THE most striking thing about this book is how short it is. From the author of novels such as The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules and The Hotel New Hampshire, which attempt a near epic scale, we might expect this memoir to be considerably longer than its 150 odd pages. But it is in keeping with Irving's modesty about himself and his achievements that this book should seem to be such a deliberately minor undertaking.
A consequence of this modesty is that the book reads like a tribute to his various mentors and to his two eldest sons. Throughout, Irving himself appears as a humble man whose abilities are average or even slightly below average. But the recurrent voice of his humility leads the reader to believe, after a while, that he considers it to be his greatest virtue.
The young Irving, attending a private prep school in New Hampshire in the early 1960s, suffered from dyslexia which was not diagnosed until a later period in his life. In the face of the incomprehension and impatience of the school's authorities who thought he was simply an under achiever, the school's wrestling team became for Irving the environment in which he was at least on a par with his schoolmates.
He was not, by his own (frequently repeated) admission, a particularly good athlete ("halfway decent", as his first coach called him), but he persevered sufficiently to captain his school's team, and to come reasonably close to winning a major tournament. His crowning achievement, in his own estimation, were the victories many years later of each of his two eldest sons in their regional championships.
The Imaginary Girlfriend is at least as much about the amateur wrestling scene in the US from the 1960s to the 1980s as it is about John Irving the novelist. Because of this, it is difficult to envisage a reader who would find this book as compelling as Irving's bestsellers, unless that reader has a keen interest in wrestling or is a particularly avid fan of Irving and his writings. At times his memoir is simply a list of names, of the great wrestlers and coaches who crossed his path from time to time, or of the semi successful novelists who populated the teaching staffs of Creative Writing courses in colleges of the eastern United States. The great character portraits which distinguish Irving as an extremely readable and enjoyable novelist and short story writer are noticeably lacking in this memoir.
The details of Irving's real life do not seem to engender for him the same rush of imagination that enabled him to create his great fictional writings. The Imaginary Girlfriend lacks the quirkiness and bizarre qualities which are the marks of his novels; it is an affectionate self portrait of mediocrity. Unable to allow his imagination to write this book, since it is a memoir, Irving finds himself stuck in the real, and, most importantly, stuck with himself. He attempts to salvage the situation by making a virtue of this modesty. The result is a book in which the author, who assumes that he is distinguished enough that people will be curious to read about his life (with good reason, considering his popularity), pretends that he wouldn't dare to assume this at all.
It is true that The Imaginary Girlfriend is at times amusing, on an anecdotal level, and that Irving's accounts of certain wrestling matches are quite involving. The account of his early years provides an interesting counterpoint to the opening chapters of Garp, and to some short stories, such as the semi autobiographical "Trying to Save Piggy Sneed". Notwithstanding these qualities, this attempt by Irving at non fiction is pale in comparison to his accomplished fictions.