The Water-Method Man

Fred "Bogus" Trumper has troubles. A divorced, broke graduate student of Old Norse in 1970s New York, Trumper is a wayward knight-errant in the battle of the sexes and the pursuit of happiness: His ex-wife has moved in with his childhood best friend, his life is the subject of a tell-all movie, and his chronic urinary tract infection requires surgery. Trumper is determined to change. There's only one problem: it seems the harder he tries to alter his adolescent ways, the more he is drawn to repeating the mistakes of the past. . . . Written when Irving was twenty-nine, Trumper's tale of woe is told with all the wit and humor that would become Irving's trademark.

Friendship, marriage, and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly—something close to joyful malice—perpetually intrude and disrupt, often fatally. Life, in [John] Irving's fiction, is always under siege. Harm and disarray are daily fare, as if the course of love could not run true. . . . Irving's multiple manner . . . his will to come at the world from different directions, is one of the outstanding traits of The World According to Garp, but this remarkable flair for . . . stories inside stories . . . is already handled with mastery . . . and with a freedom almost wanton in The Water-Method Man [which is Garp's predecessor by six years].

Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry.