SOURCE: "Understanding John Irving," in Understanding John Irving, University of South Carolina Press, 1991, pp. 1-13.

In the following excerpt, Reilly provides an overview of the settings, characters, themes, and literary techniques employed in Irving's fiction.

Except for Setting Free the Bears, his only novel with European settings and characters, John Irving's novels take place in twentieth-century United Slates, especially Maine and New Hampshire. Irving analyzes contemporary problems and issues plaguing his characters' lives. In addition, random violence and sudden death stalk his fictional worlds, a concept that has its inceptions in Setting Free the Bears.

Set primarily in Vienna, Austria, Bears traces Vienna's history from before the Anschluss (Austria's "union" with Nazi Germany in 1938) to after World War II. While admitting that Bears contains a "large" researched "historical center"—"the Yugoslavian resistance in World War II, the Russian occupation of Vienna … the Nazi Anschluss of Austria in '...