T H E   S A L O N   I N T E R V I E W  |  J O H N   I R V I N G

Literature's muscle man talks about how he wrestled his writing career to the ground and why he'd like to grind critics' faces into the mat. BY JOAN SMITH it was John Irving's high-school wrestling coach, Ted Seabrooke, who told him that "talent is overrated. That you're not very talented needn't be the end of it." Seabrooke also told him: "An underdog is in a position to take a healthy bite." And Irving, who counted himself neither a born athlete nor a born writer -- he was dyslexic before that particular learning disability had been identified by name -- took Seabrooke's words as a kind of mantra. "I was an underdog," the bestselling novelist writes in "The Imaginary Girlfriend," a long, autobiographical essay in his new collection of short pieces, "Trying to Save Piggy Sneed." "Therefore, I had to control the pace of everything. This was more than I learned in English 4W, but the concept was applicable to Creative Writing -- and to all my schoolwork, too. If my classmates could read our history assignment in an hour, I allowed myself two or three. If I couldn't learn to spell, I would keep a list of my most frequently misspelled words -- and I kept the list with me; I had it handy even for unannounced quizzes. Most of all, I rewrote everything; first drafts were like the first time you tried a new takedown -- you needed to drill it, over and over again, before you even dreamed of trying it in a match. I began to take my lack of talent seriously." Since 1978, when he published "The World According to Garp," Irving has produced eight long novels, all of them bestsellers, and has become one of the best known authors in America, famous for his comically convoluted plots, his penchant for violent fates and endless epilogues (you always know, happily, what happened next in an Irving novel). But he still thinks of himself as that underdog, always revising, always somehow having to make up for his natural shortcomings with very hard work. And he still wrestles. He writes about the wrestling room he built near his office at the home in Vermont he shares with his second wife (and literary agent), Janet Irving, and their 5-year-old son, Everett. And the black-and-white snapshots in "Piggy Sneed" are mostly a selection from the 300 photographs that line the walls of the wrestling room, many of them of his grown sons Colin and Brendan, though there are two of Irving putting little Everett through his paces. There are also three "literary" photos: Irving with Günter Grass, who is the subject of an admiring essay in "Piggy Sneed"; Irving with Kurt Vonnegut, who was his teacher at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; and Irving with Stephen King. Irving has always loved the big sprawling novelists; his literary heroes include Charles Dickens, Robertson Davies, Salman Rushdie, George Eliot, Grass, Vonnegut and Graham Greene, who taught him to "loathe literary criticism" because "the critics had dismissed him," and who "showed me that exquisitely developed characters and heartbreaking stories were the obligations of any novel worth remembering." But most of all, Irving is still angry. He hates critics because he does not believe that they make themselves familiar enough with the work of the writers they review. And he hates that he is often accused of a fascination with the bizarre. Anyone who thinks that his characters and their fates are unusual, he says, has not paid sufficient attention to the conditions of ordinary life. Salon spoke recently with Irving in San Francisco, sipping bottled spring water and tea in the plush armchairs of the Ritz Carlton's lobby.