An “Incredible Amount of Horribly Described Sex”’

Jenny Colgan reviews John Irving’s latest in the world-edition Spectator.

Some time ago I was a guest at a book festival in France where we were invited to dinner in the town hall with local dignitaries. I was asked if I liked asparagus. I do, I said, thinking of delicious green spears. Good, said the woman in charge, as it was the asparagus season. I was then presented with an enormous plate of leek-sized white asparagus with a tiny dab of hollandaise on the side, and then expected to eat my way through essentially a fibrous albino python as the dignitaries looked on expectantly. It was a long evening.

I mention this because that’s basically what the experience of reading this book is like. A fellow reviewer demurred and said, no, it’s more akin to dragging your broken leg down a mountain, à la Touching the Void.

Oddly enough, I was recently re-reading Proust, and in the course of some endless and interminable rhapsodic descriptions of French food, I found myself marveling over his expression of preference for great big, thick asparagus. The large version, in my experience, is always woody or soggy. We avoid it and seek out the young, small shoots. The French are weird, and John Irving is a terrible author.