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Author John Irving now bases himself in Toronto but travelled as far as the Phillipines researching his new novel, Avenue of Mysteries.J.P. MOCZULSKI/The Globe and Mail

Until last week, I'd never read a John Irving novel.

I'm not sure I even tried. It's not like there was a shortage of opportunities. Every bookshelf of a certain age carries a well-thumbed copy of The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Hotel New Hampshire. Get bored in a B&B, at a cottage, on a beach, in a marriage and Garp was your prolonged salvation, a fully formed world made for utter disappearance. Millions and millions of readers, compulsively turning hundreds and hundreds of pages without any sense of literary duty or obligation, testified to his skill as a storyteller. I just didn't get it.

Or try to get it. Taste in books is an expression of character, and I couldn't see myself as John Irving material. His novels, they said, were sprawling, phantasmagoric, elaborately imaginative, hilariously excessive even as they rendered unbearable pain. That was all too much for me – I got my fill of Dickensian in high school. The comic novels of Waugh and Wodehouse suited me better in my formative years, tightly wrought masterpieces of inhibited restraint that were more grown-up verbal than childishly visual in their effortless desire to please. Plus, they were generally a lot shorter – you didn't feel quite so much like you were handing over your life to an all-controlling author ready to lead you who knows where.

But maybe I resisted the marketing of John Irving as well. Nobody reads Evelyn Waugh for his wrestler's physique or his movie-star hair or his marriage to a much younger Torontonian that suddenly made a great man one of us. It's dumb, in retrospect, that I used these excuses to stay the course in my reading life. But the celebrity-driven sales pitch didn't work on me – Waugh was an obnoxious Tory social climber, and I still loved him.

Fortunately, I'm in a business that overrides prejudice just by forcing me to do my job. John Irving has a new novel out. An editor asks me if I'd like to talk to him. This is what it comes down to: I can say no, and be a jerk, and not earn my salary. Or I can say yes, and then start making up for lost time so I don't get found out for the smug, close-minded person I seem to have become.

It turns out that I like John Irving – first the book, Avenue of Mysteries, over a desperate weekend of close reading and dense thinking; and then the man, in a 90-minute conversation at his Toronto office that was very much one way, in his favour.

We're both small guys, barely 5 foot 8, aiming to play larger. One line I read about him, when doing my last-minute homework – because I'd heard he was a stickler for preparation, and I didn't want to get caught faking it – sounded very familiar. "I was seen as a pig-headed jock by my literary friends," he once told an interviewer in the kitchen of his Georgian Bay cottage, describing his boys' school days in New Hampshire while simultaneously cooking eggplant parmigiana, "and by my wrestler friends I was seen as a weird artiste."

The jock side never goes away. It's a state of mind, a discipline, a force that can't be restrained, only channelled for something better and more productive than generic hostility. "You don't want to waste a passionate explosion on a coffee pot," Irving told me, when I tried to ask him about the unwelcome and unexpected emotions of aging – my concern, it turned out, but not his. At 73, he's 10 years older than I am, and his central character in Avenue of Mysteries is a fragile 54-year-old writer who seems more like 74 and is fully dependent on beta blockers to manage an ominous heart condition. Simple-minded interviewers assume that novelists source material from their own lives. But Irving, having crafted a perfect drug regimen that allows his character to drift and dream through time simply by playing with his medications, is astonished that journalists can be so literal.

"I'm okay," he says, knocking on a big round wooden table covered in foreign-edition covers of his book. "I don't think there's anything wrong with me, or know of anything wrong with me."

He has a treadmill adjacent to his long, wall-length, windowless writing table, used more for uphill walking than running after three knee operations, and is outfitted in tomato-red Sauconys and golden-yellow quarter-length socks that suggest the thin line between working and working out. I've hiked to his midtown building straight from the gym, where I've finally managed to pull off 15 straight chin-ups, my benchmark for still-got-it seniority at the age of 63. It's not lost on me that I've got a silent rivalry going with my renegade-jock elder – maybe because he's published 15 novels and I, who like to call myself a writer, have managed to produce absolutely none.

This, too, is a one-way dialogue. John Irving doesn't intend to incorporate my friendly, collegial anxieties. A marketer or political operative would say he's on message, but after reading his novel, I recognize his monologue as something else.

He's completely immersed in Avenue of Mysteries. Nothing could be more real or more vivid for him. Once I'm inside his 10th-floor office, it's my world that looks ephemeral and artificial.

This is what it means to be a novelist still going strong after a 50-year run. Characters like Lupe, the orphaned 13-year-old Mexican mind-reader raised on the edge of an Oaxaca dump who carries a worrying obsession with the Catholic Church's holy virgins, and her mediating crippled brother Juan Diego, a reading-obsessed autodidact who will turn into a leading American novelist after several Irvingesque twists of fate involving not-so-Jesuitical Jesuits and child circuses and Holy Marys come to life and a transvestite-prostitute mother figure and a gabby pair of ingratiating fans who double as ghostly succubi, are more present in the room than I am.

Here's where the imbalance comes from: The novel that I raced through over a weekend in a state of frightening, fitful fascination – those worrisome characters were front and centre when I woke up at 3 a.m., the jarring sounds and smells of the Mexican streets kept me from going back to sleep – was the product of more than 25 years' loving labour. Working day to day, barely remembering what I said about a baseball play or a government policy a few weeks ago, I'm completely overpowered by the torrent of language that is a novelist who lives with his creations.

Irving tells me about travelling to the Philippines, the parallel Hispanic, Jesuit, Mary-obsessed, deeply pious country where Avenue of Mysteries ends, completely in the role of Juan Diego, only going where his character wanted to go. He visited circuses over and over again, getting to know the dwarfs by name, probing the psyche of the premenstrual girls – the adjective is disproportionately important – who walk the high wire without a net. He sat in the same cab, caught in the same Mexico City traffic, blocked by the same crazy pilgrims desperate to be cured by the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe until he thought he could stand it no more. And then he did it yet again, looked out the window in a moment of stalled torment, and casually saw his fated title on a street sign – Avenida de los Misterios.

How do you reduce all this to a standard author interview? He's sold his sprawling house in a Vermont ski town and now bases himself in Toronto. Even great novelists become empty nesters, have to shed the big house, and find space on their condo walls for family photos that used to range through mountainside rooms. That's interesting. Maybe, being clever journalists, we can tie that to his book – at 460 pages, Avenue of Mysteries is half the size of Irving's earlier bestsellers.

"Thank you," he says, not sounding especially grateful for the observation. "I'm modestly downsizing. Good for you."

He is the novelist, don't forget. We are his readers. And we read him because he is not like us – not like me, certainly.

"You put something away and make it come back and look at it in a new light and put it away again," he told me, describing a creative process I can't hope to understand. "As a writer, I don't know if I've got better at anything, but I know I've got slower. If you have any doubts at all, just wait and do something else. It's never not happened to me that something you put away and take out again, when you take a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth look at it, you see possibilities you didn't see before. At the very least you see something you can fix."

And there, I'm done. The deadline's already passed, and there's no room for the luxury of second-guessing, no chance to fix the flaws. As a veteran writer, I don't know if I've got better at anything, but I know when my time is up.

John Irving doesn't start a novel before he knows how it's going to end. Me, I don't have a clue.

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