While I was lost in The New Yorker, Andy Towle was tracking down the Nashville Scene (via the National Post) for an interview with John Irving from November. Irving reveals his next novel, coming in October, is called Last Night in Twisted River and it's his third political novel, though "not as overtly political" as Cider House or Owen Meany. He also shares his adult dislike of Catcher in the Rye and his love of Edmund White. He said:
And I am reading Edmund White's Hotel de Dream—what White
calls "a New York novel." It's also historical: about Stephen Crane,
who is dying, dictating a novel to his wife—about a boy prostitute in
New York in the 1890s. It's a novel-within-a-novel, and it's flawless.
I love Edmund White. Every time I read a new book of his, I am reminded
of a previous book of his, which I then reread. I've interrupted Hotel de Dream to reread White's novel A Boy's Own Story, which I love, and White's autobiography My Lives. He's a wonderful writer. We're the same age, and I remember when I first read A Boy's Own Story—in the early 1980s—and I thought that the novel spoke much more to me about a boy coming of age (even though it's about a gay boy coming of age, and I'm not gay) than The Catcher in the Rye ever did. I reread The Catcher in the Rye recently, and it doesn't hold up at all; it's just not very well, or very consistently, written. But A Boy's Own Story
is beautifully wrought, and fiercely defiant; I could reread that novel
every year and find something terrific I had missed in a previous
reading.
I believe Edmund White is one of the best writers of my generation; he's certainly the contemporary American writer I reread more than any other, and the one whose next book I look forward to reading most.
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