U.S.-Canadian novelist says he won’t travel to America to promote new book
Novelist John Irving says that President Donald Trump is an ‘authoritarian bully.’ (Random House of Canada Limited/Canadian Press)
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Acclaimed novelist John Irving won’t be travelling to the U.S. to promote his new book, because he thinks U.S. President Donald Trump has made his “beloved birth country virtually unrecognizable.”
“What Trump is doing — in the overreach of his executive power — is overreaching democracy. But I don’t know how many Americans recognize it for what it is,” Irving told The Current’s Matt Galloway.
Irving is a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen who now lives in Canada, best known for his books The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany.
His new novel, Queen Esther, returns to the world of one of his most famous works, The Cider House Rules. Published in 1985, that book explores themes around abortion rights and women’s autonomy.
He spoke to Galloway about returning to those issues in his new book, and why he thinks Trump isn’t done with his “violations of democracy.” Here is part of their conversation.
We’re now in this post-Roe v. Wade world … could you have imagined that that would have come to pass? Many people thought that that was settled business in the United States.
You see, that was the problem.
That people thought it was settled?
That people thought it was. I remember very, very keenly when Cider House was published, how many of my friends, good feminists, people that I had worked with in Planned Parenthood facilities. And people who knew my mother, who had been a nurse’s aide and a family counsellor. Her principal job was trying to advise young, unmarried women and girls who were pregnant … both before Roe vs. Wade and after.
And I remember people whose politics I shared saying, “Well, it’s nice, but it’s kind of quaint that you’ve written this historical novel now that it’s safe, now that abortion is available and is safe.” And I remember saying, which caused some stress, “If you think it’s safe, if you think it’ll ever be safe, you might be part of the reason it isn’t.”
I didn’t write it as history to say, look at this terrible time when this procedure was unsafe and illegal. Look what happened then. It was decisively written as a warning, as a way of saying, don’t let this happen again.
That this could happen again.
And that this could happen again. And my brother and sisters, we talk frequently about my mother, who has since passed away, and perhaps this is only to comfort ourselves, but we say how glad we are that she didn’t live to see the day when abortion rights went backward. Maybe because if she were alive, that would have killed her. Looking at the current administration in the United States, it is only one example of the sexually bigoted backwardness of my birth country.
Is that why you’re not going back? I mean this business of not travelling to the States to promote this book. I’ve spoken with Margaret Atwood, who’s down there. She’s been doing some travelling now and promoting her memoirs. And then Louise Penny, another Canadian treasure, who’s not doing that. How did you come to that decision?
Well, it didn’t take long, Matt. I made that decision in January, when Trump had been in office less than a month and was only beginning to overreach his executive powers, in the so-called executive orders he was issuing. And it was clear to me in the most hateful, most transphobic executive order that declared there were only two sexes, men and women, and they are the sexes you were born with. And ordering trans men and women to change the gender on their passport — if they had changed it — back to being in agreement with their birth certificates. The sheer backwardness of that, to someone who remembers those decades of protest, which were in my growing up years, late ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. They were formative of my pride in a country where freedom of speech, including freedom of protest, really mattered in the civil rights days, in the gay rights days. Think of the Stonewall riots, think of all the protests against the war in Vietnam.
I felt it was essential to protest again this authoritarian bully in the White House who is abusing his best allies and who is turning back the clock on so many issues of equality and sexual freedom I’ve long believed in.
I have long been an ally in my fiction of LGBTQ rights, and as I have long been an ally of women’s rights and abortion rights. And to see what this fascist has wrought, how he has made my beloved birth country virtually unrecognizable to me.
And of course, since that time when I made this decision in January … well, it’s only gotten worse. The cowardly Republicans in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have been complicit in their silence. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump doesn’t find or make some excuse to cancel the midterm elections. That would be in keeping with his violations of democracy. He might declare martial law and say that elections were unsafe. He’s already rumbled and grumbled about the rights of Americans who live abroad.
And a third term as well, he’s mused about a third turn.
Oh, mused! May we all be protected from what that man muses. (CBC Radio)
