The Water-Method Man (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

The Water-Method Man (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

<b>“John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist.”—<i>Los Angeles Times</i></b><br /><br />Fred "Bogus" Trumper has troubles. A divorced, broke graduate student of Old Norse in 1970s New York, Trumper is a wayward knight-errant in the battle of the sexes and the pursuit of happiness: His ex-wife has moved in with his childhood best friend, his life is the subject of a tell-all movie, and his chronic urinary tract infection requires surgery. <br /><br />Trumper is determined to change. There's only one problem: it seems the harder he tries to alter his adolescent ways, the more he is drawn to repeating the mistakes of the past. . . . <br /><br />Written when Irving was twenty-nine, Trumper's tale of woe is told with all the wit and humor that would become Irving's trademark.<br /><br /><b>“Three or four times as funny as most novels.”</b><i>—<b>The New Yorker</b></i><br /><br /><b>Praise for <i>The Water-Method Man<br /><br /></i></b>“Friendship, marriage, and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly—something close to joyful malice—perpetually intrude and distrupt, often fatally. Life, in [John] Irving's fiction, is always under siege. Harm and disarray are daily fare, as if the course of love could not run true. . . . Irving's multiple manner . . . his will to come at the world from different directions, is one of the outstandint traits of <i>The World According to Garp, </i>but this remarkable flair for . . . stories inside stories . . . isalready handled with mastery . . . and with a freedom almost wanton in <i>The Water-Method Man</i> [which is Garp's predecessor by six years].”<b>—Terrence Des Pres<br /></b><br />“Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry.”<b>—<i>Time<br /></i></b>