Avenue of Mysteries

It's well written and the characters are unique, but one doesn't feel emotionally bonded to them. This, too me, is what distinguishes Irving's recent work from such great earlier works like Garp and Prayer for Owen Meaney.

Decent story but not up to the superior standard I've expected from John Irving. The pace bogged down in multiple scenes, due in part to frequent repetition and redundancy. Some of the plot twists didn't make sense, and at the end one is left with unanswered questions.

Another beautifully crafted tale by John Irving. I found the suggestions for book club discussions very helpful.
Definitely not a book for speed readers, the punctuation is an integral part of the book, "watch out for all the exclamation marks!!!"

Couldn't even get a hundred pages read. What I read was execrable: so much was wholly implausible, straining to be zany and madcap, random, distasteful at times, and, ultimately, just plain ridiculous. I even returned it--a book! Never done that before. I just couldn't stand the idea that my having purchased it could be viewed as an endorsement of its value.

I am an avid reader of books. I will sprint thru a good one like nobody's business. I include many Irving books among my favorites. This marks day 43 of me trying to slog thru this book (no, not every day, maybe 5 days of 43). I refuse to be captive any longer. I can no longer read one more repetitive word about Juan Diego's decisions to take his beta blockers or his viagra, crying in his sleep in public, weird relationships with statues of the Virgin Mary, his penis, or sleeping with a Mother/Daughter team. Even with the later, a circus, a gay priest and a transvestite, this book manages to be predictable, slow, dull and dreary. Dare I repeat it is repetitive? You want to shake Diego the adult and tell him to lift those droopy eyelids and just get on with himself. The only character I really liked was Lupe and she was killed by a lion mid book. I would go out on a limb and say this book is Irving at his most egotistical and self-indulgent; but I don't want to sound like one of those editorial reviewers that helped sell me this steaming pile. I don't care if you loved Cider House Rules or Owen Meany. Stay away from this book.

As a die-hard John Irving reader I have read and enjoyed all of his novels. I await each new book eagerly and always pre-order the newest offering, as I did with "Avenue." The characters (major and peripheral), the plot and settings make for a terribly slow read. With an Irving book I am used to being lured back over and over until I have completed it, but I found myself seldom happy to return to this book, not curious about where the people and story might take me. When I got to the 50% mark on my Kindle I felt exasperated and went on to another book, with the hope that perhaps I just need a break and I might return to it another time. One week later I am doubtful that reconnection will happen.

This is the most tedious book I have ever chosen to not finish. It is mired in deep descriptions about very uninteresting and nonessential plot settings and as much as I like all the other books by John Irving, this one is horrible.

I tried with this book. I really really tried. I love John Irving’s books. I consider him to be one of the greatest of America’s contemporary writers. Nay, possibly one of America’s all-time greatest writers. For me he’s up there with the best – as good as, if not better than Updike and Roth and Bellow. And certainly more enjoyable most of the time – especially when it comes to Bellow. But this one is just a disaster. I couldn't stick with it. By half way I was skimming and my skimming got faster and faster. Just to get to the end - although still naively holding on the slender hope that it might get better. It didn’t. All the famous Irving themes and obsessions and tropes are here – but somehow they just don’t work. And the repetitions (litanies, I read another reviewer calling them – litanies – I like that) are just repetitious rather than becoming part of the rhythm. And as for the characters, they have crossed the line beyond quirky and individual to grotesque. The real problem, though, is the protagonist Juan Diego, with his tedious obsession with Viagra and Propranolol. He’s irritating. I felt none of the engagement that I felt with, for example, Owen Meany or other such memorable characters. I was so disappointed with this novel. Such a depressing start to 2016. How many more disillusions might the year bring? How many more betrayals? Oh John – how could you do this to me? Oh well, onwards and upwards, it’s early days….there will be many other books this year. And I’m pretty sure they won’t be worse than this one.

Reading John Irving can be like eating a hard candy - you never know when you'll hit the good stuff in the middle.....Like most of his books, this is a strange trip with not-totally real characters (e.g., mind-readers) plus his usual potpourri of circuses, sexually ambivalent people, odd deaths, etc. If yu like Irving, you'll love it. If you didn't like the last Irving novel, don't try again. The reader, as the title suggests, goes down an avenue of mysteries.

While I really like the telling of Juan Diego's story switching from youth to adult and back again, his death seemed so sudden if not unexpected. The questions of why he was lead around by Clark, who seemed like a real dork, wasn't really clear. Not one of those books I would suggest to a friend.

I am a John Irving fan, bought this book expecting much entertainment, but am now slogging through it (halfway at this point) in the hopes that it will pick up. All right, Mr Irving, ENOUGH about Beta Blockers and their physical/psychic effects--those of us who have been taking them for years are well aware of those effects. You do go on at length,repeating that same material over and over--and over.

While I really like the telling of Juan Diego's story switching from youth to adult and back again, his death seemed so sudden if not unexpected. The questions of why he was lead around by Clark, who seemed like a real dork, wasn't really clear. Not one of those books I would suggest to a friend.

I am a John Irving fan, bought this book expecting much entertainment, but am now slogging through it (halfway at this point) in the hopes that it will pick up. All right, Mr Irving, ENOUGH about Beta Blockers and their physical/psychic effects--those of us who have been taking them for years are well aware of those effects. You do go on at length,repeating that same material over and over--and over.

This is typical John Irving -- lots of interesting plot twists, mysteries, fantastical fantasies, but for me it dragged a bit. There's a lot of foreshadowing so ultimately you know what's going to happen, you just don't know when he's going to get to it -- and he takes his time getting to it!

AS much I a hate to say this....for the first time ever I did not enjoy a John Irving novel.I really didn't connect with the character or the setting.
It was rambling and the part with the "mother -daughter" sex act seemed so artificial and bizarre that it seemed to undermine the actual story.I caan't say I would recommend.

I love John Irving, but this novel is not up to his usual standards. Yes, it has the crazy, wonderful families, the questions about faith and the somewhat lethargic narrator, but it misses the mark. I am not a fan of magical realism, so I found the scenes focusing on virgin value, virgin tears and the possible succubi; Dorothy and Miriam rather tedious. Juan Diego is lethargic, but whether it's his character or the beta blockers, we'll never know. The most interesting characters are Edward Bonshaw and Flor. Their lives and their deaths are poignant, but do not get the attention necessary to develop their impact on Juan Diego. I read every word, and believed I was going somewhere, but in the end, I was disappointed by my favorite living author.

Having read most of Irving's books, it's good to see him returning to the style of his previous good books (Garp, Owen Meany, & Cider House). I thought he went into a style slump for a while but this looks like the John Irving of old is back.

WOW! Could not finish reading this book. Disappointed in the style, the story, the characters, the going back and forth between now and back then, the two "mysterious" women/ghosts/prostitutes/whatever, the constant penis obsession, Viagra and beta blockers. Wish I could get a refund on this, but I guess it's better to stop believing the reviews that seem to be written by some who are blinded by celebrity writers or die hard fans. Lupe should have predicted what a boring book this is right up front.

Juan Diego, along with his sister Lupe, was a ‘dump kid’ in Mexico, scavenging for items to sell or use in the city dump. Among the things Diego had rescued from the fire were books, many in English, which were thrown out by the Church. Diego learned to read both Spanish and English with these books.

Now, half a century later, Diego is an established and respected writer. All of his friends from his days as a dump kid are dead including Lupe and he has health problems. He is on a pilgrimage in the Philippines to honour a promise he made to a friend all those years ago in Mexico. On his journey, he meets two women, a mother and daughter, who claim to be fans and quickly seem to take over his life including sharing his bed but who may not be what they seems. As Diego travels around the country meeting old friends and visiting shrines, and as he mixes his beta blockers with Viagra, he dreams about his former life and how it led him to here.

Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving is a beautifully written book containing many of the motifs and themes of his previous works: the circus, orphans, and, of course, the Church and sex. But this is John Irving and because he revisits older themes does not make this a rehash of earlier books. This is a story about the importance of dreaming and imagination not only in youth but perhaps especially in old age. It is about sacrifice and love and mystery both in the secular and the religious and it is full of empathy, humour, and just a touch of the mystical. It will make you laugh in parts and frustrate you in others but the story and its many quirky characters will stay with you long after you finish reading.

Oh, how I wish I had gotten a kindle sample before I bought this book. I could not get into this book at all! As a fan of Irving's earlier books, I thought this one would be as good. I found it very boring. I could not bring myself to care about the characters at all.I spent $14.95 on a book I could not even finish.

John Irving is one of America’s most notable and memorable fiction writers, having created characters that are imprinted in the literary landscape, such as Owen Meany, Garp and his transgender mother, Jenny Fields. Prescient characters like Franny and her cautionary warning from THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE, “Don’t walk past the open windows,” occur throughout his body of work, creating well-placed foreshadowing of events --- often ominous, sometimes hilarious --- to come.

Irving regularly dwells on whimsical themes, but AVENUE OF MYSTERIES may be the first to tread less than lightly into the realm of magical realism. This is due in part to the locale of the reflective portions of his childhood that begin at the roots of that genre in Latin America. This is where Juan Diego and his clairvoyant sister, Lupe, begin their formative years as dump kids in 1970s Oaxaca, Mexico.

Juan Diego and Lupe are among the hundreds of homeless children who collect scrap metals for el jefe, the dump boss. The 14-year-old boy also retrieves charred books from the smoking pyres, which he reads voraciously, reclining on a decaying couch in the guard shack overseen by el jefe, who may or may not be their father. They befriend American Vietnam draft dodgers and drug addicts and see their mother, a housekeeper at the nearby Catholic church by day and streetwalker by night, only sporadically. Juan Diego’s reading skills come to the attention of Brother Pepe, a Jesuit priest from the local orphanage who supplies him with more books.

Lupe’s psychic abilities foresee a grim future for Juan Diego, and she takes it upon herself to see that her brother finds a better future. Her intervention leads to the adoption by a visiting priest from Iowa, who takes him to a university town where he grows up to become a popular professor and author. One of the addicted draft dodgers from the Oaxaca dump, the “good gringo,” beseeches Juan Diego that if he ever gets out of there to visit his father’s grave in the Philippines where he was buried during World War II. This promise becomes a central theme of the book, leading him to a trip of wonder as he mistakenly confuses prescription medications, leading to a tragicomedy of events.

At age 54, Juan Diego is a popular author and accepts an invitation by a former student to lecture in Manilla. A dangerous mix-up of beta blockers and Viagra leads Juan Diego, who never lacked for a vivid imagination, to reminisce about his traumatic childhood. From the airplane, restaurants and his motel room, he enjoys frequent mysterious and erotic visitations by two beautiful women who float in and out of his agitated dreams on his journey to and around the Philippines. This is John Irving, so naturally there had to be some sex involved, right?

AVENUE OF MYSTERIES could serve as a master class of Irving’s writing. He tackles every writing style raised as a bugaboo to any beginning writer. Flashbacks: confusing unless handled with exquisite care. Foreign names and language references: annoying unless mercifully translated. Foreshadowing: clunky and confusing in the wrong hands. Perhaps Irving’s best tricks of the trade are his vivid characterizations sans caricature. He professes to living a mundane, even boring, life, but when he writes, he dwells in the imaginary realm of “What if?” then “How could this go wrong?” followed by “How could this go horribly wrong?” for inspiration.

You expect to encounter the inevitable Irving markers, such as his disdain for the Roman Catholic Church and its inflexibility. Homosexuals and transvestites are also recurring themes --- and, of course, bears. No bears here, but El Hombre, a circus lion, plays a major role. These minable treasures are what make Irving who he is. Yet his genius is that his characters are so compellingly unique that they live indelibly in our memories. Lesser writers may try to emulate but can only imitate.

Reviewed by Roz Shea

I used to be a big Irving fan. Read several of his books, and Owen Meany was one of the first connections I made with my wife. I even attended an Irving writing workshop. All I remember from that experience many years ago is his advice to "write what you know." So these many years later she gave me a signed copy of Avenue of Mysteries as a gift. Based on my experience with his more recent novels, I was skeptical but gave it a shot. My skepticism was based on Irving's by-now formulaic approach to his novels -- deformed protagonist, pseudo-religious insight, and lots of obsession with breasts. Rinse, repeat. Sure enough, in Avenue of Mysteries they were all there on full display within the first few pages and continued until I just couldn't take it any more. I bailed after the chapter "Faith and Sex." Ugh. As a bonus the main character is an acclaimed novelist with an adoring female audience. (Write what you know huh? . . . A little too much transparent vanity for my liking.) I've now come to view Irving as a sophomoric (boobs boobs boobs) narcissist who cranks out books like Grisham and Clancy but is for some reason viewed as making brilliant contributions to the "literary canon" as referenced on the jacket, which also describes him as "sexually brave." Give me a break. They say certain politicians sound like smart people to people who aren't very smart, and I think Irving's novels read like great literary works to people who don't read a lot (myself included for a time). I wish I had stopped after Owen Meany and didn't ruin the illusion, but now I'm on to his schtick.

This was a very strange story! I know some of Irving’s books are a little strange but it took me many chapters to wrap my brain around these characters and what was going on with them. That said, I am not even sure I understood exactly what was going on until the very, very end. But, I will attempt to share my feelings about it here.

Juan Diego and his sister Lupe are “dump kids” and live in a Mexican orphanage. Juan Diego is a bright kid but much of his waking hours are spent translating for Lupe because Lupe speaks a language that no one understands, except for Juan Diego. Plus, Lupe can read minds. Many times she spouts off about what is happening leaving Juan Diego “in the know” but unable to really let others know that he is “in the know” because much of what Lupe says is inappropriate in nature.

The story alternates between Juan Diego’s “dump kid” days and the present day, where he is a writer on a trip to the Philippines. In the present day, he meets a mother / daughter duo at the airport and they sort of set the stage for what’s to come. They are very mysterious and nothing they do really makes any sense but Juan Diego is strung out on Viagra and Beta Blockers so as a reader you never really know what’s real and what’s not. Plus, memory plays such a large role in this novel. He spends much of his trip remembering his sister and his dump kid days.

I had a really hard time with Lupe. Her dialogue is all one-sided, since no one but Juan Diego can understand her but she has this wild, crude side to her that makes her very animal-like. She’s an interesting character but not one that I could really figure out or relate to.

Juan Diego was more likable, but he too was a bit of a mystery with his bag of drugs at the ready. And the strange mother / daughter duo of Miriam and Dorothy who, in my opinion, provided some much-needed comedy to the mix seemed to come and go without explanation. At the end of the book, you learn why. Juan Diego is really a very tortured soul. His story is very sad at times.

A lot of people will pick this book up and give up on it. It’s REALLY hard to get into and I considered putting it down more than once. I mean, it took me weeks to read it and it wasn’t until the 50% mark on my Kindle that I really began to understand it and yes… like it. So, if you are reading it now, then keep reading it and if you haven’t picked it up yet because of the mixed reviews, give it a shot but don’t hold it up against his other books or you will be disappointed.

For me this is bit of a departure. I cut my reading teeth on Irving with what I see are his classics. Not just The World According to Garp and Hotel New Hampshire but also Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. These are books that defined my reading youth and so define Irving for me in many ways.

His last couple of books still have some of the raw and yet warm human emotion and connection. That need to see someone as one you belong to, with and for. And that rings through pretty much from the start. But there is also a different style that I feel is a bit different than his early work. No surprise. Authors should be able to grow and expand and change with the times as anyone else. But as a reader it hard sometimes to make that shift with the author. To be able to embrace it as fully as I did in the past.

And yet for the most part I did. I think because I simply stopped thinking of it as a John Irving novel and simply let the story take hold and carry me along. This is a novel that does deliver Irving's somewhat bemused and wry looks at life in general and overall this is a well written novel. It is just a bit different in tone and the slightest but rather telling change in style that might surprise at times as it did for me. But a very good novel well worth the read in the end

I’ve only read two John Irving books, and they both contained midget transvestites. I begin with that fact because, in my experience so far living my own life, midget transvestites are not super common. In all fairness though, both Irving books I’ve read also had circuses play a role, so from a statistical point of view, perhaps midget transvestites are more common there, I don’t know, I haven’t been to a circus since I was a little kid forty years ago, and from that, I mostly remember it not smelling good and being depressing. Okay, that was a long intro/aside, but gives you an idea of what you’re dealing with, now on with my review for Avenue of the Mysteries.

Not bad, not good. Parts were touching. Mostly not. There was at least one really funny part, and many just missed being funny by a hair. Son of the Circus was the other Irving book I read, and though I don’t remember it all that well, I remember being attached to the characters more. In Avenue, Juan Diego and his sister are both immensely likable and interesting, yet I never really felt all that invested in them. Maybe they are kept at an emotional distance on purpose? – I mean – they are orphans. Emotional unavailability is a survival strategy right? That could explain things, but doesn’t change my experience much. There’s a lot of Catholicism and Jesuitism here as well that mostly seemed to serve as a sounding board for characters to bounce off of and as a set piece more than anything else. Come to think of it, the whole book reads like one of those diorama stables with wood pieces set about amidst hay bales and wise men and cribs and stuff. A glance at my long since passed grandmother’s mantle around that holiday month provoked a similar cursory curiosity and sense of strangeness while also being static and separate from me. Memorable? Obviously. Enjoyable and engaging? No.

I’ve enjoyed the films based on Irving material that I’ve seen, and I enjoy his seeming mission of strangeness. And I respect totally that when you write thirty plus books, many of which are knock out of the park successes, you are going to have a few ho-hummers in there. For a ho-hummer, Avenue of Mysteries is fantastic. I’d be thrilled to write a book half as good.

One can only assume that editing a very successful writer is nigh on impossible. How otherwise to account for the repetitiveness of John Irving’s writing in this book? The plot itself is absorbing, the characters intriguing. But far too frequently, I found myself irritated by oft-repeated phrases and sentiments. At this stage of his illustrious career, you’d think John Irving would know how to wield his own red pencil! Ultimately though, this was for me a satisfying read because of the story.

In present time Juan Diego, the main protagonist, is himself a very successful writer. On a personal mission to the Philippines, jet-lag and the mis-management of his meds serve to send him off sleep repeatedly. In sleep, he relives his tumultuous youth as a 14-year old ‘dump kid’ in Oaxaca, Mexico. Juan Diego is an avid self-taught reader who lives with his strange 13-year old sister Lupe and ‘el jefe’ - the dump boss - a man who may or may not be his father. Lupe talks in a language no-one can understand but her brother. She can also read people’s minds and see into the future. Juan Diego translates for her (as Irving never tires of telling us).

Many great characters come into Juan Diego’s orbit. The understanding Jesuit priest Pepe, the atheist doctor Vargas, the Jesus-tattooed hippie, the self-mortifying novice priest from Iowa, Edward Bonshaw, and the transvestite prostitute , Flor, with whom he falls in love. And then there are the women: Juan Diego’s voluptuous mother, the sexually magnetic mother and daughter he meets on his travels and the abiding presence of Lupe, his much-loved sister. “All the dear ones, the ones who’d marked him”.

Juan Diego’s retrospective journey from the slums to literary success is a remarkable one but in my view this story would have been better had the author not taken quite such a scenic route. I certainly could have done without the extraneous characters and the inevitable detour to the circus. Mercifully, the magic realism manages to stay just this side of acceptable. But only just.

John Irving has written some of my most beloved novels, particularly Cider House Rules and A Prayer For Owen Meany. I actually traveled to India after reading his A Son of the Circus. I am frequently enchanted by the love and parental-like concern he shows for his characters, so much like Dickens for his David Copperfield. That said, I have also been so disappointed in some of his other recent novels that feel contrived and with characters about whom he doesn't seem to care much. Happily, Avenue of Mysteries feels much more like those John Irving books I love best, with endearing characters possessed of strengths and weaknesses, driven by fate and a healthy dose of magical realism. Welcome back, John Irving. I've missed you!

At one point, the protagonist, Juan Diego, a writer, describes the process of writing a novel: “Treading water, a little dog-paddling--it’s a lot like writing a novel, Clark,” the dump reader told his former student. “It feels like you’re going a long way, because it’s a lot of work, but you’re basically covering old ground--you’re hanging out in familiar territory.”

Juan exists in a murky present that intermingles with life-changing past experiences, linked by his vivid dreams. At times, he is uncertain (as is the reader) whether or not his dreams are real. Throughout, there are elements of “magical realism:” a mother/daughter mystery couple with whom he engages sexually (not together). There are ghosts, statues that can move and even kill. Juan is a man haunted by loss.

I was a huge fan of Irving since his breakout The World According to Garp. He published three novels before that no one has ever heard of which I recall being very good. A few years back I got Last Night in a Twisted River, which I simply couldn’t finish. I haven’t touched his work since. But that’s on me. I stumbled on Avenue of Mysteries in Barnes and Noble, apparently trying to unload inventory, priced at $6.98. I would not have paid the full retail price of $28.

That said, it’s worth a read even if it is not Garp or even Cider House Rules or A Prayer for Owen Meany.

For Juan Diego, the blur between past and present is never resolved, but he seems to make his peace with it as the story ends in the only logical way possible.

John Irving has written an elegy to a writer's life, perhaps his own, in Avenue of Mysteries (Simon & Schuster, 2015, 480 pages, $28.00/11.99) which revisits many of the themes and concerns that have dominated his work since I first encountered him in The World According to Garp. Issues of the search for a parent, sex and sexuality, sexual ambiguity, as well as religion and faith dominate this wandering novel that follows Juan Diego Guerrero's life from his earliest memories as a child in the burning dump of Oaxaca, Mexico thorough an elegiac literary trip to the Philippines, where he seeks to visit the remains of a dead friend's father. The book's action takes place almost entirely within Juan Diego's mind as memory and imagination merge and twist within him. I wanted to like this book more than I did, as I followed what I will presume to be Irving's most recent and final exploration of his own life and thought in the novel format.

Images of the burning, stinking dump and the Virgin of Guadalupe dominate this reflective meditation on writing and writers, faith and belief, and loss. Juan Diego and his sister Lupe are each damaged, he because his (maybe) father Rivera drives over his foot in childhood, leaving him a limping cripple for life. Meanwhile, he becomes a voracious reader as he salvages books from the dump's burn pile in both English and Spanish. He also becomes the interpreter for Lupe, who, while she cannot produce speech comprehensible to anyone but Juan Diego, can read minds and, perhaps, see the future. She discovers that she must sacrifice her life to make it possible for Juan Diego to develop his own, as he eventually makes his way to the University of Iowa, where he embarks on the life of a writer. The story is told in a series of flashbacks while Juan Diego makes his trip, accompanied at times by the mysterious Dorothy and Miriam, both sexually demanding, controlling, and knowledgeable about his life and writings. The plot is as convoluted as my paragraph, but eventually works itself out without ever losing its mysterious sense of Juan Diego's success and sense of loss.

The book is filled with aphorisms and meditations on the writer's life, perhaps a writerly quirk aging authors must fall into. Juan Diego cannot escape the fussily oppressive ministration of his former student Clark French. He's eternally grateful to Edward Bonshaw and his eventual partner Flo (the sexually ambiguous transvestite). He encounters the life of the circus (or is it the circus of life?), where he learns and grows, but never forsakes his limp. The range of characters will either grab readers or leave them gasping for breath, or both. Each one has a symbolic quality which becomes a ghost in Juan Diego's life until reality and imagination become inseparable. The iconography and symbolism of the book can be confusing, but become increasingly clear as it moves towards its relatively satisfactory conclusion. At one point, Juan Diego comments, “Dreams edit themselves, are ruthless with details. Common sense does not dictate what remains, or is not included in a dream.” Later, Juan Diego considers himself, “Yes, his novels come from his childhood – that's where his fears came from, and his imagination came from everything that he feared. That didn't mean that he wrote about himself.” Oh no?

John Irving, at age 73, has written sixteen novels, a screenplay for one of them (for which he won an Academy Award), won lots of acclaim, and wrestled, both literally and literarily, with life and literature throughout it all. Raised in the shelter of New Hampshire's Exeter Academy, he never met his biological father, who, nevertheless, attended many of his wrestling matches (what a wonderful image that is!). During his career as a writer, he has been on the short list for a Pulitzer Prize, but hasn't won one. Nevertheless several of his books have been huge commercial successes and/or have been turned into successful films. Several of his books have been best sellers, but none have achieved number one. Avenue of Mysteries was the first Irving novel I completed reading since Hotel New Hampshire some thirty-five years ago, although I took runs at both Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, both best sellers. In other words, Irving is not always everyone's cup of tea, but is an important American writer and literary figure.

John Irving's Avenue of Mysteries (Simon & Schuster, 2015, 480 pages, $28.00/11.99) turns into an interesting, intriguing meditation on writing and the writer's life. It's tortuous plot demands careful attention. The characters are often mysterious, arresting, and intriguing. It should prove to be a rewarding read for many people who have followed Irving through the years, but I wouldn't recommend it as a first Irving book. This would seem to be more a summation of a career than an opening salvo, so begin somewhere else and then reach out for it when you have become familiar with Irving through his earlier work. I read the book as an e-galley supplied to me by the publisher through Edelweiss: Above the Treeline. I read it using my Kindle app. If you decide to purchase this book, please consider using the the store portal on my blog www (dot) tedlehmann (dot) blogspot (dot) com

The Premise

With the exception of the very beginning, Juan Diego, the star of this book, is looking back on his extraordinary life through dreams and memories. He's a famous novelist and professor at the University of Iowa, on the trip of a lifetime to the Philippines. When his medication gets off cycle thanks to a delay in the flights, Juan Diego starts to remember his life, and all that went on in his journey from a brilliant 'dump kid' (kids raised near or in the dump) in Oaxaca, Mexico to a life of study in Iowa.

Juan Diego's memories are of his little sister, Lupe, a young girl with the gift of sight and a severe speech impediment (no one but him can understand her), his mother, Esperanza, and other adults (priests and studying to be-priests, doctors, circus people, and transvestites) that ensured Juan Diego would have more of life that the dump.

Right from the beginning of his trip, Juan Diego meets two women, mother and daughter, who take charge of his life and take turns in his bed. He's pretty sure these women are not what they seem to be, but they take him by the hand and give him a chance to visit the past and enjoy the present.

This is the story of what happens when the beginning and the near-end of your life collide; the beauty and the pain of the past, the wonder and brilliance of a present that seemed impossible.

My Thoughts

Let me start by telling you all how much I love John Irving. The Cider House Rules is right up there amongst my all time favorite books. He hits on timeless questions and themes in his books without getting preachy or really even taking a side--he just presents the questions and lets the reader decide.

This book rounds up many of his favorite themes and similar characters (although all very different in personality). I started highlighting the phrases and similar occurrences from The Cider House Rules, which I haven't really done with others (although they always re-occur, I've found), and it's amazing. I've read The Cider House Rules at least six times, and my copy is well worn and loved, so I know it well.

One major theme that comes up in many books is that of orphans or pseudo-orphans. Irving seems to understand their need to be 'of use,' a phrase the appears and reappears often. Also, Irving talks about the pros and cons of legal abortion (a theme that plays on the idea of orphans, in the end), and religion.

Beyond all that, I liked Avenue of Mysteries very much, just not as much as The Cider House Rules. Although not much has surpassed my love of that one.

I give Avenue of Mysteries 4.5 stars. Really good, absorbing, and thought-provoking. Thank you John Irving. I love you.

Every now and then I buy a book by a "master" to see how they're doing, to see what sort of ways they may have improved or improved on the novel format. This novel is a revelation in that Irving, like most of his generation of writers, creates characters that are acted upon rather than act (Garp was one, his mother was not). I couldn't get into this book because the main character, a supposed writer, is really a leaf on the winds of fate and hardly does much in this novel except be set upon by other characters. That he's a writer is baffling. Writer's are proactive. They're observant. The main character in this book is mostly a victim who doesn't seem like he's got a clue. I loved Hotel New Hampshire and the Cider House Rules. Those are masterpieces. But I couldn't find anything redeeming here. One other thing: A teacher of mine a long time ago said that when a writer starts to write about writers (or a poet writes about poetry, or a playwright writes about being a playwright) then they've run out of material. Stephen King does this all the time and it's really annoying. IMHO.

in an episode of the television series, ncis, in february of 2016, a character in peril is reading a book. the camera moves, giving the book several seconds, a long duration in television air time. the book is AVENUE OF MYSTERIES by john irving.

the title character of the book is juan diego, a novelist who has written novels similar in themes to several of the novels by john irving. one suspects a bit of writer humor here, that john irving is playfully saying, i am juan diego, as a nod to flaubert who said, i am madame bovary.

at the age of 56, juan diego, who in behavior and appearance, seems much older, is on his way to the phililipines to fulfil a request he made as a fourteen year old youth to a vietnam war draft dodger, met in oxaca, mexico, where juan diego’s was born. juan diego is on a medication regimen of beta-blockers and viagra. as a side effect of his medication, he drifts on and off in dream like states in which he remembers his fourteenth year, the year a series of events and a variety of individuals, were instrumental in his leaving oxaca, mexico, and coming to united states.

juan diego was raised in the town dump with his sister, lupe, under the guardianship of rivera, the dump boss or el jefe. juan diego taught himself to read from the books discarded by the jesuits to the fires of the dump, and becomes known as the dump reader. rivera was also responsible for juan’s lifelong limp.

central to john irving’s story is his interest in children at risk growing up in poverty. readers of SON OF THE CIRCUS, set in india, will find familiar, in this mexican scenario, the circus child acrobats and the street criminals, the child prostitutes and other juvenile hustlers scrounging to survive as their only means against starvation. india or mexico, wherever the avenue, the real mystery is how any child can survive in such circumstances, short of a miracle.

in mexico, with its large catholic presence, the belief in miracles is commonplace, large pilgrimages, as theatrical as any circus, attract the faithful who trek en masse to shrines on holy days. lupe is named after our lady of guadalupe, seen by worshipers in mexico as the second mary madonna. statues of both women play major roles in the novel as prayers to them go unanswered—lupe tells her brother, in her secret language which only he can understand, the only language she speaks, that he is the miracle. watching lupe as she looks out for her brother, she demonstrates several of the requirements for canonization herself.

then there’s the question of who really is the mysterious duo, the mother and daughter, met en route to hong kong, who become the older diego’s traveling companion in the philippines?

and the mystery of juan diego’s lifelong limp from an accident in oxaca. the damage to his foot could not be corrected when he was a boy in mexico, but why not in following years while living in the united states? astute readers, especially readers of irving’s THE FOURTH HAND, the story of a hand transplant, will ask that question. back in mexico, the day of his accident, juan diego’s treatment was delayed by an argument of whether he should be brought to the church before the mother mary, referred to lupe as the monster mary, for a miraculous healing or to the hospital. perhaps the old diego rivera has not given up faith and is still waiting for his miracle. you are the miracle, lupe tells her brother.

i won’t say there is any miracle in the ncis episode. i didn’t see irving’s novel as a plot device for the episode. so why is it there? the obvious answer, someone on the ncis set liked the book, and wanted to pass along their enthusiasm for the book to viewers who are readers. mystery solved. but mysteries fare better under scrutiny than miracles, which are faith based. catholics won’t like lupe’s message—forget saints and the statutes and have faith in yourself and those who love you—but it makes for a good story.

Longtime fans of John Irving’s novels will note several recurrent themes and techniques in Avenue of Mysteries that hark back to Irving’s earlier work: the plight of orphans, life inside a small circus, the homosexual and transsexual lifestyles, the dubious value of organized religion, and the use of magical realism to move his plot along, among them. The novel is so clearly a John Irving novel, in fact, that upon its completion, one senses at least a bit of déjà vu in the air.

Avenue of Mysteries is a coming of age novel focusing on Juan Diego, a boy who along with his younger sister Lupe lives along side a huge garbage dump in Oaxaca, Mexico protected by the man who may or may not be Juan Diego’s father. Juan Diego and Lupe are children of extraordinary talents. Juan Diego has successfully taught himself to read in both Spanish and English by studying the books he manages to save from the garbage dump’s fires. But despite Juan Diego’s prowess with words, his sister’s talent may be even greater than his: she reads minds and can sometimes predict the future.

Juan Diego is, however, no longer a child. He and Lupe left the dump almost sixty years ago, and those times now live only in his memories and dreams. Despite being so largely self-taught, Juan Diego managed to carve out a successful writing and teaching career for himself in the United States, but now recently retired from the world of academia, he is on his way to the Philippines where he plans (or, depending on how you look at it, will be forced) to spend some time with a still enthusiastic ex-student of his.

Early on during the trip, the professor, no longer a healthy man, finds that tinkering with the dosage of his daily meds has a great impact on his wakefulness, his energy level, his sexual prowess, and most importantly, on his dreams. Juan Diego so enjoys reliving his past through his dreams that once he finds the dosage combination that most often allows him to reach his most vivid dream state he is reluctant to return to taking his medicines as prescribed – no matter the consequences to his health. So, in alternating segments (sometimes within the same chapter), the reader learns Juan Diego’s childhood story and follows him on his sexual adventure across the Philippines.

Typical of previous John Irving novels, Avenue of Mysteries is a complicated blending of realism and magic, a long story filled with memorable characters that come and go in the life of the book’s main character. There are Mexican prostitutes of both sexes, the strictest of Catholic nuns, orphans galore, unbending priests, an evil lion tamer, girl acrobats, inspirational female doctors, dogs with personality, a Virgin Mary statue whose eyes move and shed tears, a mother and daughter who both spend hours in bed with our hero - and most important to Juan Diego, there is the failed candidate to the priesthood who changes Juan Diego’s life forever for the better.

All that said – and despite how much I enjoyed much of it – Avenue of Mysteries is not destined to rank anywhere among my favorite John Irving novels. Parts of it are simply more of a chore to get through than they should be, and the story takes a little longer to tell than it should have taken. Despite that, the author’s fans will not want to miss Avenue of Mysteries, because who knows which of Irving’s novels will be the one he decides is his last.

This story, along with "Son of The Circus" and "Widow For One Year" are truly page turners, that is, you can flip through these stories with the greatest of ease. I almost made it through "Circus"; I put down "Widow" after the first paragraph. Irving signals his weirdness quotient early on. Perhaps this is an act of authorial mercy. I loved "The Hotel New Hampshire." I was challenged by "Cider House Rules." The luminous "A Prayer for Owen Meany" remains my favorite modern novel. I know that John Irving can be weird, but also incredibly funny, insightful and provocative. However, with "Avenue" I flipped through the last 250 pages or so, and I don't think I missed much. Geckos. Toppling statues. Burning dogs. Acrobats. The beta blockers. A lioness. Admittedly, I was sad when it came to Lupe's death, but you know it's coming early on. It must. It's a formality. Owen Meany's death must also come, but there is significance to it.
Umberto Eco wrote the amazing "The Name of The Rose" as well as some delightful travel essays. He then got silly and gratuitously clever with the tedious flapdoodle of "Foucault's Pendulum." "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," I hammered through that during a 30-minute train ride. I guess every author is allowed this sort of thing. You read one or two pages and you pretty much know the story, the literary equivalent of the movie Goodfellas: 10 minutes in you've seen the entire film.

Juan Diego is a famous writer, now in his fifties, living, writing and teaching in Iowa. But that's not where he started. Juan and his sister, Lupe, were 'dump kids' in Oaxacan, Mexico. Their mother was a prostitute/cleaning lady for the local priests. They lived at the dump with the dump boss, who was probably not their father. Their friends were the dump dogs, feral animals that tended to die early. Juan and Lupe scavenged the dump. Juan saved every book he found, and taught himself to read. This brought him to the attention of the priests. Lupe could read minds; she knew everything about a person's past although she wasn't as good at knowing the future. Neither of the children were particularly religious; they didn't feel that the Virgin Mary had come through on her promises.

Avenue Of Mysteries is the story of Juan taking a trip to the Philippines but spending his time remembering his past and all that occurred. He and Lupe had lived at the dump, at the church's orphanage and at a circus. All three places left their mark on him. He eventually left Mexico with his adoptive parents. Eduardo was a man who wanted to become a priest but fell in love with Flor, who was a transvestite. Together they left Mexico and took Juan with them to live in Iowa.

In his most recent trip. Juan Diego meets a mysterious mother and daughter pair. Each is a fan of his work and each is determined to arrange his life and take control of his days. He goes along with their plans but in reality is consumed with remembering his days with Lupe and what it all meant.

John Irving is an author whom readers either love or dislike intensely. I'm on the love side of the equation. Fans will recognize many of his recurring themes; the meaning of love, the inevitability of the future doing what it will with you and the need to understand and validate the lives of those most unlike you. The typical Irving devices are there; the geographic location of Iowa, transvestite, circus animals and reading. No one hits the same chords in a reader as Irving and this novel hits those chords again. This book is recommended for readers interested in the human condition and how our choices affect our lives.

Other reviewers have explained much better than I ever could the underlying (double) plot of this novel.
As a John Irving fan of long date (and male nevertheless), I would like to add my two cents, rather focused on the (comparatively muted) emotionally impact this novel has had on me.
First, the good points: If I had to summarize Mr. Irving’s style in one word, it would be ‘virtuosity’. So many writers struggle to tell a story in a barely adequate way – in his case, the story just wonderfully flows, regardless of the habitual weirdness of the characters, the impossibility of the situations… Not only does the story flow, but it does so with a choice of words that I would qualify as ideal – not too many for a fake ‘brainy’ or over-analytical style, not too few: his English must be one of the best, most pleasant to the ear, that any writer, modern or old, has ever used.

So, does this most recent novel continue with the tradition of storytelling virtuosity of the author? I would say, very much so. Indeed, in seamlessly weaving together the two threads (the past in Mexico, the present – represented by this long, dreamy trip that we might assume is what the life of Juan Diego Guerrero has become after leaving Mexico), Mr. Irving in my opinion reaches yet another level of mastery in the art of how a story should be told (a gift that, by the way, he regularly attributes to his writer characters – and it is indeed the case here also with Juan Diego – ‘he could tell a story’). Only the trick of getting Juan Diego to sleep in order for past memories to emerge, unhindered by the purposefully supressed beta-blockers, did start to get me a little tired by the end of the book (I was particularly grated by the repeated naps during the last-but-one leg of the trip with D. to the Escondrijo – one of the chapters I globally enjoyed less in the book).

Together with the excellent storytelling element, the second saving grace for Mr. Irving in my opinion, which could help him get away with any story he wanted to tell us, no matter how weird, is the humour. Here it is ever-present, sometimes in a subtle, more intellectual way (like all the innumerable meta-references to the act of writing and the even more uncountable private jokes: Juan Diego keeps insisting that he keeps chronological order strictly, whereas this may be the novel where the flash-backs and fast-forwards are the most pronounced in all the literature from the author – but at the same time, the chronological order of both the past and the present story threads is mostly maintained throughout), and sometimes in a grand comedy way (my personal highlights are the first evening with Dorothy in the hotel, which has the added bonus of being gently titillating, and, particularly, the scene involving finding unexpected guests in an orphanage room in the morning – which had me laughing out loud in the Geneva tramway, unable to stop – something that does not happen very often).

So, you may ask, what is wrong with the novel in order to grant one less than five stars? This may be a purely personal feeling, but to me the reading experience was clearly downhill from the middle of the book onwards. Compared with the slog of the first pages of ‘Until I find you’ (which is put in context by the new meaning they get at the end of the novel, of course, but represented a slog for me nevertheless), here things start with a bang, sustain a very high level of entertainment up until around two-thirds of the entire length of the proceedings, and then… in my case, unfortunately, things fizzled out a little to reach what I would not hesitate to call an underwhelming ending.

The first warning signs for me came when some losses which very much affect the main character (no need for spoilers here) started happening without very much affecting me (or, at any rate, failing to affect me with the same intensity I had experienced in past Mr. Irving’s novels). Maybe the characters implied in the several dramatic endings did not have time to sink in appropriately for me, with all the story jumps and with the dreamy character of the storyline situated in the present, maybe some of the plot twists were too clearly apparent too much in advance (there may be something to the criticism I read of Mr. Irving that some coincidences he places in his stories start looking not any more like plausible coincidences that could happen in the coherent universe of his books, but rather like intentional and not-too-subtle plot twists intended to provoke emotional reactions in the reader). The fact is, I enjoyed much less the 3-4 final chapters of the book than I did the 80% of the story that came before, and the resolution of some of the plots lines seemed to me, I must say, a little disappointing.

So, four stars? Definitely – in my humble opinion, you should not give up the huge enjoyment of the greater part of this story (halfway through the book, I was thinking this could clearly rank as one of Mr. Irving’s best efforts, even in the company of the other classics he has produced) only for the relative disappointment of the last part. And (who knows?) maybe you will get some story points that I missed and that give a new relevance to the final part of the book, or maybe it will affect you in a more emotional way than it did for me…

This was my first Irving book. We had picked it for book club at the suggestion of several other members who have read Irving and enjoyed his writing. (Have to add that these same members also did not like this book) I have to say that I FORCED myself to finish reading it and took three times longer to read it than it should have. I hated it! Wish I had read the reviews before I agreed to read it. I've decided this is my all-time worst book ever read in all of my 66 years, and I am a voracious reader in all different genres. That said, after reading the other bad reviews, most seem to agree that this book is way below par for Irving so I will try another one of his. If any of you have any suggestions to which one I should try, let me know. Thanks.

It has been a long time since I've gotten this into a book. I really love John Irving. I am a huge fan of Garp, Hotel H, Owen Meany, and Cider House. I haven't read his last two novels. I have been transfixed on reading this book. I enjoy that I'm actually getting into it and think to myself, "This is literature." The characters are interesting. I feel for Juan Diego, our main character and his sister! I can't wait to find out what happens. If you like John Irving, you will enjoy getting back into him. This book is different than his past books. I like that it is modern and happening now. I like that it has the vapid young daughter. I'm curious who the mother character is. I like the possible miracles. I like the whole mysterious, magical mystery of it. And it makes me more in interested in animals, dogs, lions and Our Lady of Guadalupe. I,certainly, have not read any better novels, lately. I will,definitely, take recommendations!

Once again, John Irving has drawn me deeply into another world, one that I've never experienced before and one that I'll never forget.

This story of a hyper-literate child raised in a dump in Oaxaca, Mexico blends magic realism, religion, and ghostly women into a heady novel full of fantastical characters and magical consequences. Juan Diego's journey as a smashed-foot cripple who moves from a dump to an orphanage to a circus and then to Iowa City, where he becomes a famous novelist, grabbed my imagination and never let it go. Mr. Irving is one of my top 3 favorite writers and, once again, he doesn't disappoint.

Viva la Mexico!

I'm currently halfway through this book, and I agree with much of the content of the 1 star comments here, but it's not a 1 star book. The story is indeed disjointed, it was a difficult book to get into, and some of the more dense writing is so slippery as to be devoid of meaning when you make the effort to parse it. But there is a good story in there trying to get out. I would have loved to read the story of Juan Diego and Lupe without going through the medium of the older Juan Diego's dreams - but it does give a reason for the magical realism elements (it was all a dream).

Mostly I am irritated by Mr Irving's choice of Juan Diego as his alter ego - the unsubtle references to Mr Irving's own books (The Water Method Man, The Cider House Rules, Son of the Circus so far) make it clear it's Mr Irving dreaming Juan Diego dreaming his earlier life. I suspect I keep reading only to see if wrestling or bears make an appearance. Don't tell me - I might stop reading if I find out now.

Why give it three stars? Maybe I'm just being kind but it certainly doesn't deserve 1. I've reread many of Mr Irving's earlier novels (and yes, I'm a man who reads novels, a creature Mr Irving thinks is extinct) but I know I won't reread this. Still, the writing itself is well done, even if plot and structure is a mess.

This was the least enjoyable book that I have read in years. The review from Time on the jacket says, "He manages to write books that are both critically acclaimed and beloved for their sheer readability." Not true. This book is a self-indulgent slog and not worthy of a more detailed critical review since others have already captured its failings so accurately.

Considering the prominent author and colossal publisher -- what happened?! Why wasn't this book edited better?! So much word-for-word repetition, too many self-indulgent generalities about what novelists are supposed to be like, and a protagonist more sentimental than profoundly caring enough about his dear ones to make me fall in love them through his narrative. Thank goodness for audiobook reader Armando Duran who can make the back of a cereal box sound like fine literature.

Just finished reading this book and thought it was/is a great read!

Since the book's the store page and book review, and the customer reviews, covered a majority of the plot details in fine fashion already, I'll just say, or write, this: Juan Diego, a wunderkind Mexican orphan who teaches himself to read, in both Spanish and English, from books saved from the fires in the dumps where he works and lives, eventually becoming a semi-famous writer; Lupe, a young sister who can literally read minds and sometimes foretell the future; a self-flagellating wanna-be priest, Eduardo; two mysterious, otherworldly, perhaps supernatural women (Miriam & Dorothy, the latter a woman who, um, screams in Aztec when aroused) accompanying the aging writer on a hegira to the Philippines (and staying at a hotel called, waitforit, the Encantador); an off-handed homage to Harry Potter (and even an off-handed mention of LOST HORIZON); ghosts (!) that start to appear near the mid-point of the novel; a narrative homage to Thomas Mann (DEATH IN VENICE); a prostitute with a heart of gold who beguiles young Eduardo; ruminations on the Catholic Church, fate vs. free will, the events in our lives that makes us who we are as adults, and LOTS of love for dogs, plus a whole lot more (characters, issues, and funny set-pieces)!

Having given it a second read, I have to admit that AVENUE OF MYSTERIES makes the perfect Companion Novel to A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY. Each book has a miraculous child/wunderkind (Owen Meany and Lupe Rivera); one book has a narrator that is asexual (Johnny Wheelwright in "Owen") and the other, Juan Diego (at least in the last weeks of his life), embraces sex and sexuality; they both feature the strong woman archetype of Irving's novels (Hester in "Owen", Miram & Dorothy in "Avenue"); there is a miraculous, predetermined event in both novels that changes the course of lives; and, of course, both novels take on the theme of faith (as opposed to religious dogma). Have to admit, I don't understand the religious/conservative prudes that come out of the woodwork and complain about the sex scenes in ANY John Irving novel. Not many writers can actually write well when it comes to writing scenes about sex: Irving always manages to mix the right amount of erotica and humor. The sex scenes in this book don't even start until chapter 8 -- Two Condoms -- and the first scene, involving Juan Diego and Dorothy, is rather hilarious, since it involves both the physical interactions and the verbal interactions of those characters (they are discussing the myths and religious history of Mexico while having sex -- classic).

John Irving and lots of great comic set-pieces, and well-developed characters, and supernatural occurrences and characters-- what's not to love?

Avenue of Mysteries asks you to consider what makes life meaningful and what constitutes authority and how you turn all of that on its head in your daily life to make meaning from one breath to another. Avenue of Mysteries isn't interested in your catgories; this is a novel about life.

Owen Meany pervades this text. So does every other main character from every other Irving novel. They are telling us together to hear the gospel: "Holy s***; life is important. So get out there and give it."

On the way, see yourself as the little Mexican dump reader who defies labels. Be humble. Live. Read.

Thank you, John Iriving. I see my New England in this novel, too.

I'm a HUGE Irving fan and for me this book did not disappoint. I'm crazy for his quirky characters and over-the-top pushing of believability. I had a few problems with it but it did not deter me from wanting to pick it up over and over again. He tends to repeat (unnecessarily) dialogue and character's names. It became tiresome...ok, enough, move on John....Also the two women characters, Marion and Dorothy became a kind of mystery to me. I figured out, at the end exactly (I think) what they represented, but nothing was really made clear by Irving....I thought he could have done a better job with them. .All in all a good read.

John Irving is one of my favorite contemporary authors, but Avenue of Mysteries was for me, one of the least enjoyable of his works. It seemed slow moving, repetitive, and obvious; I felt as if I were being hit over the head with recurring themes and metaphors and found myself almost speaking out loud, "Okay, I get it." Usually when I finish an Irving novel, I am in a funk (a good kind of funk) for days, not only because I am turning over the many questions raised and how I come to terms with those meaningful and thought-provoking questions, but also because I have come to love the quirky and interesting characters and feel as if I am losing real friends. Not so with this one. Avenue of Mysteries was lacking the clever foreshadowing and unexpected turn of events I expect from Irving. Although I enjoyed the characters and the challenges they faced, the accurate and sympathetic depiction of Mexico and the life for children in the basurero, as well as the variety of milagros (both literal and figurative) swirling through the plot line, I felt that something substantial was missing. Avenue of Mysteries, was to me, a long and winding road, a pleasant enough journey without any real place to go.

I am about half way through and it is a struggle. I don't know what Irving wants this book to be. I like the Lupe character, but Juan Diego is not compelling at all. I am bored to death with all the Virgin Mary and Virgin of Guadelupe references as well as the constant discussion of Juan Diego's medication. Themes and even sentences and rid bits of information get repeated over and over. I am normally a huge Irving fan, but this one is the worst I have ever read by him. On a separate note, many of the positive reviews here sound like fake advertising rather than real reviews.

I heard John Irving do an interview about this book and decided to purchase it on my Kindle because the theme and settings intrigued me. I have always enjoyed Irving's novels but this one is a clunker. I tried to get into it but found it annoying that every time the story started to get interesting about Juan Diego and his sister Lupe in the basurera the story would skip to the middle aged Juan Diego who is obsessed with beta blockers and viagra. After slogging through about 20 percent of the book I decided to quit and cut my losses.

Well... as a longtime fan and reader of Irving, I grab anything by this gifted and prolific author. This, however is a bit of a slog. So rich in character and loaded with memorable scenes, it simply loses its way with dreamy side trips that interfere with the compelling storyline and action. In fact, it just grows tiresome and attempting to keep the story fresh in your mind grows wearisome.
Not his best but still masterful. I just wanted more and was frustrated en route.

I loved everything. The junkyard, the circus, the Philippines and the end. It's mystical and earthy. I'm not a big fan of same-sex parents, but it doesn't slap you in the face in this book, nor does it present itself as ideal. I overlook it in favor of the life of the young man. To say more would include spoilers.

John Irving's nuanced language and vocabulary together with his unique characters enduring peculiar events held my interest. His common themes of paternal origin, circus eccentricity, fate, and his creation of bizarre death scenes run throughout this novel. Oh, and God help you if you're an Irving character who's gay or unconventionally sexually oriented. Chances are rather high that you'll die of AIDS. I expected such Irvingisms and was not disappointed.

The main character did not interest me at all, however. I was yawning by the middle of the book from whether Juan Diego would take a whole pill of his Lopressor beta-blocker prescription, or a whole Viagra, or a half of one or the other instead, or none at all. Would he even remember taking them? Would he dream better? Would he have a constant adrenaline rush with an indefatigable erection? Nonetheless, he nodded off constantly, dreaming of his past in the basurero burning dead dump dogs and scavenging with his prescient sister, Lupe, as well as their adventures living in a circus. There were those times I hoped he'd fatally overdose and shorten the book by 100 pages.

Diego's and his sister's religious dismay from the Virgin Mary's dominance over their beloved icon, Our Lady of Guadalupe, a result of Catholic dogma, spurred the older Juan Diego to write novels criticizing Catholic tenets such as birth control and abortion. However, his adult travels through the Philippines as he reflected on these controversies with his former student, Clark French, became tedious. The appearances of Miriam and Dorothy, in their spectral splendor as his sexual companions, irritated me with their presumptuous dominance over Juan Diego. Were these two women supernatural entities of the Virgin Mary and Guadalupe, I wondered? As it soon turned out, they were far from being virgins. They led him around like he was a doddering,submissive dweeb which annoyed me, and his dependence on them made him seem much older than 54.

I waded slowly through this book, reading only a few chapters at a sitting trying to process the intermingling of religious dogma and manifestations of both the spiritual and supernatural. By the end of the book, I had been persuaded that they're one and the same, metaphysical events that shape our paths through life whatever forms they take for us personally.

This was not my favorite Irving. It was more retrospective, pensive, and repetitive, which slowed his novel down more than I liked.

First off , I love John Irving novels. That said, this is one of my favs. Maybe because I am 56 and I can relate to the main character, and the book ultimately revolves around Death, but in a good way, in terms that make you contemplate Life. Irving can hone in on the human psyche like no other. I want to send him a thank you note for writing this novel. It speaks to me in many ways. What a good novel should be.

It's not often that I really like a character in a book but don't much like the book itself, but that is the case with John Irving's newest novel. Juan Diego, the “dump reader,” is a likable and smart child and a likable if somewhat clueless adult.

The book goes back and forth in time, and in dream sequences, and there is more than a little magical realism thrown in. Animals fare really badly in this story, and I hate to read about that. But humans don't have much going for them either. This is a sad story about broken people.

About halfway through the book, I realized I was bored and just wanted to get on with the story. About 3/4s of the way through, I just wanted some ends to be tidied up and the book to be done. But I had another 100+ pages before that would happen.

It's a book about faith. And sex. Lots and lots of sex. A preoccupation with sex. Discussions of sex. Thinking of sex. Having sex. It got old.

This novel is not so much dark as it is just sad.

I have liked John Irving's writing for years, especially A Prayer for Owen Meany and Cider House Rules, but not all of his books work for me. This one didn't. But I still am fond of Juan Diego and some of the other great characters in the book.

I usually I like Irving, that wacky offbeat mind makes for a unique read.
As I read I marvel at where I am being taken. I usually laugh out loud, or
turn to my spouse and say listen to this. I have been reading this book in
bits and pieces because I am in a hectic busy period in my life. I wish I
had concentrated and read it continually because maybe I would have liked it more.
I don't like the main character----he is just plain weird. Juan Diego is a crippled,
elderly writer. As a child he and his sister Lupe are dumpkids, one of those sad throw away children
Due to the fact the Juan is brilliant he is saved from dump life. There is one part of the
story which left me screaming with laughter. Juan, and Lupe are living in a Catholic
convent, and the cleaning woman is their prostitute Mom. They rescue a young drunk, bring
him to the convent and are washing him when the nuns arrive. It is almost worth the price of the
book for this good laugh. But Irving lost me as Juan Diego travels, meets 2 strange women and
fumbles around trying to keep his Viagra separate from his heart medicine. I feel bad about NOT liking
this book-Irving's books have brought me much pleasure.

On the surface this book seems to be a collection of strange events happening to strange people, but there seems to be an undercurrent of religious conflict throughput the book: belief vs non-belief, good vs evil within church, fate vs choice, value of prayer, icons, etc. As a result, I had to ask whether this book contained hidden messages that I was unable to decipher. Whatever the answer, I enjoyed reading it.

I'm surprised by the number of readers on the store who say they've been unable to get through this book. To me, Irving is back to his classic style in the manner of Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules. His two word metaphors (the Mary Monster, how that perfectly captures both the emotion the children feel for the statue and its physical presence) are so simple. His repetitive style (the use of dump reader throughout the book), while not for everyone, is lyrical.

There are several scenes in the book that I re-read because of the beauty of the story telling.

I gave this book four stars instead of five because the Manila scenes were not as strong as the Mexico scenes and while I thought it had a great final chapter, I felt he didn't quite know how to lead us readers there. None the less, so happy to see John Irving back to his best after a series of satisfying but ultimately not great books.

If you’ve ever thought about the phrase, “the miracle of life,” you can think about it for over 450 pages in John Irving’s fourteenth and latest novel titled, Avenue of Mysteries. Irving presents the life of protagonist Juan Diego by shifting back to the past through dreams and recollections, and in the present through the structure of a journey to fulfill a promise. Juan Diego’s life has been filled with mysteries and miracles, and with love from some unlikely or unexpected sources. One reading of this novel filled me with thoughts about the themes Irving explores including aging, fate, the Catholic church, faith, love and perseverance. If I chose a second reading, I’m sure I would find more themes to think about. Irving can be funny, the characters are often quirky and reality can seem to slip away at times. I’ve read all of Irving’s novels over the past four decades, and I admit to a positive bias toward this novel before I opened the first page. Readers who enjoy fine writing are those most likely to enjoy this novel.

Rating: Five-star (I love it)

I've read much of what Irving has written and loved most. Which is why I kept at this juvenile, repetitive, sex-obsessed but oddly superficial slog. I yelled a number of times because after hearing about pills 50 times maybe? (35 times too many) I was BORED. Irving delights us in creating mostly one-dimensional freaks and geeks, then killing them off in spectacular fashion.

I won't be picking up another Irving book. The gratuitous religion talk, sex talk, medication talk (!) never went anyplace and few of the characters I came to care about. Longing for GARP, OWEN MEANY, TWISTED RIVER, CIDERHOUSE...and a couple others that really shaped me.

I slogged my way through two hundred and twenty something pages, and gave up. An implausible story about a boy whose foot was injured, one of the poor who searched a trash heap for something to eat or use. To add sympathy, Irving has his foot injured, he walks with a limp, our hero does, this boy who self educates his way to Iowa, where at their famous school of writing, he becomes a writer like, well John Irving, someone known across the world, the Philippines among his destinations. There, he happens to meet a student of his, a younger man, a stage prop whose purpose is to show how superior Juan/John is. The famous writer's alter ego, who despite his handicap has sex with both mother and daughter. Sex is a major theme of this novel, aided by Viagra, another blend of the author/character concocted by this once wonderful writer, now in a trash heap of garbage, a story that's spoiled rotten.

This is Irving for people who enjoy his writing, character development, plot and dialogue. If you're looking for a page-turner, this would not be it. Loved the brother and sister ("Dump Kids"); especially Lupe. It was a nice device to have the brother (Juan Diego) as the only one who could understand Lupe's language. Peopled with great characters,this book will stay in my mind for a long time.

This is a very bizarre book. Like The World According to Garp, all of the characters are a bit odd, and the situations most improbable. It is very long and I finally simply skipped to the ending. I found that I really didn't miss anything by doing so.

I loved "Last Night in Twisted River" as well as earlier Irving novels. I did not love this one. Sort of meandering. No truly loveable characters, including the main character, Juan Diego. Some clever descriptions and episodes. A fairly satisfying ending if you can make it that far.

Another beautiful book, by my favorite living author. I tend to prefer non-fiction or hard science fiction, but there is something in Irving's books that transcends genre, partly by making fiction seem so real, in fact sometimes painfully real. I feel like a slightly better man for having read this, a feeling I've had with most of his other books too. Thank you, John Irving!

I'm an Irving fan, so I find the majority of his work (all of his work, really) wonderful. I was pleased with this newest novel and even though I find it hard to sympathize with the main character, Juan Diego and his environment, having been raised in a white, American family, I appreciated the development of Juan and the unfamiliar locales that he inhabited/travelled too. Irving always includes a variety of interesting characters in his novels, and this book has many. This could easily have been a much longer story, but I was pleased with how it developed and how it ended. Irving has always been a huge influence, and I look forward to his next novel.

This is a solid literary novel from one of America's top contemporary novelists. It didn't appeal to me as much as some of Irving's earlier works--A Prayer for Owen Meany or The Cider House Rules--but it is an engaging, well written effort.

The Main character is an America writer named Juan Diego, who travels to Manila to fulfill a long ago promise. Along the way, Irving seamlessly weaves back and forth between Juan Diego's childhood in Mexico and his current adventures in the Philippines. Irving returns to some key elements from his earlier works like orphans, circuses and transvestites and as always fills his novel with memorable, unpredictable characters.

The book is repetitious in places and Irving's liberal use of parenthesis throughout the text gets a little irritating, but despite that, I would recommend John Irving's 14th novel to any fan of his work or anyone who enjoys serious literary fiction.

I haven't read anything by John Irving in a long time. I got bored with his prose after reading The Hotel New Hampshire and needed a long break. Avenue of Mysteries is very imaginative and engaging, and I loved the different layers of realism, magical realism and Garp-like influence that permeates the book. Really glad I gave it a try.

I swore off reading John Irving ever again after "Widow for One Year." But then this book got good reviews and I needed a nice thick book with an engrossing story, so I relented. Next time I'll stick to my convictions. This novel could have been half as long, because that's when I stopped reading. Like "Widow," "Avenue of Mysteries" is smarmy, as well as plodding and self-reverential. None of the characters are likable and I did not care how their story ends.

I have always enjoyed John Irving's work--but his earlier novels are my favorites. Here is a return to that magical touch of storytelling the author does so well, and it's a pleasure to read after so many duds by newer authors who can't tell a story to save their lives. Here we have a complex tale of an outsider, and "other" cultures wedging into the American Dream, in this case Mexican immigrants and a quest that takes us to the Philippines. Weaving through is an ambitious attempt at dream scapes and deep interior soul history. Why Irving has never won a Pulitzer, I will never know--he is an American storyteller of considerable heft. What more of an American story is there than of immigrants and those who are in the margins of society?

This is a very sad, complex and, on many occasions, confusing read. Irving is a GREAT writer, always imaginative, but this one is just too much--too complex, too confusing, too foreign. His characters are always alive and vivid, but the plot in this book is so very confusing with the constant interwoven time/place changes. Professional reviews may praise the book based on Irving's brilliance as a writer, but this reader was bored. Not only did I not know what made the mysteries a mystery, I just didn't care. I could have put the book down at the half-way point and not worried at all that I might have missed something, only the John Irving I thought I knew.

I thought I was crazy that I had to force myself to keep picking this up. I have 100 pages left and I'm still trying to convince myself to persevere. After reading these reviews I see I'm not alone and think I'll let myself off the hook. If you haven't started it, don't!

So, sometimes older writers write books that are just for people who like all of their other books, and not really for people who haven't read all of their books already. This is one of those books. It's about a guy named Juan who is an old writer who moves to Iowa where the Iowa Writer's Workshop is. It's written by a guy named John who is an old writer who went to the Iowa workshop. Is Juan Diego John Irving? Of course not, except when Juan is talking to one of his student's who says, "in Juan Diego's world, you always know the collision is coming. Exactly what the collision is -- well, this may come as a surprise. But you definitely know there's going to be one. In the abortion novel, from the moment that orphan is tuaght what a D and C is, you know the kid is goign to end up being a doctor who does one -- right?" (p. 204). Which is, of course, an exact description of what it is like to read a John Irving book, right down to the last detail about Homer Wells in The Cider House Rules.

So, this is a book for people who have read Garp and Cider House Rules and Owen Meany, at least. And there are call backs to all of them. Women having sex with unconscious men, liberal viewpoints on sexuality, children who mysteriously know things about the future. Throw in some scenes in the circus, and it's simply a book for John Irving fans.

For anyone else, I'm not sure how well it all comes together. There's Lupe, Juan Diego's sister who can read minds. There's a ghosts living in Casa Vargas. There's some sort of unidentified sex spirits who are telegraphed from the beginning as vampires or ghosts or succubi or something. Which is all fun and interesting in a Magical Realism kind of way, but the story seems to center around religion. Juan Diego is raised by Jesuits and his father is religious, and there's The Virgin Mary and the miracle of Guadalupe, and it seems like a good idea to have character who are atheists interacting with priests and agnostics in a Catholic Church. It seems ripe for deep discussion. But as reasonable as the "atheist" position may appear in the real world, it just seems goofy in a world of magic realism.

"Believing in ghosts is not the same as believing in God," the atheist Dr. Vargas says defensively as unquestionably real ghosts interact with the cast. But in the real world that would mean that religion is sensible while ghosts are just superstition. Here, Dr. Vargas is defending an atheism that seems basically untenable once you admit a mind-reading 12-year-old. The plot is relatively straight-forward and well-telegraphed -- anything I could spoil here is spoiled by Irving 100 pages before it happens, with many flashbacks and dream sequences. It doesn't really go anywhere, but your enjoying it enough to not notice.

Four of five magical glimpses of the future, but only for seasoned John Irving fans. Newbies will wonder what the fuss is about.

The master of story telling. I read this book a few months ago and I still find myself thinking about it. Beautifully, written, a well crafted story, haunting and eloquent as only John Irving can be...

Outstanding Irving novel - right up there with Owen Meany, Cider House, etc. The reviews on this book had hinted at this, and they were so right. I'm definitely an Irving fan, generally like all his work, so, yes, I'm biased. This one has it all - great characters, settings, and loved the touch of magical realism.

A charming, funny, bittersweet saga about courageous, marginalised children and adults making good. Classic Irving. Not quite A Prayer for Owen Meany, but it has similar aspects. Irving moves from past to present like an amphibian from land to water -- like breathing.

John Irving never disappoints, with his prodigious imagination and fabulous ability to make the mundane (altho' with Irving, very little is mundane) uproariously funny. You'll stay up late and keep your sleeping partner awake with your laughing out loud. .The secret is to get him or her his/her own copy, so you'll both be awake and loving it..

I am a big fan of John Irving, but I have to admit, I have no idea why. He is the only fiction writer I read. Of his work, my favorite if Owen Meany, Cider House and Until I Find You. The story was not bad, but it was less than remarkable. I enjoyed the development of the Lupe character, but the storyline of the 'current day' as well as the ending were lackluster. Unless you are an Irving fan, don't bother. I listened to the book on audible. The narrator was great and there were points that I enjoyed. This was not his best work but he is nevertheless a talented storyteller.

I am a huge fan of John Irving, and this one did not disappoint. It is the story of a journey, both past and present of a man who started out in the dumps of Mexico and ended up being a writer. You follow both past and present from Mexico to Iowa and finally the Philippines. As typical with Irving, you have some very unique characters and some very quirky encounters-however I thoroughly enjoyed this book!

The story has a strange time line. Going from the present to Juan Diego past. Always uncertain how much of the past was accurate, because most was from dreams. The present was in a fog, what was real verse imagined.

One of Irving's better recent novels. He combines some of his preferred themes, perceptive and exceptional child characters, interesting dialogue, and sensitive story telling. Following the transitions Irving makes between his main character's memories of childhood experience and the events of this adult's journey can be a challenge. Just be on alert for when this happens, and the story can offer delightful rewards.

This is a worthy member of the Irving library. I enjoyed the characters, thought the plot was very different and interesting, and he included trademark twists and surprises. I recommend it for anyone who likes Irving's work.

If,like me, you're pretty much inclined to give Irving a permanent pass thanks to Garp, CHR, and Owen, than I can't stop you from reading this.
But, I'll bet you find it fades into the pack of his last 5-6 novels that I can't tell apart. Although the last few have an ever more obnoxious thread of , "reader-- you're an idiot if you think this stuff is autobiographical-- I just throw that Iowa, wrestler, author, abortion, alienation, reference to prior book stuff in to mess with you".

Irving has written several great books. A Prayer for Owen Meany, World According to Garp, Cider House. This one is not great and is not worth reading. I know better than to buy an Irving, his last 4 have been real turkeys. I only stuck to this bizarre, mind-reader psychic novel because I was on a six-hour train ride. The writing is repetitious, circuitous, boring and fairly devoid of plot. Did he want to write a supernatural story? No, not really. Character development? No, not really. Criticize religion? Yes, but in a boring supercilious way.
Not really good, not worth the time it takes to read it.

I was given an electronic copy by Simon & Schuster and NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

With an accomplished author such as John Irving, a reader never wants to have to give negative feedback because of the beloved books that have come before. I wish I could say that this book riveting and inspirational but, sadly, I did not have this type of reaction. Avenue of Mysteries was a miss and not by a small margin. Juan Diego's recollections of his past in Mexico with his thirteen year old sister Lupe were the only thing that kept me reading. The aging writer in the present did not interest me in the least, especially considering the fact that he spent most of his time remembering the past. I did not find Juan Diego to be engaging and felt no connection to his character. Most of his journey was in his mind and it slowed the pace of the book considerably. With the amount of time that I spent reading Avenue of Mysteries, I am disappointed that I found the book to be unremarkable. It is for these reasons that I cannot recommend this book to other readers.

I don't know anything about the story .. I was listening to it on an audiobook, and didn't even make it through the first disc. I'm very sensitive to voices and speech, and the reader gave the character with the speech problem such a disagreeable, harsh, and garbled 'voice' that I rapidly decided I couldn't listen any further. I promptly donated it to the library, and good luck to them. It may read better than it listens, but in those first few chapters, I didn't find anything about the story compelling enough to pursue it. John Irving is hit or miss for me; this was a real reach in terms of interest in the subject matter.

With the first 50 pages of Avenue of Mysteries down, I had to make the decision to keep on reading or not. There certainly seemed to be a lot here, but was it material I wanted to see? It sure didn't look like much, but John Irving is not to be trifled with. The man can write. So, I bit the bullet and entered the world of John Irving's latest tribe, with its circus performers, beasts, mystics, medics- oh, it's an endless list. All headed up by the young man Juan Diego and his sister Leon. These two alone had enough interest about them to occupy the novel, but they kept meeting interesting-bizarre- other characters. The mother and daughter who appeared on occasion- what an oddity to add it to the story, but it worked. Until it didn't. By the end, I had had enough of the mysteries and found it a struggle to finish the last 50 pages. I did, and I'll bet you would too, worried that you might miss some gem that Irving saved for last!

A true disappointment. One interesting character that he fails to do anything with. A long tedious tale of how complex writers are. At the end there are discussion points for the local book club. REALLY ?? I was a fan but this was so obviously transparent from the beginning and only got worse as the pages drug by...

If,like me, you're pretty much inclined to give Irving a permanent pass thanks to Garp, CHR, and Owen, than I can't stop you from reading this.
But, I'll bet you find it fades into the pack of his last 5-6 novels that I can't tell apart. Although the last few have an ever more obnoxious thread of , "reader-- you're an idiot if you think this stuff is autobiographical-- I just throw that Iowa, wrestler, author, abortion, alienation, reference to prior book stuff in to mess with you".

Irving has written several great books. A Prayer for Owen Meany, World According to Garp, Cider House. This one is not great and is not worth reading. I know better than to buy an Irving, his last 4 have been real turkeys. I only stuck to this bizarre, mind-reader psychic novel because I was on a six-hour train ride. The writing is repetitious, circuitous, boring and fairly devoid of plot. Did he want to write a supernatural story? No, not really. Character development? No, not really. Criticize religion? Yes, but in a boring supercilious way.
Not really good, not worth the time it takes to read it.

I was given an electronic copy by Simon & Schuster and NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

With an accomplished author such as John Irving, a reader never wants to have to give negative feedback because of the beloved books that have come before. I wish I could say that this book riveting and inspirational but, sadly, I did not have this type of reaction. Avenue of Mysteries was a miss and not by a small margin. Juan Diego's recollections of his past in Mexico with his thirteen year old sister Lupe were the only thing that kept me reading. The aging writer in the present did not interest me in the least, especially considering the fact that he spent most of his time remembering the past. I did not find Juan Diego to be engaging and felt no connection to his character. Most of his journey was in his mind and it slowed the pace of the book considerably. With the amount of time that I spent reading Avenue of Mysteries, I am disappointed that I found the book to be unremarkable. It is for these reasons that I cannot recommend this book to other readers.

I don't know anything about the story .. I was listening to it on an audiobook, and didn't even make it through the first disc. I'm very sensitive to voices and speech, and the reader gave the character with the speech problem such a disagreeable, harsh, and garbled 'voice' that I rapidly decided I couldn't listen any further. I promptly donated it to the library, and good luck to them. It may read better than it listens, but in those first few chapters, I didn't find anything about the story compelling enough to pursue it. John Irving is hit or miss for me; this was a real reach in terms of interest in the subject matter.

With the first 50 pages of Avenue of Mysteries down, I had to make the decision to keep on reading or not. There certainly seemed to be a lot here, but was it material I wanted to see? It sure didn't look like much, but John Irving is not to be trifled with. The man can write. So, I bit the bullet and entered the world of John Irving's latest tribe, with its circus performers, beasts, mystics, medics- oh, it's an endless list. All headed up by the young man Juan Diego and his sister Leon. These two alone had enough interest about them to occupy the novel, but they kept meeting interesting-bizarre- other characters. The mother and daughter who appeared on occasion- what an oddity to add it to the story, but it worked. Until it didn't. By the end, I had had enough of the mysteries and found it a struggle to finish the last 50 pages. I did, and I'll bet you would too, worried that you might miss some gem that Irving saved for last!

A true disappointment. One interesting character that he fails to do anything with. A long tedious tale of how complex writers are. At the end there are discussion points for the local book club. REALLY ?? I was a fan but this was so obviously transparent from the beginning and only got worse as the pages drug by...

You have to let this book carry you along. Don't try to sort it out too soon. It's rich in imagination and observation. Characters you can relate to or shake your head over. A braided plot full of contrasts and surprises.

Struggled to give this 2 stars ... more for old times sake than for the current offering. Characters and situations were interesting at the outset -- who knew anything about a Mexican garbage dump? Turns out, who cares? I started skimming 3/4 of the way through and wound up not finishing. Way too much magical/mystical nonsense. And that mother/daughter team! What were they really all about? .Such a disappointment as I really enjoyed Irving when he started writing. -- we are about the same age.

I am bailing on this one, 1/3 of the way through. This is surprising to me because I put it on my Christmas wish list and received it in hardcover. Since I loved A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY and THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, I was really looking forward to this book. I guess I just don't get Magical Realism, whatever that is supposed to be. If I had to read it for a book club, perhaps I would have stayed with it and found things to discuss. Since that is not the case, I am ditching this book for the pile of other ones waiting for me.

While most of the characters in this book are engaging and quirky, and John Irving's writing style is supreme, this book falls short of being one of his Great Writings. The grown Juan Diego is quite annoying and I could only finish the book because of the other characters and the appeal of JD's story as a boy. The unnecessarily perverse nature of the book tempted me to stop reading many times. It could have been such an enjoyable story! It is well-researched and has interesting settings and history but the porn gets in the way.

I am a John Irving fan. However, I've grown tired of the author/educator narrators. I've grown tired of his references to wrestling, Iowa, the creative writing department at Iowa, circuses, transvestites, etc... (too many recurring themes to name.) But, I enjoy the way he crafts a story. Avenue of Mysteries - not so much. This is a slow, meandering read that just didn't end well for me. It seemed to leave pieces of the story unfinished. Maybe I didn't understand it fully, I don't know. Either way, I was disappointed. And what's with all of the hyphens!

Even though I'm listening to the recorded version of the novel and the narrator is really quite good I still find myself 'un-engaged' (?) by the characters or the plot. (I was trying to find a more polite word than 'boring'.) I wish I could have a dollar for every one of the several hundred times the author uses the word 'beta-blocker'. Perhaps a fascination with little blue pills connotes some psycho-symbolic significance in the story that I'm just not able to relate to. I've enjoyed several of Irving's other novels, just not this one.

Excellent read if you enjoy ambiguity and a good storyteller who weaves the present with the past and how it affected them, especially the memories tied with youth now seem magical and mysterious. Juan Diego's last magical journey is his last story and it's a blockbuster. I loved the ongoing argument of the Catholic church and how it overtook countries with the insanity of keeping people poor and ignorant to be especially fun to read. Recommended!

Having a hard time getting in to this book. I finished In On Person ( which I loved) so I thought this would be good too. I will plod along for a while longer, but it just does not have that John Irving feel. I got this from the library. So glad I never bought it.

Although I liked the Irving books I had read previously,the jumble of mumbo jumbo completely overwhelmed the occasional flashes of solid writing and storytelling so characteristic of his earlier books.

I don't mean to be unkind, but I am getting old and don't want to die reading this book. I have read all the others and am tired of the process of ferreting out the themes, and what is autobiographical, and making sure there is nothing really new for the author's most dedicated fans. It is all just too tedious. You can read a good summery and skim the book in 2 hours and feel like you paid tribute to a great American author without wasting a significant part of your life.

I think it's the funniest of John Irving's books. But, by one-third of the way through, I was tired of beta-blockers & italics. (A random check showed from one to eleven uses per page.) By the half-way point, I was tired of Miriam & Dorothy. As for the back story, of which the only element of suspense was HOW things had happened, by the time I got to them, I just didn't care any more. To finish it was an uphill climb. And I very much hope Irving has finally laid the ghost of that pornographic post card. Best suggestion is to read as much of it as you like and then stop. If you must know what happened, read a spoiler.

It took me a while to get through this one. I feel as if Irving was being experimental -- a little magical reality, a little spirituality, a little criticism of the Catholic church, and a bunch of grotesques as characters. It seemed maybe too much of a hodgepodge of all of these things for any one of them to be very effective. The ending was sort of satisfactory, but certainly anticlimactic. There were better endings sprinkled through the later chapters.

I really thought I John would have rebounded from the last novel, In One Person. I'm disappointed with the book and struggling through the second half. Maybe the next novel will be better. Last Night in Twisted River was such a powerful novel, and I'm setting the bar there for all novels after.

Sometimes John Irving is brilliant and other times he leaves me wondering about "what's the point?" This book fell into the latter category - dragged on and on with no gripping moments. I finally put it down unfinished.. a rare occasion for me.