“'The New Hampshire gubernatorial race is taking all our time,' Roberta Muldoon wrote. ...

”There was, apparently, some feminist issue at stake, and some generally illiberal nonsense and crimes the incumbent governor was actually proud of. The administration boasted that a raped fourteen-year-old had been denied an abortion, thus stemming the tide of nationwide degeneracy.“

-- The World According to Garp by John Irving, p. 477 in my edition. I read that today and, well, you can imagine. The novel was satire (and not) when it came out in the late 1970s, and now it's not. I used to re-read it every few years but this is the first time in about 20. It's still great. It still reads like a breeze. The most dated thing is the black woman in John Wolf's office—the one who keeps saying ”Lawd." Otherwise, it's as up-to-date as today's tawdry news. It's as if the world has caught up to John Irving's imagination and become the X-rated soap opera he (and Garp) imagined it to be. I'm re-reading it now because it was the book on my brother's nightstand when he was murdered the night before Thanksgiving while waiting with a bag of groceries at an Edina, Minn. busstop.