N.B.: This is a somewhat lengthy review, with some detailed plot references.
THE EDITORIAL REVIEWS of In One Person are encomiums, for the most part. Encomiums are fine when they are deserved. In the case of this book, they are not, and are another example of why one must be suspicious of editorial reviews. I am an avid reader of John Irving's books, going all the way back to The 158-Pound Marriage, and even his reflective literary commentaries in Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. Indeed, Irving has given us some superb books, but this is not one of them.
In One Person is filled with repetitious and tiresome reminders that the main character and narrator of the story, Billy (Dean) Abbott, is a bi-sexual man, a "top," who shares a life-long friendship (sometimes sexual) with an enigmatic female friend, Elaine, both of whom have a "crush on the wrong people." In this case, one of the "wrong people" is a young wrestler by the name of Jacques Kittredge, who seems to have occupied both Billy's and Elaine's imaginations since the onset of their respective adolescent years. To say much more than this would only serve as a spoiler, and it is not my intent in writing this review to dissuade anyone from reading Mr. Irving's book - only to provide some company should anyone else reach conclusions similar to mine.
My disappointment in In One Person has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter, which facially concerns those who are marginalized because of their sexual orientations and gender ambiguities, but which is also (as in most other of Mr. Irving's books) about people who cross boundaries and live off of the beaten paths that society considers "normal" and so unproblematic. We find these people in The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules, and A Son of the Circus, among other books. Opening up our eyes to the richness of human possibility and diversity is something that John Irving has always done well, disclosing the richness of his eccentric characters and celebrating their courage, so that we, as readers, might learn to treat the marginalized in society with dignity and learn to celebrate those very differences that society considers suspect or dangerous.
Yet, In One Person, in barely scraping the sexual and emotional surfaces of its characters - including Billy Abbott - actually does an injustice to those marginalized people who Mr. Irving would have us celebrate, or at least come to respect and admire. Who is Billy Abbott, really? We know that he wrestles with his sexual identity, but the textures and nuances of the struggle are missing. As a young man Billy cries a lot, and we may assume that these tears reveal the discomforts of sexual confusion, but what exactly are the triggers for his tears -- the specific emotional pains with which he wrestles? He is enthralled with Kittredge, but why, exactly? Is it only because Kittredge is "beautiful"? If so, why should his beauty counteract the other negative qualities and habits that Kittredge possesses and displays, respectively (and indeed, there are many)?
And then there is the strained, even unbelievable dialogue and events, often (and, too often, only) surrounding sexual themes. A septuagenarian "transsexual" that Billy knows from his youth winds up in a fight with a group of men less than half her age, and causes them "serious" injury - assumably because she, in her advanced years, treats one or more of these men to only the "intercrural" method of achieving climax (she does not permit penetration, for some odd reason, we are told). The sexual threads from Billy's boyhood lead to a single New York City hospital, where far-flung persons from Billy's life (from First Sister, Vermont, to Europe) happen to have converged, conveniently, during the height of the AIDS crisis, and where Billy gets information, in middle-age, about boys from First Sister who were closeted in youth and are now dying, as men, of that terrible disease. Billy's father, we learn, was an effeminate homosexual, settled in another country with his original lover, and makes a living by simply telling the story of his and his lover's (now his life-long partner) first meeting, which occured while sharing a row of toilets on a wave-tossed ship (while one of them is reading Flaubert). Billy's father and his lover, now old men, claim to have never had sex with anyone else. Not ever. Possible? Yes. But only possible.
Then there is the thirteen year old daughter of one of Billy's lovers from youth. As Billy and Elaine get the news that the ex-lover is dying from HIV infection at home with his "normal" family (consisting of a wife, now infected with HIV as well, and two children, a son and a daughter), Billy meets the young daughter who literally screams at the sight of men -- all men, even Billy, and even the male nurse she presumably sees multiple times a day, and who is attending to her dying father's many needs (oddly, the girl screams even at the sight of the family dog, who also happens to be male). We are never told just why it is that this thirteen-years-old girl gets away with screaming, obnoxiously, at the sight of males; we are left to construct some explication for ourselves, should we choose to expend the energy to do so (and we are asked to do that quite a lot in this novel). Billy is summoned to his friend's house, though they have not seen each other for decades, because of their relationship as lovers when they were younger men. He dies, let us say, conveniently, just after he asks Billy to look after his son (as the children would soon be without parents). Why Billy, who returns across years and miles, virtually unknown to this dying man? Why not a relative or a close friend? Or are all the characters in this novel in a state of suspended animation, arrested development, stuck in the events and emotions of their teenage years, and valuing only the relationships forged during those years?
But there are even more haphazard and puzzling elements in In One Person. Billy learns that two close relatives die in a terrible car accident (tragic car accidents are, for Irving, a favorite leitmotif, as are wrestling, "bears," Toronto, and Vienna), but Billy, whom we are told cries easily, barely sheds a tear, and even changes the subject when he gets the news. It is true that there is distance between Billy and these relatives (largely for not accepting his sexuality), but his lack of affect upon hearing the news of a double-tragedy seems odd, notwithstanding this. Another close family member commits suicide, and it is glossed over by Billy as though it is one of those interesting things that just happens in life, from time to time. C'est la vie. Long-held resentments and childhood wounds can lead to this, of course, but the lack of affect seems thinly supported by the narrative.
Billy is a writer. We are informed that his writing is about sexual themes, largely themes involving gender and intolerance but, unlike in the case of T.S. Garp (in The World According to Garp), we have no idea what Billy's books are about other than this. Presumably, he is earning enough to live off of his writing, but we have little indication that he is successful enough to make this believable. Elaine, too, is a writer, but there is almost no evidence that she is commercially successful. We know that Elaine is Billy's friend, but she is so badly developed as a character, so flat, that we know little else about her, and it becomes hard to care about her one way or another. She seems no more than a foil, a mildly useful tool that Irving inserts to add some stability to Billy's life.
There are so many simply incredible events and jejune and unbelievable exchanges in In One Person that one has every right to conclude that Mr. Irving and Simon & Schuster simply conspired against the reading public to publish a largely incoherent and unfinished work that it was assumed would rise to success on the coattails of John Irving's reputation for writing first-rate works of fiction (which he certainly has).
What is In One Person? A somewhat lamentably impoverished work of fiction that treats bisexual, gay, and transgendered people as though the only thing salient and interesting about their humanity are their sexualities -- which is more than likely exactly what Mr. Irving does not believe. Indeed, sex is sex. Sex as, in large part, a collection of physical acts cannot always be discussed euphemistically, or politely. But what Mr. Irving does with bisexuality and homosexuality is parade the more titillating and earthy images of sexuality before us in gratuitous ways that border on the pornographic (mere puerile-prurient display). Mr. Irving treats us to the "stink" of gay sex (borrowed, admittedly, from James Baldwin -- "the stink of love" comes from Giovanni's Room), rather than the homoemotional commitment enjoyed by gay couples in meaningful relationships, and he cavalierly uses gross and prurient words and expressions to reveal, well, just what exactly? What gay sex actually is? These reductionist treatments might have been fine, were Mr. Irving to have given more depth and texture to his characters, had he made them more than wounded, confused, and too often two-dimensional creatures, some of whom happen to have a literary sense.
JUST WHO IS JACQUES KITTREDGE, the perennial center of both Billy's and Elaine's infatuation? Irving spends a good deal of time exploring WHAT Kittredge is, but he does little to tell us WHO he is, as a human being. We find out that Kittredge wanted to be something other than as he portrayed himself to be while a young man. We learn little else about Kittredge, the person, however. And what made Mrs. Kittredge, Jacques Kittredge's mother, the woman that she was?
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Billy meets the transgender librarian, Miss Frost, because he goes to the library seeking novels about “crushes on the wrong people.” Miss Frost starts him out with the Brontë sisters--specifically, 
