BOOKS: Circus Maximalist

Ever since the roaring critical and commercial success of The World According to Garp (1978), the arrival of a new John Irving novel has been an occasion for intense interest and sometimes febrile arguments. Irving fans applaud his jam-packed plots, his innocent heroes (the line from Garp to Gump is not hard to draw) and his overt, Dickensian sympathy for damaged or endangered children. Critics retort that Irving’s heart may be in the right place, but his head is not — that he actually exploits for shock value the very characters whose welfare he pretends to champion.

Irving’s eighth novel, A Son of the Circus (Random House; 633 pages; $25), will not settle this debate; it may make it more heated. For this is unquestionably Irving’s busiest book so far. Keeping track of all the nonstop, simultaneous developments on its pages feels a little like being at one of the circuses that pop up now and again in the story. To pay attention here probably means missing something going on over there.

The closest thing to a ringmaster — a character at the center of the action — is 59-year-old Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla. Born in Bombay and educated in Vienna, Daruwalla practices orthopedic surgery at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Every so often he puts in a stint at the Hospital for Crippled Children in Bombay, but it is not just these young patients who lure him back to India. The doctor has developed an interest in finding a genetic marker for a form of dwarfism; to pursue his research he must draw blood from dwarfs, and a good supply of these can be found among the clowns who perform at the various circuses in and around Bombay.

Irving gives his hero yet another reason for visiting India. Daruwalla is the secret screenwriter behind the Inspector Dhar movies, a wildly popular and controversial series featuring a sneering, tough-talking Western-style gumshoe. Every Dhar film offends some segment of Bombay’s populace; the number of people who resent the main character has grown with each new release. Death threats have begun cropping up among the hate mail. The actor who plays Dhar bears a complicated and secret relationship to Daruwalla, and also has an identical twin, separated at birth, who knows nothing of his locally infamous brother and who is due to arrive in Bombay at any moment.

Perhaps it might be a good idea to take a deep breath at this stage and point out that the setup for A Son of the Circus is vastly more elaborate than the preceding suggests. Irving has been known to complain, understandably, about reviews of his books that give away the plots and their attendant surprises. He need not worry this time; the new novel is summary-proof.

Unfortunately, many may find much of it reader-proof as well. With so much going on — premise piling upon premise, coincidence upon coincidence — the point of it all begins to grow muzzy. As the edifice of Irving’s invention rears ever upward, the people who inhabit it all begin to look as small as Dr. Daruwalla’s dwarfs.

Oddly, Irving underscores his characters’ diminishing importance by constantly mentioning their ignorance. The narrator records Daruwalla’s conflicting emotions about the people in a novel he is reading, then adds, “The doctor didn’t know that he was supposed to feel these things. The book was beyond him.” On her first visit to Bombay, a young American woman notices a gang of street beggars abusing a handicapped boy: “She didn’t realize that the cripple’s role was choreographed; he was central to the dramatic action.”

These accelerating interjections — all these “it would never have occurred tos” and “couldn’t have knowns” — have the effect of turning the characters into puppets. So do several other of Irving’s narrative practices: his habit of disposing of people in violent accidents, his fondness for cartoonish props — a large, anatomically correct pink dildo plays several important roles in the action — and his penchant for hinting to the reader what is to come. When Daruwalla packs medicine in case a rabid chimpanzee should attack him or his party, it is just a matter of time — or of 30 pages, in this case — before a chimp materializes and starts biting.

Irving’s defenders would argue that of course novelists are all-powerful with respect to their characters. A Son of the Circus, however, raises the question of the consequences when an author too forcefully reminds the reader of his narrative control. Irving makes his characters less involving because he overwhelms the illusion that they are free. The author obviously cared enough for Daruwalla and the rest to write about them at heroic length, and he is a sentimentalist, not, like some, a maker of elaborate literary contraptions for their own sake. But he does not seem to have noticed that his characters were vanishing within the intricacies of his attention.