This little pig stays near home
Simon Curtis
TRYING TO SAVE PIGGY SNEED by John Irving Bloomsbury, 170.99, pp. 250 here are two short and four longer stories in this collection, set between the title-piece (a yarn-cum-'How-I-came-to- write'-memoir), and a stimulating essay on Dickens. In the latter, John Irving com- mends Chesterton's view of the novelist; reassuringly, he cares little for the 'post- modernist' critical fraternity.
The six stories, dating from 1968 to 1982, then, are told plainly. The milieu is middle- class New England; in two stories, we are on campus. Family relationships, where mundane circumstances become by-the-by bizarre, are a main theme. Existence involves random knocks, sadnesses and dis- coveries of personal vulnerability; yet the message is of paradoxically optimistic acceptance. The tone is secular, without traditional New England religious intima- tions. Life, perhaps, is not good or bad, it is interesting, as Svevo's Zeno put it.
'Interior Space', the best story, is well- plotted, with lively, ironical interplay. The domestic preoccupations of a young urologist and his architect wife, in their renovated home with a walnut-tree which a retired neighbour wants to chop down, are played off against the doctor's hospital commitments, like tending heart-attack victims and counselling VD patients. John Irving can catch comic incongruity well. If his touch is not always light, the dialogue is terse, the device of the telephone call from the office being used to good purpose. Making the reader chuckle aloud is one of the most likeable, if not the deepest, things a story can do; this does that.
'Brennbar's Rant' is a high-spirited cameo of chattering-class chatter at a dinner-party in a smart restaurant. It is told by Brennbar's wife as, in his cups, he comes slowly to explode with exasperation at the company. These two stories convey a sense of the author relishing his social comedy. 'Almost in Iowa' and 'Other People's Dreams' are ironical psychological sketches of single protagonists at points of marital distress. In 'Weary Kingdom', Minna Barrett is one of those 'submerged popula- tion' figures Frank O'Connor found a recurring short-story subject, Akaky in Gogol's 'Overcoat' being the immortal pro- genitor. A middle-aged spinster matron in a girls' hall of residence, Minna leads an emotionally self-contained life which is shaken by an outbreak of drama; an attractive new under-matron provokes an incident of sexual jealousy between a student and one of the kitchen staff. Minna is well-seen, though the denouement of this 1968 story lacks tautness.
Set in Vienna, The Pension Grillparzer' moves into surreal, 'come fantastique' territory. Some may prefer it for its 'crazy' happenings. Circus people, related to the manager's sister, and a unicyclist perform- ing bear, roam the seedy hotel; the narra- tor's visiting family try to cope. Eventually, bear, circus people and manager die, leav- ing the sister old and alone. She is 'without enthusiasm or bitterness . . . like a story- teller who is accepting of unhappy things'.
The more predictable 'Piggy Sneed' yarn- memoir concerns a retarded pigman in a New England town. Sad Piggy becomes a victim both of a dreadful fire and, we're informed, of the writer, too, who is fated to learn to record the sadness of life — and hope for a kind of aesthetic 'saving'. The burden comes across best in 'Interior Space' and 'Brennbar', on a (British?) esti- mation that lively social comedy is the author's forte.
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