The Cider House Rules, John Irving

(September 15) Liked it. Even though I'm a big Irving fan and even though The Cider House Rules was published 20-odd years ago, I had never read it -- had never even heard of it until the movie came out in 1999. The Cider House Rules is not in the running for my favourite Irving novel -- my top three are still The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meaney and A Widow for One Year -- but it was very likable in a typically Irving way.

What is that "way"? Why do I like Irving? Roger Ebert said of the movie version of The Cider House Rules that it "is often absorbing or enchanting in its parts." That is certainly true of all the books. There are always several totally enchanting characters, who seem to embody various combinations of my own best qualities, lol. The events that befall these characters are sometimes surreal, but charmingly so. The threat of something awful about to happen often hangs in the air around Irving characters, but that only compels me to read on. Perhaps the really attractive thing in Irving's books is how much groups of characters love one another. There are weird and hateful characters in every Irving novel, but there is always a core group of people whose love for one another is very affectingly portrayed.

Ebert also said of the movie version of The Cider House Rules, "The story touches many themes, lingers with some of them, moves on and arrives at nowhere in particular. It's not a story so much as a reverie about possible stories." This is true of all the Irving I've read, and I like it fine.

But, in fact, there is a very poignantly painful question posed by this novel: "How do you protect the one(s) you love from how much you're going to hurt them?"

When I started reading The Cider House Rules, Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic came to me as the image. It was startling to see, further into the book, how appropriate this was -- knives are a big part of this novel, only beginning with scalpels.

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic