You can’t really rush through a John Irving book. There’s so much detail and so much richness to his storytelling that you really have to take your time or you’ll miss so much. And that’s why this review is so, so, so very late. I received an advance copy of Avenue of Mysteries from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Typically I like to have the review up on the day the book publishes, but for this book I just had to take my time.
I’ll start by saying that this isn’t Irving’s best book. The well-developed settings and characters typical of Irving are there, but there's a flatness to the story as a whole that disappointed me. That said, even a flat book by John Irving is a good book. It’s just not a great book. It’s three stars where I expected five.
Avenue of Mysteries is the story of Juan Diego Guerrero, a writer who seems equally transfixed by events from his past and the correct dosages of his betablockers and Viagra. The story is told half in the present, half in the past, in a way I’ve always thought of as inside out. There’s no straightforward, chronological order to the telling - we flip back and forth from the present to the past without warning. At times the story is confusing and repetitive because of the almost heavy-handed foreshadowing used in the scenes set in the past. By the time events happen, we’re almost tired of hearing about them - at times it seems Irving was tired of writing of them too. We are teased about what happened to Lupe, Juan Diego’s sister, throughout the entire book. And then when we finally found out, the scene feels glossed over, the details hazy. The entire novel has an almost dreamlike quality, which I suppose was deliberate and supposed to reflect the dreamlike state Juan Diego seems to be in throughout the story.
I’d recommend this one for existing fans of Irving and his style of story-telling, but I wouldn’t recommend it as anyone’s introduction to him for fear it would put them off and they’d end up missing out on his other, better novels.
