![]() Later, in a marriage of convenience (but also of love and respect), Little Ray formally weds Mr Barlow, who transitions from male to female during the course of the novel. We also meet Adam’s grandparents, his aunts, his uncles and several of his variously banjaxed girlfriends. The best of the novel comes in Irving’s unusual scene writing, and this remains his great imaginative strength. ![]() He consistently avoids the cliches of setup and setting and deftly draws you in as a witness to the outlandish. Adam is in bed with Jasmine, one of his ill-fated girlfriends, for example, and the ghost of his grandfather appears, naked except for his nappy. Then the grandfather “squatted, grunting. ![]() Could ghosts crap? Did they? … Not to be outdone … Jasmine – still standing on the bed – let her bowels go. ” Enter Dottie, an elderly carer and “fix-it person”, looking like “the Angel of Death”, covered in pale face cream and wearing a contraption like a lampshade around her head. “I sat close… holding them tight … I admired the life they had made together, and how they’d chosen to end it.” “Looks like your lady-friend shoulda been wearin’ the diaper.”īy contrast, there’s a very moving and – again – oddly original scene when Adam goes to recover the corpses of a couple who have decided to end their lives together at the top of the ski slopes following a cancer diagnosis, and rides the chairlift down between the two frozen bodies. Initially, I relished the assembly of characters – the different sexualities at play, the transgressive mother, Mr Barlow. But part of me could not help but feel that after 900 pages I had learned very little about the experience of a fellow human being transitioning genders, for example.
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