By John Irving, 2015

I started reading this book back in December, for the meeting on the 22^nd of the book club I think of as the Eating and Drinking Women.  Usually I read every book through at least once before the meeting and often twice.  Last month, though, I got to only page 170 before the discussion, which turned out to be brief and perfunctory.  This was especially striking in comparison to the previous month`s discussion of Harvest by Jim Crace, which had evoked passionate debate.  I had enjoyed that book although I had failed to see the deeper meanings that others did in that particular book.

The discussion of Avenue of Mysteries was perfunctory not just because we were even more focused than usual on eating and drinking because it was our Christmas meeting, but also because of the kind of book it is. Book clubbers who had read much more of John Irving than I have said Avenue of Mysteries is not his worst and not his best.

I remember reading The World According to Garp  shortly after it came out in 1978 and enjoying it. I don`t remember much about it except that it was a good story with a lot of characters and a lot of plot.   I have never gone in for reading bestsellers or books by very popular writers.  This type of book gets plenty of attention and hype without mine and there are so many books to read.

In Avenue of Mysteries the main characters are Juan Diego Guerrero, a scavenging Mexican dump kid and his sister Lupe, a mind reader whose garbled speech only Juan Diego understands. He is lame after the dump manager, a father figure to both children and possibly the boy’s actual father, accidentally backs over his foot. Possessing exceptional intelligence, he has taught himself to read in two languages from the books he has rescued from the flames of the dump. Juan Diego grows up to be a writer and teacher of writing in Iowa.  After the death of Lupe and of his mother, a prostitute who is also a cleaning lady for the Jesuits, Juan Diego becomes the ward of a lapsed Jesuit named Edward Bonshaw—a professor of English from Iowa—and his transvestite lover.

A large part of the book is taken up with Juan Diego’s trip to Manila to visit the grave of the father of a dead`good gringo`who came to Oaxaca to escape the draft for the Vietnam War.  Juan Diego doesn`t know the name of the father and the American military cemetery in Manila is vast, so the trip is a somewhat pointless excursion.  On this trip Juan Diego becomes the lover of a mother and daughter named Miriam and Dorothy, who provide him with the best (possibly only) sex he has ever known, and who turn out not to be real women but phantoms of his imagination and angels of death.

In Avenue of Mysteries, and apparently in John Irving’s fiction in general, the reader is hit over the head again and again with the idea that the Roman Catholic Church is bad while indigenous spirituality is good. The white Virgin Mary is presented as a lesser figure who has usurped the rightful place of the brown Lady of Guadalupe. Juan Diego just happens to have the same Christian names as the peasant who witnessed the first miracles of the indigenous Lady.  This dichotomy between bad/white Catholics and good/brown descendants of those conquered by the Spanish gets kind of tiresome, especially as the teacher Brother Diego, the dump manager,  and Juan Diego’s eventual legal guardian Edward are very good to the boy and his sister and all very Catholic.

The shifts back in forth from reality—with real historic news events—and magic realism are somewhat disconcerting and not entirely convincing.  The flashbacks and the dreams are fueled by beta-blockers and Viagra, and often it is hard to know what is real and what is not—and I don`t mean that in a good way. This reliance on drugs to keep the story going is a bit lazy.   The memories of the dump boy are more vivid and real than anything about his subsequent life, and perhaps that is the point of the story. However, I did not find anything about his current life very engaging.

I kept reading because much of the novel is set in Manila and other parts of the Philippines I have visited.  Apparently Juan Diego never encounters the “Sir/Ma’am” greeting that is ubiquitous in that country. He does, however, drink a lot of San Miguel beer, as I and many other visitors to this nation or more than 7,000 islands have done.  He is so caught up in his passion for the non-existent Miriam and Dorothy that the ostensible purpose of the visit—to locate the grave of the dead gringo’s father—gets short shrift.

Perhaps John Irving is so old and so famous that he no longer bothers with an editor, or perhaps his publishers have fallen on such hard times they can no longer afford editors. Even if there were no editor available to tighten up this rambling novel, any first-year creative writing instructor would have insisted that Irving get rid of all the irritating italics.

Avenue of Mysteries is a potentially good story, with many interesting characters struggling to become clear.