It's been almost exactly five years since I've devoted any sustained thought to John Irving or any of his novels, but I can't seem to get him off my mind these last few days.
A little short of five years ago, a colleague of mine with whom I had become rather close friends moved away from Pullman after completing her graduate program. I, of course, stayed in Pullman because that's how all of my stories end, it seems (I'm not really complaining). I can't remember now if it was when she left town or when I drove to visit her later that summer that she gave me a stack of John Irving novels. There were three, I think, and I'll probably ruin my last chance to inject this story with any pathos by admitting that at the moment I can't even remember the titles, though I remember a decent amount of the content of each.
Anyway, I was eventually compelled to express interest in a romantic relationship, a proposal which she thankfully had the good sense to gently reject. Though this development was really the complete opposite of unexpected, it was also only yet another way in which I suddenly found myself at loose ends: I'd recently finished my graduate program as well, but failed to find a job. I had no money, nowhere to live, and no prospects for employment in academia until the next academic year began eleven or so months later. Example-colleague was the other half of the only really well-maintained and functional friendship that I had at the time (in spite of my good-natured but ill-considered attempts to upend even that) and after two straight years of 60- and 70-hour work weeks as a graduate student, I had completely lost any faith that younger me might have ever had in my ability to communicate with human beings that weren't related to me by blood and thus required to be understanding.
I spent a lot of that summer driving around the country, smoking American Spirits, playing a guitar, doing a little hiking, and mostly reading and re-reading those John Irving novels. There was something oddly captivating about them: a tone, a portrayal of the world as simultaneously merciless and stupefyingly beautiful in its illogic, the reaction of a character somehow more real than real...I don't know. As I read them stretched out in the back seat of my car, on beds in skanky trucker motels, by headlamp in my old, stupid, stupid bargain-basement tent, on friends' couches and eventually, at the stereotypical nadir of every graduate student's fall, on my childhood bed in my parents' house, they helped me fix something. When I started back at WSU the next fall as an instructor, my getting hired was certainly more luck-of-the-draw than anything else, but a lot of the reason that I came back as someone capable of doing that job with as much energy, enthusiasm, interest, and confidence than I'd had before graduation and the unraveling of everything in its aftermath is in those books somewhere. Even if I can't remember the titles or anything else about them right now except a sort-of Virginia Woolf analogue and a bear on a motorcycle.
They're on my mind again, now, I think, because I'm starting to feel like I'm in a similar position, with similar anxieties. But that's another post, for another night. If I've learned one thing in my last five or so years of relative complacence, happiness, and comfort, it's that you rarely actually solve your problems by sitting up all night staring into your computer screen when you've got to get up and start work at eight the next morning...
