The Washington Post

The Washington Post is a newspaper whose two cited reviews offer contrasting but complementary views of John Irving’s fiction: one emphasizes the consequences beneath erotic entanglement, while the other celebrates the imaginative energy of a novel set in India. Together, the reviews frame Irving’s work as both attentive to intimate aftermath and capable of exuberant reinvention.

Review of The 158-Pound Marriage

In its response to The 158-Pound Marriage, The Washington Post looked beyond the novel’s conspicuous sexual complications to their consequences. The review described Irving as looking past the “eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance” toward the “morning-after implications,” treating the book’s ménage à quatre not simply as erotic spectacle but as a source of emotional and relational aftermath.

The review also called the novel “lean and concentrated,” using the image of a mine shaft to characterize its compression. That description pairs formal economy with psychological reach: the novel may be tightly focused, but its attention extends beyond the immediately striking events to what follows them.

Review of A Son of the Circus

The Washington Post Book World later praised A Son of the Circus as “Irving’s most daring and vibrant novel.” Set in present-day Bombay, the novel follows Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, a circus fan, screenwriter, and researcher into dwarfism who may be pursuing a serial killer. The review’s emphasis on daring and vibrancy responded to the novel’s combination of a specific urban setting, circus material, and an uncertain investigative thread.

The review further described the story as “circus-as-India,” told with “gusto and delightful irreverence.” Its formulation highlights the novel’s use of circus as a way of approaching India, while its praise of the storytelling’s gusto and irreverence stresses an exuberant narrative manner rather than a restrained or documentary one.

Critical Perspective

Across the two reviews, The Washington Post recognized different kinds of energy in Irving’s fiction. Its response to The 158-Pound Marriage stressed the movement from sexual entanglement to its aftermath; its response to A Son of the Circus emphasized boldness, liveliness, and irreverent storytelling. The reviews thus register both Irving’s interest in the consequences of private relationships and his capacity to build expansive, comic worlds around unusual subjects.