The book of Ruth

Convinced that real life is far more bizarre than most fiction, American novelist John Irving has always ensured that his stories are complex, farfetched and downright grotesque enough for most readers to recognise elements of their own experiences in them. Author of The World According to Garp (1976), The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), The Cider House Rules (1985) and A Prayer for Owen Meaney (1989), Irving is the producer of long, meaty yarns constructed upon more coincidences than even Dickens would dare perpetrate.

Irving's latest epic, A Widow For One Year (Bloomsbury, £16.99 in UK), is characteristically lengthy, as complicated as much of his previous work, wacky, and sustained by gusto, detail and manipulation. It is also his best book since The Cider House Rules. Admittedly, that doesn't mean it is perfect, but it is funny and, for all the tough sexuality, it reaches surprising levels of vulnerability which, however contrived, make it almost impossible not to like this modern-day Dickensian romp.

Dickens is an emblematic figure: Irving believes that the best fiction shows the influence of the great Victorian showman. No one knew better than Dickens that children in fiction will always move the reader, particularly abandoned children. Ruth Cole, the tomboy anti-heroine novelist at the heart of A Widow for One Year, has suffered one of the cruellest of losses: Marion, her beautiful mother, left her when she was four, not out of carelessness but out of an inability to cope with the grief of losing her two sons. The dead boys haunt Marion just as they haunt the narrative.

Marriage to the womanising writer Ted Cole was already a disappointment made bearable to Marion only by her gorgeous sons. But when the boys are killed in a car crash, Marion retreats into a world dominated by remembrance of them. Her days are spent examining the many photographs of them, framed and hanging on the walls. Fear of losing her daughter makes her withdraw from the child, who is now cared for by nannies, and the object of love showered on her by her wayward father, a writer at his happiest when autographing copies of his books and selecting his next sexual conquest.

Good old Ted, ever young and handsome and fitness-conscious like so many of Irving's characters, specialises in unhappily married young mothers. He likes his women big-breasted, and just at the level before their submissiveness and humiliation steers them to madness. Most of all, though, he just likes sex. And there is a lot of it in this book, some of it comic, much of it pathetic and, unexpectedly, some of it violent.

The story is certainly sufficient to keep most readers satisfied. As ever with Irving, the book is too long: economy is not his strength, nor is beautiful prose, but few novels of 550 pages move as fast or read as quickly. The most interesting thing about it is that Irving has seldom assembled a nastier bunch of characters - previously he has relied heavily upon stock grotesques. It is not that the people in the new book are villains, they simply are not very nice - but in a normal sort of way. Even poor Ruth, whom we first meet as a betrayed little girl, grows up into an angry, hardened woman who hides behind her success as a writer. Ted, her appalling father, is self-centred and selfish. A cad as a husband, he is otherwise not particularly dislikable - or, to be more accurate, he is dislikable in an ordinary way. Touches such as these make this book more interesting than one might at first expect. When Ruth witnesses a horrible murder, Irving chooses not to have her rescue the victim. Instead, she merely watches a woman die. Ruth, in keeping with the Irving obsession with physical fitness, is a physically able woman, but she does nothing.

Irving's showmanship and sexism test him and the novel as well as the reader. Presumably we are expected to have sympathy for the lovely Marion whose life seems to have stopped with the accident in which her sons died. Her seduction of young Eddie, who comes to work for Ted as a writer's assistant, never rises above cliche. Besotted by her, the young boy develops into a remarkable sexual performer. Marion, however decides when the affair is to end, and she disappears. Having elevated her to the status of goddess and absolute love of his life, Eddie is determined to devote himself to his passion, so becoming a figure of fun for the rest of the cast. Chronicling every moment of his brief affair, he has repeatedly told the entire story through a series of mediocre novels which act as his lifeline. Some of the best comic writing in the book is inspired by Eddie's absent-minded antics. Yet, jokes aside, Eddie is the clearly and most deliberately the most honourable character in a book of liars and self-deceivers. The romance between Eddie and Marion endures, with typical Irvingesque flouting of time scales, for almost forty years - despite them not being in contact.

Ruth's path to happiness is harsher. In attempting to make her complex, Irving risks turning her into a masculine figure. Intent on proving herself by beating her aged father at squash, Ruth prepares as if she is a warrior facing battle. Irving is a writer who delights in excess of detail. There is also a bossiness about his authorial voice which insists on reminding the reader of the relevance of objects and incidents. He believes in the "everything and the kitchen sink and then some" approach to fiction, and the sheer abundance of his narrative style is essential. Density is his natural medium.

Irving's characters can defy time, never mind routine logistics. Much of the dialogue is hilarious. As the entire narrative edifice wends its way towards a Shakespearean conclusion, one is left to wonder at the sheer outrageousness of Irving's craft which permits him such licence. Far-fetched the book is, as well as sentimental and aggressive, but it is also often funny and ultimately moving enough to make one gulp once or twice.