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Title details for In One Person by John Irving - Available

In One Person

by John Irving
ebook
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“My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me – don’t make me a category before you get to know me!”
 
John Irving’s new novel is a glorious ode to sexual difference, a poignant story of a life that no reader will be able to forget, a book that no one else could have written.
 
Told with the panache and assurance of a master storyteller, In One Person takes the reader along a dizzying path: from a private school in Vermont in the 1950s to the gay bars of Madrid’s Chueca district, from the Vienna State Opera to the wrestling mat at the New York Athletic Club. It takes in the ways that cross-dressing passes from one generation to the next in a family, the trouble with amateur performances of Ibsen, and what happens if you fall in love at first sight while reading Madame Bovary on a troop transport ship, in the middle of an Atlantic storm. For the sheer pleasure of the tale, there is no writer alive as entertaining and enthralling as John Irving at his best.
 
But this is also a heartfelt, intimate book about one person, a novelist named William Francis Dean. By his side as he tells his own story, we follow Billy on a fifty-year journey toward himself, meeting some uniquely unconventional characters along the way. For all his long and short relationships with both men and women, Billy remains somehow alone, never quite able to fit into society’s neat categories. And as Billy searches for the truth about himself, In One Person grows into an unforgettable call for compassion in a world marked by failures of love and failures of understanding.
 
Utterly contemporary and topical in its themes, In One Person is one of John Irving’s most political novels. It is a book that grapples with the mysteries of identity and the multiple tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, a book about everything that has changed in our sexual life over the last fifty years and everything that still needs to. It’s also one of Irving’s most sincere and human novels, a book imbued on every page with a spirit of openness that expands and challenges the reader’s world.
 
A brand new story in a grand old tradition, In One Person stands out as one of John Irving’s finest works – and as such, one of the best and most important American books of the last four decades.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 8, 2012

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780307361806

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780307361806
      • File size: 2233 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 30, 2012
      John Benjamin Hickey more than does justice to Irving’s simple but effective prose in this unusual coming-of-age novel that sensitively explores sexual identity and orientation. Hickey gets this audio edition off to a good start with his reading of passages in which bisexual protagonist Billy Dean admits to having trouble pronouncing certain words such as library and penis—which Dean can only vocalize as “penith”—a fact that genuinely causes him anguish, especially as puberty kicks in and he develops a crush on the librarian of his small Vermont town. Portraying an older character with a speech impediment looking back on his life could trip up many a talented narrator, but Hickey doesn’t miss a beat. One of the many high points is his depiction of Dean’s grandfather, a humorous female impersonator with an acid view of the town’s teenage acting talent in a local production of Ibsen. Irving fans will be delighted. A Simon & Schuster hardcover.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 20, 2012
      Prep school. Wrestling. Unconventional sexual practices. Viennese interlude. This bill of particulars could only fit one American author: John Irving. His 13th novel (after Last Night in Twisted River) tells the oftentimes outrageous story of bisexual novelist Billy Abbott, who comes of age in the uptight 1950s and explores his sexuality through two decadent decades into the plague-ridden 1980s and finally to a more positive present day. Sexual confusion sets in early for Billy, simultaneously attracted to both the local female librarian and golden boy wrestler Jacques Kittredge, who treats Billy with the same disdain he shows Billy’s best friend (and occasional lover) Elaine. Faced with an unsympathetic mother and an absent father who might have been gay, Billy travels to Europe, where he has affairs with a transgendered female and an older male poet, an early AIDS activist. Irving’s take on the AIDS epidemic in New York is not totally persuasive (not enough confusion, terror, or anger), and his fractured time and place doesn’t allow him to generate the melodramatic string of incidents that his novels are famous for. In the end, sexual secrets abound in this novel, which intermittently touches the heart as it fitfully illuminates the mutability of human desire. Agent: Dean Cooke, the Cooke Agency.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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