I remember reading John Irving's The World According to Garp in Kolkata in the 80s and a phenomenal book it had appeared to me then. I was especially awed by Jenny Fields, Garp's mother, because of her powerful eccentricity and self-determining journey through life.
Irving's most recent novel, In One Person, I hear is another tale of celebration of the power of self-determination and sublime eccentricity.
The story is of a bisexual Billy Dean and his desires and of their unequivocal expression and fulfillment. Billy enjoys women, but the best women in the novel turn out to be those who have had been men once upon a time. Such is Ms. Frost, a librarian at Billy's school. Billy is fiercely turned on by the sight of Ms. Frost every time he goes to check out a copy of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations from the school library. Ms. Frost suggests he try a variety of books.
In her younger days, Ms. Frost was Big Al, a 6ft 2 inches tall undefeated wrestling champion. Now he chooses to live as a woman. When Billy finally sleeps with Ms. Frost for the first time, he believes she is a woman. When he returns for more, he knows she is a magnificent woman with a male organ.
The novel is wide-ranging, almost natural, in its spirit of tolerance. Tolerance isn't=anything goes; it's what happens when we face our own desires and choices honestly, whether we act on them or not.
Ms. Frost says it well, when she replies to Billy's query about her sexual identity: Don't make me a category before you get to know me."
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