Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. Where would we be without books? Where would we be without good? No, Timberd. It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm thrilled to have as my guest, John Irving, whose new novel in one person has just been published by Simon & Schuster, his new publisher.

It's a magnificent book. I would say that it returns to certain themes which were expressed in the form of great political anger in GARP.

Now we're entering the realm of gender confusion, and this book takes us once again from a

boy's school in childhood to the present, and we encounter a whole spectrum of gender possibility,

which would not really have been quite imaginable

when GARP was first published.

Now, you've said that GARP is an angry book.

How do you describe in one person?

Well, it's easy to contrast it to the world according to Garb, which when I finished it in

1978, I imagined I was done with that subject.

Namely, I thought any trace of our intolerance toward our sexual differences would soon evanesce and disappear,

naive as I was.

I imagined that I was quite through with the content of the world according to Garp.

Garp is a much more satiric novel, a much more extreme novel politically.

It is decidedly angrier than in one person,

which is a more realistic novel. But the subject remains our troublesome intolerance for sexual differences, although I would say that anger has somewhat dissolved, somewhat.

Billy Abbott, the bisexual narrator of in one person has a kind of justifiable anger about him.

I purposely made him a bisexual guy of my generation because I felt that he would be largely distrusted by his gay and straight friends alike.

To many gay men of my generation, a bisexual man was disbelieved.

It was often presumed that a so-called bi-guy was simply a gay man who lacked the

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