This is Irving’s first book, and it shows. The book wanders, and reads much longer than it’s small number of pages. Irving begins exploring several themes that will continue to wind through his books: what is a family? How should an adult from an unusual childhood function in the world? Sex, Sex, SEX! and how it, in all its myriad forms, shapes human life! Let me assure you: the process of following Irving’s progression from this book to The Last Chair Lift is a study worth undertaking.

If you can’t tell, I’m a John Irving fan. Even still, I didn’t exactly like this book. His use of sex becomes little more than an excuse to demonstrate his soft porn writing skill. The primary relationship, a four-on-four spouse swapping extravaganza, is well told. While it is shaped by 1960’s free love, there is, in the end, more here about the sadness of free-swinging sex than a glorification of it. This is one of Irving’s great skills, his ability to describe the sadness life interspersed with cosmic absurdity. It’s found in Garp and in so many of Irving’s other stories.

The story here is a bit hard to explain. It involves the main character, a married American Germophile (I intend this to mean one who loves all things German) now living with a German woman. He is a father of a son by another woman to whom he is still married. Eventually, he learns that his wife has begun a relationship with his best friend. The two couples become quite close. There is also a long and convoluted story within about a friend of the main character who has gone off the rails in Europe. The search for this friend becomes much too long before it ends.

Sometimes, it seems that Irving is ever-embracing wild sexual relationships, and to some extent, he is. But at the same time, we see the children trapped in these relationships, like the son when he sees his mother with his father’s best friend and asks his father about it. The scene is as touching as a similar, yet very different in detail, scene in The Last Chairlift, when the boy asked the family friend about his father’s and mother’s strange marriage. Through Irving’s other books, there are many other examples of this otherness that we experience due to the choices of our parents.
Instead of character development, the characters in this book tend to wallow in their shortcomings. The German woman is the wise advisor to the main character, and his wife plays much the same role though she does plenty of her own wallowing. Our protagonist never listens to these wise women and continues to make the same mistakes. Maybe he develops as the book progresses, in that he finds different ways of messing up the same things.

As for place, there are several settings here. None are particularly well drawn. The time is obviously not Victorian England, but other than the sexual freedom, there is little to ground this story in the 60’s. The plot works well enough, except for the long, drawn out, story of the main character’s European friend.

Like Irving’s other books before The World According to Gaarp, I can’t recommend this book on its own. If you are interested in following Irving’s career through Gaarp, the Cider House, Owen Mean, the Hotel somewhere in New Hampshire, the ski resort in Maine, and all his other great books, I would suggest you come back to this book after you are already sold on Irving. If you start here, you probably won’t read another.

Partnertausch, um eine Ehekrise zu bewältigen? Was anfangs zu funktionieren scheint, entpuppt sich als fatale Fehleinschätzung: Scheinbar spielt nur einer nicht richtig mit, aber was in den anderen dreien vorgeht, weiß auch keiner genau.
John Irving beschreibt dieses Liebesdrama großartig und menschlich, man kann sich in die Figuren hineinversetzen, man lebt und leidet mit. Auch wenn sein schräger Humor und sein Gespür für skurrile Szenen hier nicht ganz so ausgeprägt zu sein scheinen wie beispielsweise bei Hotel New Hampshire oder Garp, ist Eine Mittelgewichtsehe ein typischer Irving, fesselnd und hervorragend zu lesen.

A tale about the trials and tribulations of relationships that are fraught with infidelities, an area of expertise in the writing mind of John Irving, I was expecting a whole lot more from this book than I actually got. As with most Irving novels, there's plenty of Vienna for the reader to sink their teeth into (after all the John Irving I've read over the years I feel almost as intimate with Vienna as I am with my own Toronto, and I've never even been there!), and no bears to mar or confuse this story which is a nice change for early Irving, but the tone and characteristics of the antagonists, and they're all antagonists in this one, just sort of fell flat for me and didn't ring with the usual realism that make John Irving's characters so sympathetic. I felt their jealousy for their scorned and spurned lovers, but I didn't care about it or them as much as I should have. It was a very quick and easy read, but probably not one I'll ever read again which is a shocking review for me to make, indeed, since I think John Irving is one of those writers who wasn't meant to be read, but rather he was meant to be re-read, re-visited, and re-loved. I will do none of those things with The 158-Pound Marriage, but rather just go back and re-read Garp the next time I want to read about the sexual politics of couples as he told the same story in that book, and did a much better job with more fulfilling characters. The second wind of the cuckold, indeed...

I wanted to rate it a 4 because John Irving sets the standards for character development and style. Although 158-Pound Marriage is a well written and intense story of the lives of four people gone terribly awry, I rated it a 3 because it is simply too sad. Written in the 70s, it depicts the open marriage prevalent in some literature and lives of married couples of that decade. Four friends, two couples, decide to test the normal boundaries of marriage and learn the destructive consequences of their decisions. As in A Prayer for Owen Meany, I couldn't put the book down; however with Owen Meany, I liked the characters. In 158-Pound Marriage, I asked myself what are they thinking. I felt the betrayal that the two wives felt, but I knew the ending would not be good, Yet, I forged on thinking that somehow no one would be devastated and that all would be well. John Irving does not allow any of the four characters to go untarnished. He is compassionate toward them but not forgiving, I am not disappointed in the book, and I urge fans of John Irving to read it and be prepared. It isn't typical of his rather robust style.

2,5*

La cruauté de ces couples qui échangent leurs partenaires dans les États-Unis des années 70 est impeccable. Un petit John Irving qui se lit facilement, bien et qui fait sourire par son humour et son sarcasme toujours bien placé.
Plus sur mon blog : https://akathegirlwhoreads.wordpress....

n  "Edith knew that Severin Winter's sense of family was more ferocious than most. We should all have been warned."n

In short,



The book explains the idea of an open marriage and the complications developing from it.
The book has everything a typical John Irving book has. Vienna. Art. Complete nakedness of the character. However, the characters fail to connect with me. Moreover, the writing style seems similar to Setting Free the Bears.

Honestly, this is my least favorite book of John Irving.

the title caught my eye as i passed a book shelf in the library on my way out the door with the next book club book.  it's john irving, and i've liked his complex, weird characters in the past, so i gave it a shot. 
it's about 2 couples who openly swap spouses, but of course not everyone is equally pleased with the arrangement.  from the start, the narrator seems to love himself, and hate the other guy which is expected.  it takes awhile to peel all the layers (blinded by the narrator's point of view) but all the characters are loathsome, lying, selfish pricks.  the women too.  it's not a good idea to have a book without one redeeming character; you gotta like / identify with somebody
oh, and not a fan of the wrestling subtext.  who is honestly attracted to stocky men with no bums and tiny thighs?  (the author's description, not my inference)

relationships really aren't all about the sex. john irving kicked even more ass before he was widely read. read it.

Like most of John Irving's novels, writing, wrestling, and Vienna play featuring roles. Like all of his books, parts of the story are delightfully bizarre; some might even say sick and twisted. There is a common thread of sexual exploration, liberation, comedy, and even hidden depths of feminism for its time. Unlike his other novels, I didn't find these characters endearing and I don't think that was the idea, but the book was entertaining and explicit.

In spite of feeling trapped among four unlikable characters and the fact that the story’s general ending is revealed up front, I had a hard time putting this book down. I suppose that’s a testament to John Irving’s colorful and humorous style, without which this book would have been completely depressing. Beneath the salacious and fantastic story, I think the book says something eloquent about, on one hand, the strength of human sexual desire; and on the the other hand, the frailty of the human psyche and ego. Even though this was originally published 45 years ago, the story doesn’t feel stuck in its time period or in its location. Worth a read for people who enjoy Irving, and perhaps for couples who are considering an “arrangement” - it’s a strong cautionary tale of how, in spite of best intentions, human nature is nearly impossible to suppress.

John Irving es un autor prácticamente desconocido en México: sus novelas se empolvan, cuando llegan, en las librerías y es difícil que un lector promedio haya leído más de dos; sin embargo, a mí parecer, se están perdiendo a uno de los mejore narradores estadounidenses del s. XX que surgieron de la tradición dejada por Hemingway, Steinbeck y Faulkner.

En “Doble pareja” asistimos a un sainete, que tendrá un final amargo, entre dos matrimonios con hijos: el narrador, un historiador devenido en autor de novelas históricas, está casado con la robusta Utch, austríaca, hija de la segunda guerra mundial y rescatada por el Ejército Rojo, mientras que los Winter (Severin y Edith) son fruto de una unión similar (él es austríaco, entrenador de lucha libre y profesor de alemán; ella es una privilegiada estadounidense, frustrada historiadora del arte y escritora).

En pocas palabras el conflicto narrativo gira en torno a cuánto estamos dispuestos a soportar una vez que la fidelidad y la exclusividad sexual dejan de importar al interior de un matrimonio.

El estilo no lineal y profusamente descriptivo de Irving está presente en esta novela que se desarrolla como un combate de lucha libre —la comparación no es gratuita— y tiene un final redondo (muy adecuado a mi parecer) que dejará a más de un lector incómodo y pensando qué habría él hecho en semejante situación.