The publication and failure of Second Wind of the Cuckold is a turning point in T. S. Garp’s writing life: his second novel receives baffled and sometimes hostile reviews, sells less well than Procrastination, and leaves him feeling, for the first time, that he has failed. Its mixture of marriage, sex, pain, guilt, and comedy proves difficult for readers to classify, while the people closest to Garp offer little encouragement.

The Novel and Its Critical Reception

Second Wind of the Cuckold centers on two married couples who have an affair. Its treatment of intimacy was deliberately uncomfortable: the novel’s sexual relationships leave the partners hurt and guilty, yet often still wanting more. Reviewers noticed this paradox but did not agree on its value. Some called the effect brilliant; others called it dumb. One described the novel as bitterly truthful, then argued that its bitterness prevented it from becoming more than a minor classic. The same reviewer speculated that refining away some of that bitterness would have allowed a purer truth to emerge.

The critical debate also struggled to pin down a thesis. One reviewer found the book’s apparent proposition contradictory: sexual relationships seemed to reveal people profoundly, even as sex seemed to diminish the profundity they possessed. Garp rejected the expectation that his novel should advance a thesis. He described it to an interviewer as a serious comedy about marriage but a sexual farce, and later wrote that human sexuality makes farcical the most serious intentions. The novel’s unsettled combination of seriousness and absurdity was therefore not an accidental feature of its reception; it was central to what Garp said he had tried to do.

Plot, Comedy, and Intended Meaning

The novel’s ending gives its comedy a conciliatory shape. Friendship finally persuades the couples to end their affair. The childless couple later separates, disillusioned with each other, although the separation is not necessarily caused by their experiment. The couple with a child stays together, and the child grows up without a detectable flaw. This outcome offers a qualified optimism rather than a simple punishment or catastrophe.

In the final scene, the two women happen to meet on escalators in a department store at Christmastime, carrying packages as they travel in opposite directions. One woman’s uncontrollable flatulence and the other’s involuntary movement of her right arm set off a chain of mishaps on the crowded escalator; an old man is knocked down, and people topple after him. The store is packed and noisy, but no one is hurt. In the holiday setting, the incident is forgivable, and the women exchange grim smiles as they move apart, apparently recognizing each other’s burdens. Garp repeatedly insisted, “It’s a comedy!” and imagined the novel as a film. Yet no one bought the paperback rights, a particularly stark measure of the gap between his comic intention and the book’s commercial prospects.

Sales, Rejection, and Personal Consequences

Whatever Garp or the reviewers made of the novel’s meaning, it was not a success. Second Wind of the Cuckold sold a few thousand copies fewer than Procrastination. John Wolf, Garp’s editor, tried to put the result in perspective by assuring him that second novels often performed this way. The reassurance did not prevent Garp from feeling that, for the first time in his life, he had failed.

Wolf also tried to shield Garp from a particularly hostile West Coast newspaper review. He eventually sent the clipping when he worried Garp might encounter it by accident, attaching a note that the reviewer had reportedly suffered a hormone imbalance. The review dismissed the book as sordid and pathetic, attacking Garp both as the son of Jenny Fields and as the author of a novel it characterized as sexist and preoccupied with sex. Its insult joined the wider critical confusion: the book’s subject and tone were reduced to accusations rather than engaged as a difficult comic design.

The disappointment was not confined to the press. Helen disliked the novel, and even Alice Fletcher, despite her affectionate letters to Garp, never mentioned it. Helen’s colleagues in the English Department had discussed Procrastination with her, however tentatively, but no one spoke to her about the new book. She regarded it as an invasion of her privacy and hoped Garp would soon leave the project behind. The novel’s subject—an affair between two couples—thus reached beyond its fictional plot, leaving Helen feeling exposed and its failure all the more intimate for Garp.

Significance

The episode establishes a contrast between Garp’s confidence in the novel’s comic purpose and the reception that meets it. He sees a story whose sexual farce, injuries, and holiday mishaps can culminate in forgiveness; reviewers instead find bitterness, contradiction, or a dubious sexual thesis, while the market supplies no paperback readership. The failure is not simply a lower sales figure: it is the first time Garp interprets a book’s reception as evidence that he has failed.

At the same time, the novel’s unresolved mixture of bitterness and comedy complicates any easy verdict. Its ending makes room for embarrassment and disorder without injury, and its couples reach different outcomes without the narrator assigning every consequence to the affair. The reviewers’ competing labels reproduce that instability: the book can look both serious and farcical, but its intended humor does not ensure that readers will recognize it as comedy. Garp’s repeated defense of the novel therefore becomes part of the event itself, a measure of the distance between an author’s design and the response his book can command.