Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
I envy the reader who opens a John Irving book for the first time. Irving stands with Tom Wolfe as the best American fiction writer today. The writing of John Irving flows so smoothly. He knows how to side track from the main theme of a story tell us a secondary tale related to one of the characters and then move right back to the main story without skipping a beat.
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed is part memoir, part essays, and a few short stories thrown in as well. Piggy Sneed is the character is the first tale, a semi-retarded junkman who lives on the outskirts of Irving s northeastern home town. Piggy also raises pigs, and as Irving remembers, contains characteristics more pig like than human.
His face would jut in front of his body when he approached the garbage cans, as if he were rooting (hungrily) underground. The story is meant more as a tale for children than memoir. The children tease Piggy unmercifully. Later he dies in a fire, and the young Irving uses imagination as a means of keeping Piggy alive.
The sport of wrestling plays a large part in Irving s life, and his wrestling career dominates most of the memoirs in Piggy Sneed.. Wrestling has never touched the popularity of say, baseball, but it shouldn t scare readers away. To Irving, wrestling can be a metaphor for writing. Wrestling demands control of the physical and the emotional aspects of an individual. Losing focus, looking ahead too soon, leads to defeat. Too many inexperienced writers think that relating the past has to be interesting because it happened to them, he writes.
But consider being pinned in a wrestling match. Irving describes it: The worst thing about being pinned in the pit was the lasting image of all those faces peering down at you ... their expressions were strangely incurious, as if they were already distancing themselves from your defeat.
This is autobiography, it really happened to Irving, but few writers can express it so well. Writers, say Irving, must learn that real life must be made to seem real. Irving, by his own admission, was a mediocre wrestler, but it s likely that no other writer could make the wrestling career of an NCAA champ seems as interesting as Irving s undistinguished exploits are in PiggySneed.
The best fiction, Brennbar s Rant, is a funny, slashing attack on political correctness that was ahead of its time. The story was written in 1974. Narrated from the point of view of a woman, several wealthy elitists dining compare who is the most oppressed. Even the waiter gets involved into the debate. Finally, Brennbar, the silent husband of the narrator, speaks his piece. He s the most oppressed. The others scoff, seeing a white male. Brennbar explains that he was a victim of zitism, by far the worst oppression. Even you own parents were ashamed of you!
Subtle indications that your pillowcase was not washed with the rest of the laundry, and at breakfast your mother would say to you, Dear, you know don t you, that the blue washcloth is yours? Brennbar shuts the others up, and his wife loves him for that.
Another story, Other People s Dreams, is a tale about a recently divorced man whose dreams depend on where he sleeps. If he sleeps on his ex-wife's bed, he dreams what she might dream. When he visits his elderly mom s home and sleeps in her bed, he is shocked. It s a steamy dream, with passionate coupling in the shower between his mom and late father. It was Fred s first sex dream as a woman; he felt so stupid to be learning now; a man in his thirties, and from his mother precisely how women liked to be touched.
Among the essays is Piggy Sneed is an homage to German author Gunter Grass, who Irving considers the best novelist alive today, and an appreciation of Charles Dickens A Christmas Tale. Irving tells us that Scrooge s greed in the tale is not a deliberate exaggeration. Rather, it was considered realistic and laudable in 19th century London. It was, of course, detestable to Dickens, writes Irving.
Irving provides readers a notes section at the end of each chapter that provides an interesting history of how each work was created. It s sure to be an added treat for his many admirers.