Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Irving, John (Vol. 112) - Andrew Rosenheim (review date 4 February 1996)

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Andrew Rosenheim (review date 4 February 1996)

SOURCE: "Catch-As-Catch-Can," in Times Literary Supplement, February 4, 1996, p. 9.

[In the following review, Rosenheim offers a generally favorable assessment of The Imaginary Girlfriend.]

Evelyn Waugh's Mr Pinfold maintained that "most men have the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery". One of the appealing things about the popular American novelist John Irving is his unwillingness to use any tricks at all, or to pretend that the same themes do not recur in his work. Bears, motor cycles, Vienna and, most of all, the sport of wrestling figure prominently and repetitively in his novels, and this curious set of preoccupations has spawned the imaginative plots that are this writer's greatest strength.

The Imaginary Girlfriend is a memoir, atypically short for Irving, which details the major (really, with writing co-dominant) role which amateur...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Jack Beatty (review date 23 September 1981)
   2. Caryn Fuoroli (review date January 1982)
   3. Evan Carton (essay date Fall 1986)
   4. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges (essay date 1986)
   5. Wendy Steiner (review date 19 May 1989)
   6. Robert Towers (review date 20 July 1989)
   7. Edward C. Reilly (essay date 1991)
   8. Kim McKay (essay date Winter 1992)
   9. Raymond J. Wilson III (essay date Fall 1992)
   10. Irving Weinman (review date 9 April 1993)
   11. Robert Towers (review date 4 September 1994)
   12. Sven Birkerts (review date 4 February 1996)
   13. Andrew Rosenheim (review date 4 February 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. John Irving