The 158-Pound Marriage
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 1990 Ballantine Books paperback cover |
|
| Author | John Irving |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | England |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Released | August 12, 1974 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 245 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-394-48414-2 |
John Irving's third and perhaps darkest novel, The 158-Pound Marriage examines the sexual revolution-era trend of 'swinging' (wife swapping) via a glimpse into the lives of two couples in a small New England college town who enter casually into such an affair, with disastrous consequences.
[edit] Plot summary
The narrator (who never identifies himself by name) is a college professor and a relatively unsuccessful author of historical novels. While doing research in Vienna, Austria, he met Utch, an orphaned survivor of the German occupation and the Russian siege at the end of World War II. At the opening of the novel, the narrator and Utch are married with two children and live a relatively placid existence until, at a faculty party, they become acquainted with Severin Winter, a Viennese-born professor of German and coach of the school's wrestling team, and his wife Edith, a WASP from a privileged background (she met her husband in Vienna while on a buying trip for MOMA) who is an aspiring fiction writer. The narrator begins a mentor-protege relationship with Edith, and soon the couples are sharing dinners and play-dates with their children. As the narrator becomes more attracted to Edith and Utch begins to fall for Severin, the couples begin trading spouses for sexual encounters at the end of their dinner dates. At first the affairs proceed smoothly, with emotional conflict submerged beneath sexual curiosity, but soon enough, obsessive love rears its ugly head, and the narrator begins to discover that the Winters have not been entirely honest with him and his wife about their motives for entering the affair.
The sport of wrestling features prominently--the novel's title refers to the 158-pound weight class, which Severin Winter considers the most elite competitive weight--and a subplot eventually emerges involving Winter's protege, a peculiar wrestling prodigy from Iowa who transfers to Winter's college because of its superior biology department and becomes a pawn in the fallout of the two couples' swinging relationship.
Irving utilizes the narrator's flashbacks and investigations of the other characters' lives to transport the setting of the novel back and forth between New England and Vienna, a city which would later dominate the middle portion of his most successful and critically acclaimed novel, The World According to Garp. In fact, most critics view this novel and its predecessors, Setting Free the Bears and The Water-Method Man, as exercises leading towards the development of Garp, the first of Irving's novels to exploit the extended family epic structure modeled after his chief influence, Charles Dickens.
The 158-Pound Marriage is distinguished primarily by its focus on the negative consequences of sexual obsession and experimentation. It is extremely dark and pessimistic, and somewhat contradictory, in that Irving titillates the reader with graphic sex scenes and then offers a somewhat puritanical, moralistic conclusion in which the characters are punished for their sexual deviance. The novel's darkness is amplified by the narrator's relentless myopia and the selfishness and arrogance of all but one of the principal characters, Utch, who is presented as somewhat helpless and childish for the first two thirds of the book.
The novel is redeemed by Irving's stylistic grace and his unparalleled gift for character development. It is probably the least cohesive of his early novels, but it may also be his most sophisticated work in terms of prose style. Though the novel has moments of humor, it lacks the trademark wit of Irving's other books, allowing for little relief from its bleak, tragic perspective. Similar situations and themes are explored in The World According to Garp with more humor and generosity. Nevertheless, the novel is valuable for its portrayal of a unique generational phenomenon and for the insight it provides into the developing aesthetic of one of America's most widely read and highly regarded contemporary novelists.
