about the evolution of this country's comfort with penises is a half-truth of the novel—the other half encompassing attitudes toward gender fluidity, but particularly homosexuality and bisexuality.  These are not exactly new topics for Irving's fiction, though In One Person reads as if it is the author's definitive statement, particularly the acceptance, the tolerance of differing sexual practices and concepts of gender.  By the end of the story, at the end of the first decade of this century, Billy is not what he was at the beginning but, thankfully, neither is the nation.

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John Irving crushes the sexual reactionaries
REVIEWED BY STEVEN HAYWARD
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, May. 11, 2012 4:00PM EDT

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/in-one-person-by-john-irving/article2429842/

Thinking that literature will lend credence to this opinion, Richard takes Billy to the public library, where they encounter public librarian Miss Frost. She is broad-shouldered and powerful, with mannish hands and delicate, girlish breasts, and Billy immediately develops a crush on her.

When, soon after, he discovers Miss Frost is a transsexual – a former wrestling champion who used to be known as Al Frost – it only deepens his attraction to her. "In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing," Billy tells the reader, "I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost – not necessarily in that order."