Essay by Jeffrey-Michael Kane
Standfirst:
For fifty years, some critics have played “John Irving Bingo” — ticking off orphanages and wrestling matches, readable prose and recurring grief — while missing the writer standing in front of them. Irving is not a sentimental novelist who keeps failing to be serious. He is a tragic novelist in the Greek sense: fate, not error; pattern without consolation; the grief that does not teach, that does not redeem, that simply settles and stays.
I. The Man at 83
John Irving is eighty-three years old. Three weeks ago, he published his sixteenth novel. Queen Esther returns to the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, Maine — the same setting Irving immortalized forty years ago in The Cider House Rules — and follows a Jewish orphan whose life intersects with the founding and defense of the state of Israel. It is ambitious, sprawling, and unmistakably Irving.
Many reviews arrived with the usual checklist. One critic opened with “John Irving Bingo” — a game in which readers tick off recurring elements as they appear. Orphanage. Wrestling. Vienna. Eccentric sexuality. Missing body parts. The tone was affectionate in the way condescension often is. Another reviewer called the novel “a sequel for committed Irving fans only.” The Washington Post concluded that it “isn’t a masterpiece” — a judgment delivered with the weariness of critics who long ago decided what Irving is.
Irving has published sixteen novels over five decades, won a National Book Award and an Academy Award, sold millions of copies worldwide. And still, many within the critical establishment has largely misread him: minimizing his vision, marginalizing his achievement, mistaking his clarity for simplicity.
This reading misses the entire point of what Irving has been doing for half a century.
John Irving is a tragic novelist. Not in the casual sense — not “sad books” or “difficult subject matter” — but in the formal, structural sense. His novels are tragedies of fate, not tragedies of error. His characters do not fall because they are flawed, because they made poor choices, because hubris brought them low. They fall because the world is built against them. They love deeply, protect fiercely, build families and lives with devotion and care — and they lose anyway. The loss is not earned by failure. It is not redeemed by meaning. It simply comes, because that is what loss does.
This is fate in the ancient sense — inexorable pattern, not moral lesson. His tragedies do not teach. They accumulate.
The critics have checked the boxes — orphanage, wrestling, death, grief, readable, repetitive — without ever asking why these elements recur, what they mean, what vision they serve. They have mistaken obsession for tic, accumulation for excess, compassion for softness. They have looked at one of the most serious novelists of the past half-century and seen an entertainer who keeps failing to be serious.
After sixteen books, it is time to look again.
II. The Tragic Vision — Fate, Not Error
The distinction between fate and fault is everything. In tragedy of error, the protagonist falls because of something they did — a flaw, a misjudgment, a moment of hubris that sets catastrophe in motion. Lear demands proof of love; the demand unmakes him. Macbeth grasps for power; the grasping unmakes him. The fall is earned. The tragedy teaches.
Irving’s tragedies do not teach.
His characters do not fall because they are flawed. They fall because the world does not permit what they want most: to protect the people they love. They are vigilant, devoted, careful. They see the danger coming. They name it, even. And it takes those dear to them anyway.
In The World According to Garp, T.S. Garp is a writer, a husband, a father — and, crucially, a man who understands that the world is dangerous. Early in the novel, his young son Walt mishears “undertow” as “Under Toad.” The family adopts the term. The Under Toad becomes their name for the lurking danger waiting beneath the surface of ordinary life, ready to pull you down.
Garp sees the Under Toad everywhere. He is vigilant. When a car comes drifting down his street with its headlights off, he chases it, furious, because he knows what an unlit car could do to a child on a bicycle. He is not paranoid. He is correct.
The Under Toad takes Walt anyway. Not in some grand catastrophe — in a stupid accident in a driveway, sudden and senseless. Duncan survives but loses an eye. Walt does not survive. The death is not earned. It does not arrive as the consequence of Garp’s failures. It simply happens, because that is what the Under Toad does. It waits, and then it takes.
And Garp, the man who saw it coming, who named it, who organized his life around preventing it, could not stop it.
This is fate in the structural sense — not punishment, not consequence, but pattern. The pattern is visible. It offers no protection. Garp’s vigilance does not save his son. His awareness of danger does not exempt him from danger. The Under Toad does not care that he was watching. The structural irony is Oedipal: the protagonist names the danger, pursues it with total vigilance, and that very awareness does nothing to prevent the catastrophe. Oedipus seeks the truth; the truth destroys him. Garp sees the Under Toad; the Under Toad takes Walt anyway.
A Prayer for Owen Meany, published in 1989, takes this structure and makes it explicit. Owen believes he is God’s instrument. He has seen his own death in a vision — knows how it will happen, knows approximately when, knows what it will accomplish. The entire novel is preparation. Owen practices the shot that will matter. He keeps himself ready. He moves toward his death with the certainty of a man who has read the last chapter and accepted both the death and its preordination.
The death, when it comes, is exactly as he foresaw. Owen saves a group of children by catching a grenade and throwing it where it cannot harm them. Owen dies, and the children live.
This is miracle. Irving means it as miracle. And yet the miracle offers no consolation. Owen’s faith is vindicated, but vindication is not the same as redemption. He is still dead. The narrator, John Wheelwright, does not emerge transformed. He emerges haunted — exiled to Canada, estranged from the country he once loved, unable to forgive and unable to forget. The sacrifice does not redeem the world. It simply happened, because it was always going to happen.
The Cider House Rules operates in a different register — not the sudden strike of the Under Toad, but the long erosion of a self. Homer Wells is raised in the St. Cloud’s orphanage, trained as a doctor by Wilbur Larch, who performs abortions in an era when they are illegal. Homer resists this work. He believes it is wrong — or believes he believes it. He leaves the orphanage, finds a life elsewhere, falls in love, builds something that feels like freedom.
Then, piece by piece, he gives it back. There is a moment late in the novel when Homer stands in Larch’s operating room — now his operating room — and performs the procedure he swore he never would. He does not feel damned. He does not feel liberated. He simply does the work, because the work is in front of him and no one else will do it, and he has been trained for this and not for refusal. The world has worn him into the shape it required. He returns to St. Cloud’s. He takes up Larch’s work. He becomes what he swore he would not become — not through failure, not through corruption, but through the slow accumulation of circumstances that leave him no other viable choice.
The cider house rules — posted in the bunkhouse where migrant workers sleep, rules none of them had any part in making — become the novel’s governing metaphor. You do not get to make the rules. Homer’s tragedy is not dramatic. It is the tragedy of accommodation, of compromise without resolution. The world does not destroy him. It simply wears him into the shape it requires.
Four novels, spanning nearly three decades, and the structure is consistent: characters who love fiercely, who protect devotedly, who see the danger and name it and prepare for it — and who lose anyway. Not because they failed. Because the world does not permit what they want most.
His critics have mistaken this for melodrama. They have seen the tears and assumed manipulation. They have not seen the structure beneath — the Greek bones, the fate that instructs no one, the tragedy that consoles nothing. That is not sentimentality. That is tragedy. And it is darker, not lighter, than the ironic modes that displaced it.
III. The Contract — Why We Read Anyway
Here is what many critics miss: Irving tells you what is coming.
The Under Toad is named in the first act. We hear the phrase, we understand its meaning, and we know — long before Walt dies — that it will take someone. Owen Meany announces his own death. He has seen it. He describes it. He spends the novel preparing for it. A Prayer for Owen Meany is not a mystery. It is a countdown.
Irving does not ambush his readers. He warns them.
This is the contract. Irving offers it openly: I will make you love these people. He makes you love Garp. He makes you love Owen Meany. He builds them with their full absurdity and warmth, their devotion and striving, their messy, aching humanness — and then he kills them. Not as punishment. Not as consequence. But inevitably. You see the death coming. You cannot stop it. Neither can they.
You know this going in. And still you turn the pages.
Not because we are masochists. Not because we enjoy suffering. We read because the grief Irving offers is genuine — and genuine grief, fully felt, is something we rarely encounter. Not in life, where we armor ourselves against it. Not in most fiction, where it is either avoided or redeemed. Irving offers grief without armor and without redemption. He offers the thing itself.
This is what the accusation of sentimentality misunderstands. Sentimentality is unearned emotion — feeling that exceeds its object, that manipulates rather than moves. Irving’s grief is not unearned. We have spent four hundred pages with these people. We have watched Garp chase the car with its headlights off. We have heard Owen’s strange voice, seen his small body, understood his certainty. The love is real. Therefore the loss is real. The tears are not stolen. They are given.
We accept the contract because we sense that the suffering matters. The grief is not redeemed. It does not transform into wisdom or growth or meaning. It is simply grief — the cost of having loved. Irving insists that we pay it. And we do, willingly, because the alternative is to love so cautiously that the loss, when it comes, is not grief but relief. The alternative is to have never loved at all.
Irving does not permit that caution. He makes us love fully, lose completely, and sit with what remains.
IV. Grief as Subject — The Weight That Stays
Most novelists who produce grief are writing about something else. They are writing about love, and the love ends. They are writing about family, and the family fractures. Grief arrives as consequence — the emotional residue of a story that was, at its core, about something other than loss.
Irving is different. His novels are not about love that ends in loss. They are about loss itself. The love is the setup. The family is the scaffolding. Everything he builds, he builds to lose.
This is what makes the accusation of sentimentality so misplaced. Sentimental novelists exploit grief — they use it for effect, for catharsis, for the warm glow of having felt something. Irving does not exploit grief. He investigates it. He asks: what does it weigh? What shape does it take? What remains after the loss, and how do the living carry it?
The answers are not comforting. In most literary fiction that deals with death, something is offered in return. The character grows. The reader learns. The loss is metabolized into meaning. The grief teaches. Irving refuses this transaction. The grief offers no wisdom. It does not transform. It accumulates — settles into the bones of the novel and stays there.
Consider the final pages of Garp. The novel does not end with Garp’s assassination. It continues — an epilogue that tracks the fates of every surviving character, one by one, until death. Helen dies. Roberta dies. Duncan dies. The epilogue is relentless, almost clinical in its accounting. No one is spared. And no one’s death means anything beyond itself. The grief is not shaped into elegy. It is simply there — the residue of lives that ended, as all lives end.
This is what the maximalism serves.
Many critics see the accumulation — the bears, the wrestling, the Vienna prostitutes, the New England prep schools, the car accidents and plane crashes — and they see excess. They play John Irving Bingo and miss the point.
The accumulation is not excess. It is architecture. Irving builds dense worlds because grief requires density. You cannot mourn an abstraction. You cannot feel the loss of a character you never loved, a world you never inhabited. Irving fills his novels with texture and incident and life — so much life — because he is constructing the conditions for loss to register. He thickens. He accumulates. He makes you live inside his novels for four hundred, five hundred, six hundred pages — until the world feels real, until the characters feel known, until their deaths would be grievous.
And then they die. And the grief lands. Not because Irving has manipulated you, but because he has prepared you. The maximalism is not indulgence. It is the necessary groundwork for feeling.
V. Compassion as Courage — The Demand for Presence
The word has been used against him for decades. Irving is compassionate, the critics say — meaning soft, meaning sentimental, meaning not serious. Compassion is what disqualifies him from the company of the great postmodernists, who understood that the world is too broken for warmth, too absurd for feeling. In that literary world, irony functions as armor. If you never let the reader love a character fully, you never have to kill someone the reader loves.
But his critics have forgotten what the word means.
Com-passion. To suffer with. Not to comfort, not to console, not to redeem. To be present to suffering — to enter it, to stay with it, to refuse the exit routes that would make it easier to bear.
This is what Irving demands of his readers. Not sympathy, which observes from outside. Not empathy, which imagines from a distance. Compassion — the act of suffering alongside, of feeling the weight because someone you love is feeling it too.
His novels do not permit distance. They are built to prevent it. The four hundred pages of accumulation, the density of incident and texture and life — all of it exists to bind you to the characters, to make their world your world, their people your people. By the time the loss comes, you are not observing. You are inside. The grief is not described to you. It is enacted upon you. And you stay.
This is what some critics mistake for manipulation. They feel the tears and assume they have been tricked. But there is no trick. Irving has not exploited your emotions. He has implicated you. He has made you love, knowing that love costs, and now you must pay. The payment is presence. You must stay with the grief, sit in it, feel its weight settle.
Irving’s compassion asks something harder than ironic detachment. Detachment mistakes distance for depth. Irving offers no such distance. He builds complete vulnerability into his characters — and then he lets the world take what it will. He does not flinch, and he does not let us flinch. The demand is that we care fully, lose fully, grieve fully. That we remain present when every instinct says to look away.
We live in a culture that has learned to protect itself from feeling by refusing presence — keeping suffering at arm’s length, never staying long enough for the weight to settle. Irving’s novels do not permit that protection. They demand that we stay — with the loss, with the grief that does not resolve. They teach us, if we let them, that presence is survivable. That the weight, once felt, can be borne.
This is what compassion means: not the soft feeling, but the hard practice. The willingness to suffer with. The refusal to look away.
Irving has been offering this practice for fifty years. The critics have called it sentiment. The readers have known better.
VI. The Readers Have Always Known
Three weeks ago, John Irving published his sixteenth novel. Many reviews arrived with the usual checklist. Queen Esther is not his best work — the structure is looser than Garp, the emotional center less focused than Owen Meany, the accumulation of incident more sprawling than purposeful. Irving at eighty-three is not Irving at forty-six. Time takes what it takes.
But the critics have been wrong about him for the better part of five decades. They have seen the tears and called them sentimental. They have seen the recurring motifs and called them tics. They have called his readability a failure of seriousness, as though difficulty were the only mark of depth.
Irving is not a sentimental novelist who keeps failing to be serious. He is a tragic novelist who keeps refusing to look away. His novels are built on Greek bones — fate, not error; pattern, not punishment. His characters do not fall because they are flawed. They fall because the world does not permit what they want most: to protect the people they love. The grief that follows does not redeem. It does not transform. It simply settles, and it stays.
The readers have always known this. They cry in airports, finish novels at two in the morning, sit in the silence afterward and feel the weight. They return to Irving not despite the grief but because of it. They understand that what he offers is not manipulation but practice — rehearsal for the losses coming in their own lives, losses that will not redeem, that will not teach, that will simply arrive and demand to be borne.
The postmodernists have their monuments. The academy has made its choices. But Irving has something the monuments do not: readers who return, who remember, who carry his characters with them like the dead they have loved and lost.
That is not sentimentality. That is witness.
Irving, at eighty-three, is still writing. Still telling the same story, because the story is true. You cannot protect the people you love. The grief will come. It will not console you. But you will not be alone in it.
The Greeks knew. The readers have always known.
John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He has written sixteen novels, the majority of which have been international bestsellers, and his books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. He won the National Book Award in 1980 for The World According to Garp and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2000 for The Cider House Rules. He also received the Lambda Literary Award in 2013 for In One Person. A Prayer for Owen Meany is his best-selling novel in every language. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Irving lives in Toronto.
J.M.C. Kane is the author of the non-fiction book Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk UK). He is an ASD-1 and writes from this learned experience. His prose work has been published in more than three dozen literary journals & magazines, including Plough, Camas, AMERICA Magazine, Commonweal, Smokelong Quarterly, and The New Ohio Review, where he won the 2025 Ellis Prize for Non-Fiction. He lives in New Orleans with his family where he works as an environmental attorney.
