SOURCE: "A Son of the 19th Century," in The New York Times Book Review, February 4, 1996, p. 9.

In the following review, Birkerts offers tempered criticism of Trying to Save Piggy Sneed.

Reading Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, John Irving's ninth book but only his first compendium of assorted prose, duplicated for this reviewer the sensation of moving in a large airplane over a long stretch of tarmac before suddenly, thankfully, achieving liftoff. Mr. Irving's miscellany—divided into "Memoirs," "Fiction" (six short stories) and "Homage"—shows how one of our most widely read novelists fares in what he might consider a triathlon of lesser events. What we find, in this order, are disappointments, confirmations and surprises.

The author, an avowed Dickens lover, has from the first demonstrated a good bit of the master's ability with passionate impersonation: his fictional characters strike us as autonomous creatures rather than as just so...