Girls and boys come out to play

‘You are in the polymorphous-perverse stage,’ the school psychiatrist tells the assembled boys of Favorite River Academy in Vermont in the late 1950s. Just how polymorphously perverse his audience turns out to be would have surprised even Dr Grau, had he not fallen over drunk one evening and frozen to death.

It is no accident that the all-male private school in which much of the action of John Irving’s new novel takes place should be in a town with the unusual name of First Sisters. Irving’s narrator is a bisexual novelist called William Abbott, known to friends and family as Billy. ‘Abbott’ is in fact the name of his stepfather, who teaches at the school: Billy’s real father disappeared during the boy’s infancy and is rarely talked about.

During his time as a pupil at Favorite River, Billy develops a succession of ‘crushes on the wrong people’, including his stepfather, the school’s wrestling champion, Jacques Kitteridge, and several much older women. He somewhat tentatively and innocently explores heterosexuality with his best friend, the conveniently gamine Elaine Hadley, but causes a scandal when he embarks on a relationship with the town’s librarian, Miss Frost.

Irving springs a number of surprises upon the reader which it would be unfair to reveal here, and it is perhaps enough to say that almost no one in the novel is who or what he or she at first seems. The story comes up to the present day, by which time Aids has cut a swathe through the cast list, bringing in its wake a number of revelations. Billy has affairs with both men and women as well as those hovering somewhere between the genders, but he survives to find out the truth about Kitteridge,  his real father and various other characters.