BOOKS: Circus Maximalist

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Oddly, Irving underscores his characters' diminishing importance by constantly mentioning their ignorance. The narrator records Daruwalla's conflicting emotions about the people in a novel he is reading, then adds, "The doctor didn't know that he was supposed to feel these things. The book was beyond him." On her first visit to Bombay, a young American woman notices a gang of street beggars abusing a handicapped boy: "She didn't realize that the cripple's role was choreographed; he was central to the dramatic action."

These accelerating interjections -- all these "it would never have occurred tos" and "couldn't have knowns" -- have the effect of turning the characters into puppets. So do several other of Irving's narrative practices: his habit of disposing of people in violent accidents, his fondness for cartoonish props -- a large, anatomically correct pink dildo plays several important roles in the action -- and his penchant for hinting to the reader what is to come. When Daruwalla packs medicine in case a rabid chimpanzee should attack him or his party, it is just a matter of time -- or of 30 pages, in this case -- before a chimp materializes and starts biting.

Irving's defenders would argue that of course novelists are all-powerful with respect to their characters. A Son of the Circus, however, raises the question of the consequences when an author too forcefully reminds the reader of his narrative control. Irving makes his characters less involving because he overwhelms the illusion that they are free. The author obviously cared enough for Daruwalla and the rest to write about them at heroic length, and he is a sentimentalist, not, like some, a maker of elaborate literary contraptions for their own sake. But he does not seem to have noticed that his characters were vanishing within the intricacies of his attention.