THE WATER-METHOD MAN
by JOHN IRVING
365 pages. Random House. $6.95.
In John Irving's fine first novel, Setting Free the Bears, two Vienna University students plan to reform the world by liberating the animals in Vienna's Hietzinger Zoo. Now he offers the dislocated odyssey of an Iowa University graduate student who seems to be helplessly bound for self-destruction.
Irving's easily daunted hero is Fred ("Bogus") Trumper, a monumental procrastinator with a talent for bungling. Bogus' hardscrabble effort to support his wife "Biggie" and infant son Colm by selling football pins and pennants is thwarted by a mob of fans who pick clean his display board. Seeing his existence threatened by "little things—errors of judgment, but never crimes" —Bogus begins identifying with Akthelt, the heroic warrior and lover in Akthelt and Gunnel—an absurd Old Low Norse epic he is translating for his doctoral thesis. And when Akthelt is told "Det henskit of krig er tu overleve" ('The object of war is to survive it"), Trumper thinks: "Which struck me as the object of graduate school—and possibly my marriage."
Owls and Mice. But survival for Bogus is a haphazard undertaking at best. An unsuccessful attempt at infidelity becomes a mad, nude chase across the Iowa countryside that leaves Bogus with bleeding feet, if not a bleeding heart. Homeward bound, he falls off a bicycle in front of a barber shop and sardonically observes: "Several sheeted men raised their shaved skulls above the backs of their barber chairs, watching me writhe on the sidewalk as if they were owls—and me, a club-footed mouse."
Worse yet, Trumper's sex life is painfully complicated by a medical complaint that might embarrass even Alexander Portnoy. Unable to commit himself to risky surgery, Trumper opts for "the water method"—a sloppy palliative that requires him to drink huge amounts of water before and after intercourse to flush himself out.
To flush out his life, however. Bogus flees his family and goes to Austria to search for a diabetic friend, who unbeknown to him has died—another illusory hero image. What follows vacillates between brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. Eventually, Bogus comes to see himself as Moby Dick, "mindful of his scars, his old harpoons and things," knowing that his very endurance is in itself monumental.
Remarkably, John Irving manages to weave the disparate fragmented elements of Trumper's calamities into a rich, unified tapestry. From the dreck of daily lives, he can make the improbable seem likely and retrieve something of beauty.