Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany, 1989, etc.) sets his new book about outcasts and freaks in India, but the story is weighed down by the same stale bag of tricks he has been trotting out since Garp, only now they are more tedious than ever.
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"The result is a novel that seems sincere but turns too bombastic and insistent in its opinions about literature, religion, and politics."
Irving's novels, which often begin in autobiographical commonplace, get transformed along the way: sometimes into fairy tale (The Hotel New Hampshire), sometimes into modern-day ironic fable (The World According to Garp).
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"Finally, this effort is sometimes moving or amusing, but also irritating and ultimately disappointing."
As in The World According to Garp, a young man is trying to find his way as he grows up amid institutional, individual, familial, and social craziness in upper New England.
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How many times can Irving, novelist-as-juggler, throw the same subjects, metaphors, and tricks—bears, motorcycles, prep schools, hotels, Vienna, muscle-building, feminism—up into the air?
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"Hardly spiritual, but serious and ebullient — with some elemental symbolism for those looking for a little more."
This energetic, often intelligent novel about a four-way marriage has as much sleight-of-hand as the earlier Nabokov but avoids the master's aestheticism.
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"But then a very likable, imaginative child, with a tremendous comic drive."
John Irving is the hypermotor young man who wrote Setting Free the Bears and this is about another one — volatile, confident but lost, all on the surface since he doesn't "convey" anything, and on some special frequency which doesn't relate to much unless it might be Moby Dick, another grandiose geyser.
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