Posts by Sneed
The Fourth Hand
This is how John Irving’s tenth novel begins; it seems, at first, to be a comedy, perhaps a satire, almost certainly a sexual farce. Yet, in the end, The Fourth Hand is as realistic and emotionally moving as any of Mr. Irving’s previous novels—including The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year—or his Oscar-winning screenplay of The Cider House Rules.
Read MoreMy Movie Business
John Irving’s memoir begins with his account of the distinguished career and medical writings of the novelist’s grandfather Dr. Frederick C. Irving, a renowned obstetrician and gynecologist, and includes Irving’s incisive history of abortion politics in the USA. But My Movie Business focuses primarily on the thirteen years John Irving spent adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for the screen—for four different directors.
Read MoreA Widow for One Year
“When she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.” This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, a story of a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman.
Read MoreThe Imaginary Girlfriend
The Imaginary Girlfriend is a candid memoir of the writers and wrestlers who played a role in John Irving’s development as a novelist and as a wrestler. It also portrays a father’s dedication — Irving coached his two sons to championship titles. It is an illuminating, concise work, a literary treasure.
Read MoreA Son of the Circus
“The novel may not be ‘about’ India, but Irving’s imagined India… a remarkable achievement—a pandemonium of servants and clubmen, dwarf clowns and transvestite whores, missionaries and movie stars. This is a land of energetic colliding egos, of modern media clashing with ancient cultures, of broken sexual boundaries” —New York Newsday
Read MoreTrying to Save Piggy Sneed
A treat for John Irving addicts, and a perfect introduction to his work for the uninitiated. In his spirited opening piece, Irving explains how he became a writer: “A fiction writer’s memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember.
Read MoreA Prayer for Owen Meany
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he was the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
Read MoreThe Cider House Rules
First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is John Irving’s sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch—saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud’s, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch’s favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.
Read MoreThe Hotel New Hampshire
Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Son of the Circus and A Prayer for Owen Meany. “You must read this book.” —Los Angeles Times
Read MoreThe World According to Garp
This is the life of Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes. Rich with “lunacy and sorrow”; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust.
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