Doing Things His Way

Maybe John Wheelwright should be in Stockholm," says John Irving, the former college wrestler who pinned the nation's attention in 1978 with The World According to Garp. Maybe, but Toronto turned out to be the perfect place. There one can be away but not away, close to home but not at home. The clean, well-lighted city on Lake Ontario is also where Irving, 47, met his second wife, literary agent Janet Turnbull. Irving and Turnbull were married in 1987, and maintain an apartment in Toronto's Forest Hill section. The author spends about a week each month north of the border, where there is no lack of literary companionship. Novelists Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies are among his writing friends. Irving has two other homes, one in Vermont and the other from Vermont but in eastern Long Island. The wood-frame structure had been dismantled, transported to Long Island and restored among the summer retreats of the Northeast's most glamorous resort area. "I'm known as the eccentric bastard who moved to the Hamptons and brought his house with him," says Irving, a man who can take satisfaction in having done things his way.

In wider circles, Irving is known as a modern American Dickens. His novels are animated by victims of society who grapple with issues such as terrorism, rape and abortion. Owen Meany goes a step beyond. "I'm moved and impressed by people with a great deal of religious faith," says Irving, an Episcopalian who admits that the compulsory churchgoing of his youth has had a cumulative effect. But, he adds, "the Christ story impresses me in heroic, not religious, terms."

As for putting Owen Meany's dialogues in upper case? Irving got the idea from editions of the New Testament in which Jesus' utterances appear in red letters. And John Wheelwright's inability to forget the country of his birth? "Even if you try hard to look away from the U.S., it is there in your face like a flag."