ME & MR. IRVING
Greetings from Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA ("City of Lakes"). Welcome to my Web site, www.needahand.com, a domain name referred to in John Irving's The Fourth Hand and which was, amazingly enough, available for registration. I registered the name in late July 2001, several weeks after The Fourth Hand's release and while it was still the #1 bestseller in the U.S. I wonder if the powers-that-be at Random House assumed that a John Irving junkie, while reading The Fourth Hand, would grab it and turn it into a sort of fan site. It turned out to be me. I couldn't let somebody turn it into a porn site or, worse, a mindless corporate advertising venue, so here I am.
I am a major John Irving fan, and there are many of us. For some reason, there is something in the originality, imagination, twisted and bizarre plots, and passion and conviction of the John Irving novels that speaks to certain readers and totally escapes possibly the majority of other readers. I suggest that perhaps there is something in our lives, some common ground, that we as the Irving readers share. It might be scary if we knew what it was.
I, your "webmaster" and host, was born and grew up in Millville, New Jersey ("The Holly City of America"), which is about 30 miles west of Atlantic City. I love Jersey and the East Coast of the US but have spent a good portion of my adult life in the Midwest, in the state of Minnesota. It was while I was living in Worthington, Minnesota ( "The Turkey Capital of the World"), a quiet city of 11,000 in the middle of nowhere on the prairie, in the late 1970s that I first heard of John Irving and his new book at that time, The World According to Garp. Just reading a book review and a plot synopsis of a John Irving novel for the first time can be a wild read, but that wild read got me to try the book.
Reading Garp, for me, was an exhilarating experience. What a passionate, wonderful book it was and is. What over-the-top but real characters. How involved we can get in characters in absolutely absurd situations that seem almost normal. I am sure that I will never quite forgive Mr. Irving for killing off little Walt Garp -- that was the first time a novel has made me cry -- but I was hooked. I am a John Irving reader for life, and Garp will always be my favorite.
I doubt, though, that anybody else in Worthington was reading Garp at the time, at least nobody that I could find, and it would have been so great to have had someone to connect with and discuss it. I tried to loan out my copy to friends, but nobody seemed to quite "get" it. I don't know -- it could be that we readers who appreciate the Irving mind are a strange breed. My intention is for this site to serve, in part, the isolated Irving readers in the Worthingtons of the world. My other goal is to inspire some people to read books that they wouldn't have read otherwise -- not just John Irving books but the works of other good writers too. Since starting this Web site, I have heard from readers on every continent except Antarctica.
A side note: Garp was nominated for the National Book Award (whatever that means) that year, and I assumed that it would be the winner since, as far as I was concerned, it was the best novel ever written. Instead the book that won that year was Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien, whose hometown was -- guess where? -- Worthington, Minnesota! Even though I find Mr. O'Brien to be a fine writer and as much as I like Cacciato and his other books, I had a hard time understanding that choice over Garp, but it was good to see a home boy, long since escaped, make good. (To my amazement, the local newspaper article announcing Mr. O'Brien's award, in the Worthington Daily Globe, was on something like page five. So much for priorities.)
I was looking forward to the film version of Garp and ended up disliking it (Mork as Garp??). But how, after all, could anybody make a movie of a book like that -- a book so personal, one that is so dependent on our own imaginations and our own reactions? And that may always be a problem with making film versions of John Irving novels. I think that Cider House Rules has been the best film adaptation of an Irving book so far. I have now read all of John Irving's books, and my other favorites, after Garp, have been A Widow for One Year and A Prayer for Owen Meany.
I enjoyed The Fourth Hand, of course, but on some lighter and less involved level than Garp, Widow, or Owen. I found that I liked Fourth Hand much better on the second reading: There are many gems in this book. One thing, though: as a Minnesota Vikings (and Philadelphia Eagles) fan and as a person who lives just twenty miles from the Wisconsin border, I wonder how John Irving came up with such uncannily accurate perceptions of Green Bay Packer fans??
Like all good John Irving fans, I was looking forward to his masterwork finally finished and released in 2005 -- Until I Find You -- which turned out to be an enormous (800+ pages) semi-autographical (in a roundabout John Irving sort of way) disappointment for me. I found it to be totally un-interesting. My good friend in Germany, though, Elke (whom I met because of this site), has so far read Until I Find You twice and has loved all of it. Even her husband Peter read it and liked it, and Peter isn't generally much of a reader. Keep in mind that John Irving is very popular in Germany. He sells more books in Germany than in the United States and Canada combined. Even though I have yet to meet an American other than myself who has even finished Until I Find You, it apparently translates well.
I read a variety of other writers also, my other favorites being Philip Roth, Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Anne Tyler, Graham Greene, Nick Hornby, Kate Atkinson. I also find that I read too many bestselling "book group" books. They make for good cocktail-party talk, but I'd like to be ambitious enough to find more good obscure writers.
As for this Web site, I am no techie and still have a fear of accidentally pushing the wrong button and blowing the whole thing up. If that happens, hang in there: I'll be back.
Keep passing the open windows, my friend....
Howard.
(me, in my favorite city, my home away from home, Amsterdam) -------->
www.needahand.com, born August 2001. Please feel free to e-mail me howard@needahand.com.