Page Turner

With his 11th novel, Until I Find You, John Irving introduces us to Jack Burns, a Hollywood actor often cast as a cross-dresser, and his estranged father, who is addicted to tattoos. When we arrived at Irving's hillside home in Vermont, the author, whose books are known as much for their length as their gripping plots, was calling his publisher about a misplaced comma in the Until manuscript just before it went off to the printer.

When you started researching tattoos in 1998, we were at the tail end of the Lollapalooza culture, when everybody seemed to be getting tattooed all over. Now it seems as if it's mostly young women showing off in their low-rise jeans. What happened to all the tattoos?

I'm 63, so I almost don't acknowledge a difference between the '90s and now, because that seems like a second ago. The new tattoos, and that includes almost everything after the late '60s and early '70s, are not as appealing to me as the original sentimental reasons for being tattooed. It is harder and harder to find the old maritime guys who are still doing it. Hanky Panky has retired, Herbert Hoffmann has retired, Tattoo Ole is dead. I was aware when I was embarking on this novel that I was making a study of something that was already disappearing.

Readers and reviewers love to comment on the classic John Irving subjects - wrestling, single motherhood, physical disabilities. Do you expect tattooing to become one more?

I don't think the physical detail of wrestling, or the use of bears, or the settings in New England - I don't think those things matter much. I think the part about a missing parent, the part about imagining who someone is because they've been removed from your life - in The Cider House Rules, everybody's an orphan; Garp doesn't know who his father is - the serious things that repeat themselves thematically all have to do with loss and how you handle it.

Do your characters live on for you from book to book? Do they bump into each other in the night?

Not only do they bump into each other in the night, but it's often after the fact of creating a new character that I realize that character's not as new as I thought it was. I think the character of Emma [in Until I Find You] is one of the best and most tragic women characters I've created. I love Emma. But Emma doesn't come without her precursors. The character of Hester in A Prayer for Owen Meany is a lot like Emma. The character of Melony in Cider House Rules is a thug. Big, overpowering young women are not new to my fiction.

On the way to boarding school, Jack's drama coach tells him, "Never be afraid to take a beating." Is that good advice?

Yeah. You know, I am a small person. One of the things that deeply attracted me to wrestling was it was a contact sport that a small person could participate in. My wrestling coach pulled me aside one day after a little flare-up [with a bigger teammate] and said, "The only thing you can do is hurt him as much as you could as quickly as you could." Break their nose, break their finger, take a rib out. Do some damage. Bullies are bullies, but bullies don't like people who fight back.

How does that advice apply to life after school?

Well, you can't be afraid of sticking your nose out. I've always been verbally abused for the sexual explicitness of my books, usually by the kind of prudes who lack the courage to say so. People don't write that my novels offended them. They say they're "overlong" and "aesthetically unpleasing." It's so obvious. It's perfectly fine to dislike a John Irving novel, but I'd like somebody for once to be honest about why they dislike it. If they want to say, "I dislike it because there must be 150 mentions of the word `penis.'". . . Don't give me this BS that the novel is a "sprawling mess." I know how to build a story. If you don't like me, you don't like my subject matter.

You're in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. Was there an induction ceremony?

I'm invited to have a ceremony if I ever go. They sent me the plaque. I have it in my wrestling room. It means very much to me. I drew a lot on the discipline that I learned from wrestling, that everything was a task, everything was predicated on how hard you could push yourself.

You've written that your success is due to one-eighth talent, seven-eighths discipline. Is tenacity the single greatest attribute a writer can have?

"Single greatest" - I don't know if you can say that. You have to have some feeling for language. It's like saying, "How can you be a singer if you can't sing?" You do have to be able to hit the notes. If you're going to be a writer, you have to find the words, the right words. You have to be able to structure the sentences in such a way that people want to keep reading. If you get to publish a book, there's no excuse for treating it lightly. You better do your best to find every comma.

Your grandfather was a well-known doctor in Boston, right?

My grandfather [Dr. Frederick C. Irving] on my stepfather's side taught at Harvard Medical School. He was chief of staff at the Boston Lying-in. I have a good memory of him. But my grandfather on my mother's side, Everett Winslow - my first notions of Jack Burns as a cross-dresser come from that grandfather, who in the old days of the Exeter Town Theatre was so delicate that they always cast him as a woman. He'd come home and say, "I've just been cast in Much Ado About Nothing," and my grandmother would say, "Well, are you a man or a woman this time?"

In the book, Jack is reminded that being tattooed isn't the only one way to be "marked for life." Isn't being marked for life essentially the idea behind all fiction?

That's a very good way to put it. My instinct is to reach you emotionally, which includes wanting to make you laugh but also wanting to move you, to make you cry, to hurt you. I'm not an intellectual, I'm a storyteller. And, as such, I'm a craftsman. I care very much about building characters to a point where you care deeply about them, and when you lose them, it's like losing someone you knew.

James Sullivan is writing a book about the history of bluejeans. He can be reached at jassullivan@earthlink.net.