No thriller in Manila as Irving mislays his mojo

Henry James once complained of certain 19th-century novels that they were “loose, baggy monsters,” deformed by “queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary”. John Irving’s 16th novel is squarely – or perhaps the word is loosely – in this capacious mould.

Avenue of Mysteries is the story of a writer named Juan Diego, himself a perpetrator of loose, baggy monsters (Diego’s novels, Irving tells us, are “a tad old-fashioned,” and they seem ...