Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

INTERVIEW:IT'S HARD NOT to approach an interview with John Irving with some trepidation having read his latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River. The book's protagonist, Danny Angel, is a writer, like Irving, born in the early 1940s, like Irving, who studies at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, like Irving did, and who hates journalists, believing "most of them lacked the imagination to believe that anything credible in a novel had been wholly imagined".

It makes an interviewer feel slightly sheepish asking about the possible autobiographical elements in this, his 11th book, which is why it's a relief to find out that John Irving, while as darkly serious, is also as humorous as his fictions can be.