The title [The 158-Pound Marriage] comes from one of the characters who evaluates everything in terms of college wrestling weight classes; it indicates moderate approval. Although the novel is also middleweight in both size and subject, it is all muscle, all confidence and speed and sure grip. (p. 1187)

John Irving knows what he is doing, and his confidence is reflected in his decision to start his novel with two epigraphs, one from Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, the other from John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges—two excellent novels with this same subject. Irving does not suffer in the comparison. He resembles Hawkes, however, in more than mere subject. His narrator, for instance, keeps the same distance between the reader and the story as a Hawkes narrator, neither directly taking charge of his story nor idly reminiscing but telling his experiences in bits and pieces, framing each event...