chaotic neutral
This Week in Reading:
The Cider House Rules by John Irving
John Irving is one of the most chaotic novelists I’ve ever read. The Cider House Rules is a behemoth of a book, nearly 600 pages long in paperback, spanning decades, the entire state of Maine, and dozens of characters. Every page is a wild turn—the book is essentially a string of tangents, philosophical discussions about abortion law, random backstory, and anything and everything else you can imagine. Somewhere in the first few chapters the protagonist, Homer Wells, is adopted by a burly, adventurous couple who take him on a camping expedition. They string ropes across a raging river so they can bounce in the white water rapids. As they splash about, a logging company upstream releases a load of felled trees down the river, crushing Homer’s new adoptive parents instantaneously. Homer returns to Saint Clouds, the orphanage that raised him. This bananas, traumatic incident takes place over the course of about three pages, and is barely mentioned again—a mere side note in the biography of Homer Wells. The Cider House Rules is a bizarre and twisted story hidden beneath a cloak of sentimentality.
You may remember from my newsletter about Hotel New Hampshire that Sophie is a John Irving superfan. She owns two copies of The Cider House Rules (I’ve been informed that both copies are necessary), along with a biography about John Irving writing The Cider House Rules. There is something extremely intimate about reading someone else’s copy of their favorite book. Sophie is a dog-earer (I would never), and the edges of this edition are soft and creased. Tucked inside, I found a day pass to a park in Sacramento—I imagine her reading this novel in central California, on a trip she took sometime between the first and second time we met. If you have ever met Sophie, you know that the way she tells a story is Irving-esque in nature—all colorful character details and unprompted segues. I’m telling you this for no reason, really. This is a sentimental tangent, but is that not what John Irving is all about?
So much is happening in The Cider House Rules all at once. Dr. Larch, the ether-addicted obstetrician and abortionist that heads the orphanage, is celibate by choice following a single, deeply unpleasant sexual experience as a young man. Wally’s parents own an apple orchard but he enlists in the army and ends up stationed in Burma. Dr. Larch spends decades fabricating an elaborate lie about a Harvard educated doctor that can take over his practice when he retires. Melony taunts Homer with a pornographic photo of a woman giving a pony a blowjob. Homer Wells delivers a baby while Dr. Larch chases an educational cadaver by train halfway across the state of Maine. Candy and Wally love each other, and Homer and Candy love each other. Melony works in a ball bearing factory and takes a lesbian lover. All of this barely scratches at the surface of the plot.
It is a chaotic structure for a novel, but life itself is chaotic in structure. All of our individual lives happening simultaneously, separately from each other, on top of each other, intersecting with each other. It’s a lot to keep track of. New jobs, new babies, illnesses, deaths, romantic sagas et al. In this current moment, our lives seem more in sync than they ever have before, each of us in our own quarantine, facing the same global pandemic. We are all tuned into the same news, we are all facing the same agony of self mandated house arrest. And still—even when we are dealing with the same problem at the same time, it is chaotic to follow. Keeping track of the changing regulations in Los Angeles while also keeping tabs on the situation in New York, Seattle, Italy, South Korea. What are the laws in Spain right now? In Singapore? In Belgium? How many cases are in Detroit today? How many deaths in China? Trying to stay on top of the news happening in every country of the world while also checking in on each of my individual friends. Who lost their job last week? Who is losing their job tomorrow? How are my friends that live alone coping with quarantine? Who is sick?
And then on top of that, the typical chaos of being a person in a world. Dishes in the sink and the ongoing wonders and challenges of interpersonal relationships and Tiger King on Netflix and rejection emails. Here is the part where I tell you I didn’t get into any of the MFA programs I applied to. There a plenty of caveats I feel compelled to offer up as an amulet against pity, but in short, I got very very close to getting into several very very small programs, and I can and will reapply next year, after we emerge from the other side of an international public health crisis. Grief is wide. Grief takes up a lot of room—room that is in short supply when your parents are visiting you for the weekend and staying in your apartment. There isn’t a lot of room for grief about getting rejected from UCLA during a global pandemic. It is hard to wrap my head around the fact that getting rejected from grad school exists in the same universe as the corona virus and also in the same universe as the three tubs of granola Sophie baked on Friday. It can be spring and I can be scared about people I love being turned away from the hospital, and I can also make pierogies and be upset by problems objectively much more trivial than COVID-19.
In short, it’s a lot. In some ways, life has never been more straightforward: I have no job, I spend all day in my apartment, I see no one outside of my immediate household, my only responsibility is to stay six feet away from my neighbors as I walk laps around Angelino Heights. Our worlds have shrunk, quite rapidly and without our consent, to the four walls of our homes—but we have also never been more aware of our role within the sprawling interconnected global community. Simplicity promises to minimize chaos, but what it actually delivers is the space for us to get a wide angle view of it. The backdrop of this current moment is certainly more melodramatic than usual, but the chaos is typical. Hopefully one day soon we will be able to choose the chaos of meeting a friend for Thai food, or pushing through the crowd at a loud concert. One day we will hear babies screaming on the sidewalk again, and let the small-scale chaos overtake us until it muffles the global messiness of being alive.
I hope, with full earnestness, that this finds you well.
Further Reading:
If you are looking for more John Irving, Hotel New Hampshire is a wacky ride, but beyond that I will have to direct you to notable Irving scholar, Sophie Peter. The movie holds up btw, though it leaves out the majority of the novel’s wildest plot lines. I highly recommend the score.