![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Irving, beloved for bona fide classics such as The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules, has been writing admirably for much of his career against the repressive small-town mentality of his former Puritan home state of New Hampshire, where several of his novels and short stories are set. It’s perhaps not coincidental that Adam will not marry until the age of 49. And once demonstrated on him how to kiss. Oh, and Little Ray often crawls chastely into bed with Adam. That English teacher will transition to a woman across the course of the novel, a compulsion readily accepted by Little Ray, who willingly lends the teacher her clothes. She is also gay, something 12-year-old Adam only realises when he catches her having fun with her female lover on the day of her wedding in 1956 to a petit male English teacher. That she had sex with an unnamed man for the first and last time with the sole purpose of conceiving Adam has lent the act itself a near mythical quality for her young son. His mother, Little Ray, a pocket-size ski instructor who spends half the year away working in Vermont, is largely the cause, if not always to blame. Adam, who narrates the story of his life against an intermittently unfolding history of post-war America, across an interminable 900 pages, develops a youthful sex complex to rival any character of Philip Roth. “The issues we have, about being Brewsters, are all about sex,” says Nora to her younger cousin Adam early on in John Irving’s exhausting new novel.
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