Who’s Rules?

It’s hard to believe that when Morrow published John Irving’s Cider House Rules in 1985 he was just at the beginning of his prolific and critically acclaimed career with only Garp and Hotel New Hampshire preceding, other lesser-known academic works notwithstanding. The New York Times Book Review’s major critic treated it carefully but finally admitted it was an achievement and more mature and accessible than his previous work. It’s both comforting and comfortable therefore to look back over a quarter century with so many later novels in the can and with this one in the spotlight.

The novel follows Wilbur Larch, obstetrician and orphanage director, over the course of his very long life, with the main emphasis on the forty-some years he shares with his favorite and finally unadoptable orphan Homer Wells from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. Homer evolves into Larch’s apprentice, spending years with Gray’s Anatomy and real-life midwifery until there is little difference in training between Dr. and pupil. The father/son theme runs wide in this novel but has its genesis in Larch’s childlessness among many hundreds of orphans and Homer’s fatherlessness with Larch as father figure extraordinaire. The orphanage at St. Cloud’s has a deep secret that gives Larch his impetus to train a successor: it is the only place in a wide swath of rural Maine that a woman can receive a safe and professional abortion. Among the many births that keep the orphanage full and Larch and Homer busy in delivery, there is the other work of rescue that Larch pursues and Homer eventually rejects. The polemical possibilities of the pro-life and pro-choice debate are not missed in the long case of Larch and Homer, but it’s important to see this debate in the context of the time, and to see how Irving widens his lens on so much else in the moral universe.

Homer of course must leave and as a twenty-something man falls accidentally into the wide circle of the Worthington apple enterprise on the coast of Maine. There he falls madly in love with Candy Kendall, fiancée of Wally Worthington, apple heir and all-around most handsome and good natured fellow in Maine. There he also finds his self-perceived vocation as apple farmer:

 At St. Cloud’s (orphanage) growth was unwanted even when it was delivered — and the process of birth was often interrupted. Now he was engaged in the process of growing things. What he loved about the life at Ocean View (Orchard) was how everything was of use and that everything was wanted. (p. 237)

Irving, John, 1942-. The cider house rules : a novel. New York : Morrow, c1985.