Conversations with the novelist John Irving are not brisk affairs. They are more marathon than sprint. It is a euphemism to describe him as deliberate. If you have an interview with Mr. Irving, 83, set aside several hours, if not days.
“Make sure you have time,” said Dr. Marty Schwartz, a physician with a family practice in Toronto and a longtime friend of Mr. Irving’s. “When he starts to tell you something, you can see it being written as if it were a book in his head.”
The words do not spill forth like tidal waves. Rather, Mr. Irving produces them in a slow but continuous drip. In the process, he takes possession of conversations. He has the road map, and there are detours — heavily layered anecdotes and memories that do not lend themselves to newspaper profiles, an inconvenience that is not lost on Mr. Irving, whose 16th novel, “Queen Esther,” a sprawling work of historical fiction, comes out this week.
“I feel like I’m leaving you with a mess to sort out later,” he said during a recent interview at his home office in Toronto.
Consider: A question about whether Mr. Irving had already started working on another novel merely cleared the runway for a 45-minute monologue that touched on his research methods, his interactions with tattoo artists and retired gynecologists, his proficiency in German, and his 1981 trip to Israel at the invitation of the Jerusalem International Book Fair. It was in Israel, he said, that he met with a botanist and Holocaust survivor who had figured out how to grow asparagus in the desert.
Later, over dinner at a nearby pub that he frequents, he elucidated on the purpose of thin-soled wrestling shoes — “You’re supposed to be able to feel the mat,” said Mr. Irving, whose lifelong connection to wrestling, in his personal life and his novels, led to his induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame — before segueing into a story about how, many years ago, he invited Twyla Tharp, the dancer and choreographer, to Harvard, where he was moonlighting with the men’s wrestling team as a volunteer assistant. Ms. Tharp visited practice and even participated in some drills with the team’s lightweights.
“They were, of course, sort of thrilled to have a woman to throw around,” Mr. Irving said. “The third day, she went out there and said to one of them: ‘OK, I picked up a few things. My turn.’ And sure enough, she hit a perfect double-leg on this guy, picked him up by both cheeks and threw him onto his back. The old coach — he was a great guy — said: ‘Jesus Christ! She’d be a hell of a 123-pounder!’”
A human nesting doll, Mr. Irving is a lot like many of his novels. There are stories within stories, and he is as uncompromising as his work.
For over 60 years, he has championed in his pages the experiences of so-called outsiders — orphans and dwarfs, lesbians and prostitutes, addicts and artists — and he remains fiercely protective of them and all the nuanced expressions of humanity they represent. So protective, in fact, that he will not visit the United States to promote “Queen Esther,” a decision he described as a protest of President Trump and his administration’s policies.
“I could not, would not, in good conscience go to my birth country,” Mr. Irving said, “when there is such an authoritarian bully in the White House, and when the craven Republicans in the House and the U.S. Senate are complicit in their silence.”
Since 2015, Mr. Irving has been a full-time resident of Toronto, where he lives with his wife, Janet Turnbull Irving. (He became a dual citizen in 2019.) His work space in their condominium has panoramic views — on a clear day, he can catch a glimpse of Lake Ontario — and enough real estate on the walls for dozens of framed pictures, many of them of his three adult children.
Among the countless books in his office are several copies of “The World According to Garp,” the 1978 novel that vaulted Mr. Irving to stardom — he landed on the cover of Time magazine in 1981 — and established him as a prescient voice for the marginalized. One of the novel’s central figures, a former professional football player named Roberta Muldoon, is a transgender woman, which was a fairly radical concept at the time.
“People would say to him, in a critical way, that his characters are so outlandish and outrageous that it’s kind of hard to swallow,” Dr. Schwartz said. “And he would say: ‘You think my characters are hard to swallow? Read the newspapers, you idiot.’”
‘Writing Is Rewriting and Rethinking’
Mr. Irving, who has the stocky build of a former athlete, is partial to flannel shirts and running sneakers, as if he were always ready for a workout. He subscribes to exactly one magazine, Amateur Wrestling News. It was his experience as a high school and college wrestler, he said, that instilled in him the sort of work ethic he needed to succeed as a novelist.
“Writing is rewriting and rethinking,” he said. “And you can’t learn to wrestle without doing it again and again and again, until it’s an instinct, until it’s a reflex.”
Mr. Irving sticks to the same routine, seven days a week. When he is not traveling or being interviewed, he gets up between 7:30 and 8:15 a.m., then watches the television news and looks over the newspaper while he eats breakfast. At around 9:30 a.m., he stations himself at a long desk where he spends the next eight hours writing. He used to write by hand, but arthritis in his fingers — a consequence of old wrestling injuries — has relegated him to typing on a computer. He is not happy about this development.
“Technology is not my friend,” he said.
After that, he takes a walk or hops on the treadmill, then does some weight lifting and stretching before dinner.
The novelist Ron Hansen, a friend and former student of Mr. Irving’s at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, described Mr. Irving’s “industry” as one of his defining traits, an unyielding sense of discipline that has enabled him to write prolifically, and well into his 80s.
There is a story about this, because there are always stories about Mr. Irving — even when he is not telling them himself. Several years ago, Mr. Irving invited Mr. Hansen to watch the Super Bowl at his apartment in New York, where they were joined by Mr. Irving’s Swedish publisher. Mr. Irving spent most of the evening answering correspondence. Mr. Hansen watched the game with the Swedish publisher.
“He has this Dickensian way of being able to write in company,” Mr. Hansen said. “He once told me that he taught himself to write with his sons around, because otherwise he wouldn’t get the writing done.”
Another story: Back when Mr. Hansen was studying at Iowa and living in Mr. Irving’s basement, something happened in the kitchen that knocked out the power. Mr. Irving rumbled down the stairs to the basement and, unaware of Mr. Hansen’s presence, glared at the fuse box as if it had caused great personal offense.
“I JUST WANT TO WRITE!” he shouted.
All these years later, Mr. Irving acknowledged that the slow creep of mortality had affected how he approached his work. It was within the last decade that he began to prioritize the projects he felt were the most difficult — those outside his personal experience that would require more research and time — and save his easier, more straightforward ideas for later.
He sometimes dwells on the many hours he has spent writing screenplays and adapting his books for television and film, often frustrating endeavors that have drawn him away from his novels. Even the most rewarding of them — “The Cider House Rules,” for which Mr. Irving won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay — went through four directors before it was released in 1999.
Mr. Irving still gets annoyed when he sees the movie poster, which happens frequently since one is up in his home office. It shows Tobey Maguire, the film’s star, giving Charlize Theron, his love interest, a piggyback ride, their smiles as wide as the Hollywood sign.
“Oh, I was so mad,” Mr. Irving said. “It’s an abortion story, not a love story. I didn’t want to see Charlize Theron riding around on Tobey Maguire’s back. I wanted to see a curette and an enamel basin — a bloody one.”
Even now, he said, he has six properties in development for film and TV. It’s good to be in demand, right?
“Or,” he said, “you could look at that, at the age of 83, and say, ‘Boy, have you been wasting your time.’”
Getting Under Their Skin
Some reviewers have been less than charitable with Mr. Irving’s more recent work.
The New York Times, for example, critiqued “The Last Chairlift,” which was published in 2022, as “an unrelenting avalanche of words from which one emerges blinking and dazed — a book to be not so much read as survived.” Similarly, The Guardian assessed “Avenue of Mysteries,” his 2015 novel, as “meandering.” (The Times called it “exhausting.”)
“Sometimes, members of my family try to hide them from me,” Mr. Irving said of negative reviews. “Or Jonathan Karp, my wonderful editor, he’ll say, ‘If you were thinking of reading The New York Review of Books next week, don’t.’”
Mr. Irving went on to explain, in his own way, why he did not heed their advice, first by drawing on his experience as a wrestling coach. In the same way that he liked to know other wrestlers’ tendencies, he read reviews to learn “who doesn’t like you and why,” he said.
He then cited Camus, or at least he thought it was Camus. It might have been someone else. “One of those French guys whose writing wasn’t terribly impressive to me,” he said. Anyway, the point was that one of them once said something about how negative feedback was important because it meant you had done something original.
“If it gets under their skin, keep doing it,” Mr. Irving said.
Criticism is inherently subjective, of course, and many have continued to praise Mr. Irving’s knack for invention and his willingness — sense of obligation, even — to tackle, with the full force of his literary weight, volatile subject matter.
That trend continues with “Queen Esther,” which, among other things, takes on Jewish identity, antisemitism and sexuality. Also, as if to reinforce that he is still fearless, Mr. Irving devotes several pages to the histories of both abortion and male circumcision.
Yet, because Mr. Irving’s newer books exist in the shadow cast by his megahits of yore, comparisons are unavoidable, and the power of his productivity may work against him, too.
“I was remembering that quote about E.M. Forster, that his reputation improved with every book that he didn’t write,” Mr. Hansen said. “John is just the opposite. He keeps writing books, and it’s almost like the wrestling model: You don’t know if you’re going to win every match, but you go out there and try and see what happens.”
Unlike Mr. Forster, who stopped writing novels in his 40s and lived to 91, Mr. Irving continues to write — and, in fact, cannot stop.
“He sits down at the same time every day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, and writes,” Dr. Schwartz said. “It’s what he does.”
Mr. Hansen sees that as a virtue. “It’s like a scientist who continues to do experiments,” he said. “John is still experimenting, still growing, still trying to figure out the craft.”
In some ways, Mr. Irving’s work space has a museum quality, with so many old books and old photos, some friends now gone, and even a few portraits of himself as a younger man. He pointed to one. “Back when I actually had an aquiline nose — how strange,” he said, wistful for the days before wrestling forever altered it.
He is still pugnacious, but slightly more open to compromise. He recently told Mr. Hansen that his next novel — which, yes, he has already started — would be shorter than most of his others.
“Maybe only 400 pages,” Mr. Hansen said.
Read by Scott Cacciola
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Scott Cacciola writes features and profiles of people in the worlds of sports and entertainment for the Styles section of The Times.
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