John Irving

John Irving's third and perhaps darkest novel, The 158-Pound Marriage examines the sexual revolution-era trend of "swinging" via a glimpse into the lives of two couples in a small New England college town who enter casually into such an affair, with disastrous consequences.

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old …