Saturday, May 8, 2010

158 lb Book

Seven enthusiastic members of the Barga Book Club met Wednesday evening to discuss the novel, 158 lb Marriage by John Irving. The story was a period set piece of mid 1970’s lifestyle choices, exploring sexual attitudes and representative of the author’s early thematic development.

The plot revolved around two couples who exchanged sexual partners in an early experiment during the so called sexual revolution. Twisted rationalization prompted the beginning of the experimentation and extreme disillusion ended it and tragically ruptured one family.

Though the opinions were typically divergent, the consensus was that though readable, the writing was heavy handed, the story contrived, the characters calculating and exploitative. It is representative of a particular period in time and therefore seemed dated. Various influences on the author at the time were cited as too apparent. Opinion varied as to interesting aspects of the writing such as the seeds of typically wry John Irving humor and touches of the absurd. One member noted that the peripheral characters seemed to have been very interestingly developed but not integral to the story. There was an overall wrestling metaphor with allegorical implications of Irving wrestling with a theme of the period, which was inter-relational sexual experimentation that ultimately went very wrong.

We will next meet on Wednesday the 2nd of June to discuss The Tehran Conviction by Tom Gabbay. We’re very happy to report that the author will be there for the discussion.

In July we will discuss Divine Secrets of the Ya -Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells.

A sincere thank you to Julie Flynn-Ciniglio for hosting the meeting again and thank you very much to everyone for patience and effective cooperation in the book exchange process. A special thanks to Margaret Moore for getting copies of the books and helping to organize the exchanges.

We look forward to seeing you at the next meeting and we’ll confirm the place closer to the date,

Kerry and Julie