The Water-Method Man

I’m parking this book for now. A friend had gifted me a duplicate copy, and I lost my kindle for a while so I picked it up. 13 chapters in, I am finding it a confusing and generally unappealing read. There are moments of humour, but not enough for me to enjoy it. Rather than skim-read what’s left I am going to put it away for a while and see if I get the urge to return. I think I’m more likely to pick up one of Irvivg’s later and better known novels.

Encontré la novela bastante confusa. No está ni mucho menos entre lo mejor que he leído de Irving, del cual destacaría “ Las normas de la casa de la sidra “. Empieza bien, pero luego se me hizo bastante tediosa. El estilo, mezclando entre primera y tercera persona, me resultó poco satisfactorio. Se salvan algunos pasajes cómicos, pero en su conjunto está lejos de figurar entre mis lecturas más estimulantes. Su época posterior es mucho más recomendable. Me costó bastante terminarla.

When R.E.M. recently broke up, it occurred to me that I hadn't bought one of their CD's (or downloaded any of their songs for my iPod, now that CD's are passe), since "Automatic for the People" -- which was released in 1992. Everything else was from "Out of Time," "Green," "Document," or "Life's Rich Pageant" -- all released between 1986 and 1991. That means that their last seven albums never made it onto my radar.

Some of this has to do with the fact that I adopted many of my favorite songs between 1988 and 1994. But I've heard R.E.M.'s later work, now and then, on the radio, and it just doesn't resonate with me. I used to listen to "Pop Song 89" every day after school during my senior year of high school, blaring it on my (yes) cassette deck as I tore out of the parking lot, headed over to pick up my girlfriend from her school. I made a really crappy recording of "The One I Love" using my friend Leo as a fake DJ to try and seal the deal with a different girl, a year earlier (let's just say editing is a lot more seamless today). "I Am Superman" was my sign-off song during my brief career as a DJ on KSMU Radio, which had the giant broadcast area of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center -- and no further.

The newer R.E.M. stuff, to me, goes in two directions: the weird ("What's The Frequency, Kenneth?" has a quirky title and is loud and catchy, but so did "Sliver," and we all know how that turned out) and the vapid (yes, "Reveal," I'm talking to you -- the whole disc). R.E.M. had an amazing sound, but they didn't figure out how to keep it -- or success made the karma blow away.

My first encounter with a John Irving novel happened in a hotel near Orly Airport in Paris. I was on my way back to the U.S. after six weeks in Europe -- four in a study program and two traveling around with friends -- and I'd just gotten off a long train ride from Heidelberg to the capital of France. It was late, my flight left the next morning, and I saw "The World According to Garp" in a store in the Paris train station. I remembered the movie title (I hadn't seen it), so I grabbed it on a whim. I checked into my hotel, laid my clothes out for my plane ride the next morning, and got in bed with the book.

Six hours later, I finally put the book down -- done. The whirlwind that T.S. Garp and his mother, Jenny Fields, created, and the toll it took on them both, that brought Garp to a tragic end at the Christlike age of 33, swirled around in my mind. The next day, when my flight was delayed for six hours because of a faulty engine, I didn't even mind that much, because I was busy reading the book again.

And so, when I got home, I rented "The World According to Garp" and watched it. Like I would discover about all of the adaptations of Irving's books, the movies have to leave so much out that it's like watching a marionette play of the book. The closest that any movie gets to its Irving original, in my opinion, is "The Door in the Floor" -- but to get that close to Irving's grandeur in scope, it has to leave out a full half of the novel that inspired it ("A Widow for One Year").

So, instead, I decided to read everything else that Irving had written, from the beginning. "Setting Free the Bears" and "The 158-Pound Marriage" didn't do much for me, but "The Water-Method Man" did. It's about Bogus Trumper, who is having a really hard time making the leap from adolescence to manhood. He got his first wife, Biggie, pregnant right after they met, which led to a marriage far earlier in his life than he probably would have planned. Weighed down in Iowa by the poverty of life as a grad student, his young son, and his wife's expectations, he philanders and then just runs away to Europe, looking for his lost youth, symbolized by the nebulous character Merrill Overturf, who used to try to hook up with girls through such odd rituals as swimming out into the Danube and showing them a tank that had crashed down through the river.

Of course, there is no such tank, and when Bogus returns to Europe, he can't even find Merrill. By the time he gets back, his wife has divorced him and moved on to his best friend. He takes a job in New York City with his old friend, Ralph Packer, editing the sound for his films. He meets a new girl, has a baby with her, but then runs back to Iowa to finish his graduate degree.

In short, Bogus' life is disjointed. The structure of the novel, a wonderful mishmash of letters, diary entries, newspaper reviews, told in an order that more resembles a view through a kaleidoscope than chronological narration, suits the main character perfectly. We even get an allusion to Moby-Dick at the end.

The endings to most of Irving's early novels are glorious things, with explanations of what happened to everyone and, in general, these explanations are stories of purpose and power.

Somewhere, though, John Irving has lost his way. The whimsy that dances through "The Water-Method Man" and the powerful themes that run through "The Hotel New Hampshire" (the power of family despite a blind, befuddled father), "The Cider House Rules" (the right of a woman to choose) and "A Prayer for Owen Meany" (if Christ really were the Messiah, what would it be like to witness his coming, and to believe?) have faded, replaced by navel-gazing.

Irving's newest novel, "In One Person," will certainly be a best-seller, simply based on the author's name. Irving belongs in any discussion of the top five American novelists since 1930. But his latest efforts, "Until I Find You" and "Last Night in Twisted River," made me feel caught in an eddy that swirled around and around the hole the author feels within himself. His earlier novels were about missing fathers, which made for an almost mystical aura. All of his novels teem with lust and sensuality, but they have always had a purpose in reaching a bigger theme. In his last two novels, these elements have become virtually gratuitous. In interviews, Irving (and his publicists) promise us a novel more political than any he has written in recent years. He is at his best when he writes either with the passion of a conviction or the whimsy of a jester. We'll see whether either one of these made it this time.

I don't know if it's a generational thing, or his stream of consciousness style, or what, but the more John Irving I try to read, the less-impressed and interested I find myself in his characters and the events they sort of stumble through. His protagonists rarely have any agency over their lives, and it bugs me. I bought this one at a used bookstore a few yrs ago, and finally decided to read it. It only took a couple days, in between work, etc., so it held my interest just enough, as I kept waiting for more to happen. I didn't like the main character, Fred "Bogus" Trumper, or really, any of the people in his life that he irritates, disturbs, or endears in one way or another.

I think this quote, from a review of the awful-sounding cheap documentary a friend makes about miserable ol' Bogus sums it up best, and I laughed out loud: "the women are beautiful! What's missing in Packer's film is any clue whatsoever as to why two such frankly open and stunningly complete women would have anything to do with such a weak, enigmatic, unfulfilled man..."

Indeed. At least Irving was aware this guy is a waste of oxygen. Bravo for that honesty. Off he'll go to ruin some other woman's life. The end.

"Her gynecologist recommended him to me. Ironic: the best urologist in New York is French. Dr Jean Claude Vigneron: ONLY BY APPOINTMENT. So I made one." Thus begins John Irving's "The Water-Method Man," his second novel, my favorite of his. Published in 1972, it is by far his funniest book. It is also his quirkiest book, part epistolary novel, part reminiscence, part farcical spy thriller, part movie script, part translation of the Old Low Norse epic "Akthelt and Gunnel." Its jumbled structure nicely symbolizes the chaos in the brain and soul of Fred "Bogus" Trumper, the man who stumbles through life never sticking with anything challenging - his doctoral thesis, his marriage to former US Olympic skier Sue "Biggie" Kunft, the independent movie in which he stars, the partial solution to his urological problem by which this novel gets its title ... to cite several examples.

In 1981, when I had lost my mind trying to survive Plebe Summer at the United States Naval Academy, a classmate, Matt Plotkin, who lasted an entire five weeks at Annapolis, made a reference to John Irving's "The World According to Garp." I, the future English Major, had never heard of John Irving or "The World According to Garp." (I had barely heard of Matt Plotkin.) Anyway, while he was quitting the Naval Academy, he purchased Garp in the Midshipmen Book Store. He seemed so happy! So I bought a copy too, and nearly inhaled it while not learning all of the Navy stuff I was supposed to be learning. (I was a poor-to-mediocre Midshipman. Every day, I had to walk around in uniform with a nametag that said "POOR." Symbolism, right?) I soon read "Setting Free the Bears" and then quickly discovered "The Water-Method Man."

Between 1981 and 1989 I probably read this novel a dozen times. Now, I have just re-read it for the first time in over thirty years. Four thoughts:

1. I can see why I loved this novel so much when I was younger. Its chaos and uncertainty and use of humor in lieu of any real answers or knowledge neatly paralleled my own young adulthood.

2. It is still wonderfully and compellingly readable. The humor generally holds up, although some allusions to homosexuality are a little dated. It feels like a very 1970s novel. I remember reading John Updike discussing his "Memories of the Ford Administration" and saying something to the effect that, in the 1970s, any two members of the opposite sex left alone in a room for more than a minute felt compelled to have sex. That truism is upheld here in Water-Method. Lots more sex than I remembered. I am not complaining, just saying.

3. His descriptions of fatherhood and friendship are timeless. This time, I found myself struck much more by his descriptions of fatherhood than I did pre-children-of-my-own. Watching his baby son's breathing while sleeping, sharing a good story like Moby Dick, the joint discovery of awesome stuff on the beach at low tide, the inevitable despair that sets in when you realize your kids need you less than they used to.

Reading this novel again was like running into old friends. "Ralph and Couth and Bogus hung around, with their slightly off-putting morning smells and a certain prickliness of appearance. Matje and Biggie and Tulpen were blowzy, wearing not quite clothes; bathrobes and soft slept-in stuff - a warm rumpled sensuousness about them."

4. His descriptions of alienation are universal. "He wished he understood what made him feel so restless. Then it occurred to him that he was actually at peace with himself for the first time in his life. He realized how much he'd been anticipating peace some day, but the feeling was not what he'd expected. He used to think that peace was a state he would achieve, but the peace he was feeling was like a force he'd submitted to."

Highly recommended. "The Water-Method Man" is a proud member of Poor House Hall of Fame.

PS: Where are all the Matt Plotkins of yesteryear?

Technically a 2.5 star rating.

I'm a big big fan of Irving's later books (Garp, Owen Meany, Cider House Rules, Until I Find You) so I was intrigued to read one of his earlier works. But, it was nowhere as good, which I should have expected. This was choppier and more uneven/inconsistent than I'm used to from Irving, and his storytelling skill is not nearly as good/compelling as it becomes.

Irving obviously naturally gravitates towards flawed, quirky characters, but in this book had not yet quite honed his ability to make them whole and human. The constant unpredictable changes in POVs were somewhat annoying and distracting, as was his habit of referring to the main character by various nicknames, often in the same sentence. I imagine this was purposeful and intended to emphasize Trumper's lack of depth, identity, purpose etc, but it didn't really work, generally detracting from rather than adding to the story.

As always with Irving, childhood abandonment is a key theme (poor Irving!), and fathers that leave, although I'm more used to the actual fathers being absent from his books, rather than having the story told from the father's perspective. It is hard to be on this father's side, as it's obvious Irving hasn't quite achieved an understanding of the absent father's motivations, which is reinforced by the whole cast of characters saying things to Trumper like "You just leave! You don't even know why!" and Trumper conceding that, yes yes, they are all right. He just leaves. He doesn't know why.

And he (Irving and/or Trumper) never really addresses that, never figures out why Trumper leaves with such frequency, which is largely why the ending feels too forced, abrupt and pat, neatly tied up with a ribbon. It was unsatisfying, as Trumper doesn't have to deal with any real consequences of his actions, and his character arc feels unprompted and unbelievable. He just seems to have this random moment of "this is what I'm going to do!" and so he does it (also completely out of character) for no good reason, and then he repents his errant ways and lives happily ever after. It was a bit jarring.

In my opinion on of the most underrated books by John Irving. Though this is one of his early books, it's so full of joy and simply fun to read.
This is an urgent "must reread", because I remember only small pieces but yet remember, what fun it was to read.

"The Water-Method Man" may be my favorite John Irving book so far. It is his first novel and the rough edges only enhance the hilarity found on its pages.

To be honest, I picked it up on a whim since the main character's name is Fred "Bogus" Trumper and the jacket blurbs all declared how funny it was. I wasn't too sure until I got to the chapter on Trumper's first skiing experience and then I was hooked.