Avenue of Mysteries is to fiction, it can seem, as the Cirque du Soleil is to gymnastics. There’s athleticism and a degree of difficulty, for sure, in Mr. Irving’s storytelling. There are also a lot of sequins and canned melodrama and hammy showmanship.
Repeated references to a woman's looks aren't the only excesses in Irving's work. In his more-more-more style of writing, he rarely mentions a topic once if he can mention it a dozen times.
This sort of ambition — how vast an illusion can I build and maintain here? — is part of what makes Irving such a prodigious entertainer. At the same time there are figures of real pathos braided in and out of the narrative.
Avenue of Mysteries is entirely Irving's, his best novel since the years of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Like Lupe and Juan Diego's quest to visit Guadalupe's shrine, it has an ending you may anticipate —but the journey is full of richly imagined surprises.
Mr. Irving is something like a magician showing the audience how the rabbit actually pops out of the hat. Perhaps more than in any other of his books, Avenue of Mysteries demonstrates what is under the hood – what goes on in writers' minds.
All this is good fun, if incredibly meandering; Irving has packed so much detail in, and so blurred the lines between what we need to remember and what we don’t, that he seems often not to be sure himself, repeating factual bits and bobs over and over again just in case.
Irving has outdone himself in good and bad ways in his new book... [he] ignores the constraints of conventional fiction and tosses all of his ideas into his novelist’s blender and turns it on high.
