Avenue of Mysteries: Irving Pays Homage to His Own Back List

Avenue of Mysteries - John Irving

Almost no one had ever heard of John Irving before The World According to Garp. After Garp, almost every English-language reader seemed to know his name. They eagerly awaited the release of subsequent novels such as A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Fourth Hand, and looked backward to older works like Setting Free the Bears. All that’s to say that this reader, at least, has had a thirty-plus year relationship with Irving. Some novels have pleased – the aforementioned Meany or A Widow for One Year, for instance – while others (think The Hotel New Hampshire and Last Night In Twisted River) seemed to miss the mark. Irving, it seems, gets on a “kick” once in a while, though he hasn’t written about wrestling in several decades.

Irving’s back, with Avenue of Mysteries, and the question of the day is “Hit? or Miss?” I’m afraid that I, at least, must lean toward the “miss” end of the scale. But first, let’s talk about the book…


Now in his mid-fifties, Juan Diego Guerrero has lived an eventful life. Born to the part-time prostitute Esperanza in Oaxaca, Old Mexico, Juan Diego spent his formative years with his little sister Lupe. Lupe could read minds and, to some extent, predict the future; but only Juan Diego could understand her when she spoke. Orphaned when, at least according to Lupe, their mother was murdered by a statue of the Virgin Mary, Lupe and Juan Diego joined the local circus. His life soon disrupted by yet another tragedy, Juan Diego emigrated to Iowa in the company of Flor, a transvestite former prostitute, and his/her lover, the ex-Jesuit Edward/Eduardo. 

Forty years later, now a semi-famous author, Juan Diego finds himself journeying to the Philippines to fulfill a promise he’d made as a Oaxaca teen. Jet-lagged and stuffy, Juan Diego slips into a fugue state of sorts brought on by his apparent inability to balance his medications (beta blockers and Viagra). In his strange, semi-waking state he alternates between dreaming of his long-ago life in the Oaxaca basurero – the city dump – and a present in which he finds himself in the control of a mother-daughter succubus tag team. Miriam and Dorothy. As his medication regimen becomes more and more unbalanced, past and present merge into a single, messy whole.

Anyone who’s read Irving in the past couple of decades will recognize the usual themes of religion, mysticism, and religious mysticism. It’s an Irving novel, so you know that if you throw a rock into the cast you’re highly likely to hit a prostitute (Until I Find You), a priest (Cider House Rules), a transgender or transvestite character (The World According to Garp or In One Person), or someone whose speech you can’t understand (Ellen James in The World According to Garp). There’s sure to be a sprinkling of large carnivores (The Fourth Hand), most likely at a circus (The Hotel New Hampshire) and one character will have divined the method of his death as a mere child (A Prayer for Owen Meany). If you read that paragraph to suggest that Irving doesn’t seem to climb out of his comfort zone at times, so be it.
None of that means that Irving has forgotten how to write, however – it just means that he’s written so much that he’s begun recycling character descriptions and physical traits. His characters remain fully-fleshed and oh, so human; and his plots, as ever, alternate between absurdity and melancholy at a sometimes frenetic pace. Still, however, I found Avenue of Mysteries, regardless of its glorious characters and that typically Irving plot, a long and difficult slog. It’s bad enough that Juan Diego can’t figure out who (or what) the hell Miriam and Dorothy are, but to make matters worse, neither can a reader. Perhaps calling upon the supernatural is a popular literary device this decade (c.f. T. Jefferson Parker’s Mike Finnegan), but that doesn’t mean we readers have to like it. 

When it comes to ratings, then, Avenue of Mysteries deserves four stars for a plot and characters we can’t resist, but it loses one of them for an overdose of pop mysticism and a bouquet of recycled characters. Sorry, John…

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