Throughout college and for about a half-decade after, John Irving was my favorite author. I loved the way he took similar elements (wrestling, squash, New England, boarding schools, abortion, sexual diversity, shrill and prudish women) and reshuffled them into something full of new meaning. I loved A Prayer for Owen Meany and A Widow for One Year, and I enjoyed, to one degree or another, everything else of his I read (with the possible exception of The Water-Method Man, but we're all entitled to some misses). 
 Overall, In One Person does just what my favorite Irving novels do with the reshuffled elements and the new meaning. In addition, Irving tackles without flinching issues of sexuality and gender fluidity that have seemingly got our whole country shifting in their seats a little (or a lot) right now. And I really appreciate the look at what the AIDS epidemic was like in the 1980's. I was in elementary school when Ryan White was kicked out of school for being HIV positive and in college when the first anti-retrovirals were approved, but while AIDS was present and in the news for much of my youth, I had little to no experience with people living with the disease until I was an adult and public sentiment---and available treatments---had changed dramatically. This novel wasn't the first time I'd heard about what it was like on the inside of this epidemic, but it was a poignant telling. As usual, Irving doesn't pull any punches. 
 All of this I love, but I didn't quite love this novel as a whole. It took about 180 pages for the story to start moving, and when it did I thought, "There! There's the Irving that I know!" but even after that, it never quite reached the level of my favorite Irving novels. 
 The main problem I have is with the narrator. I don't dislike Bill/Billy/William as a person---he's actually a quite sympathetic character---but he is a clumsy narrator. Either Irving, for artistic reasons, is letting Bill do the narrating knowing he'll overuse italics and exclamation points and repeat words and phrases beyond the tolerance of the reader, or this is actually Irving's narrating voice and he's lost his edge or is just phoning it in these days. In a way, it doesn't really matter because I found the narration tedious regardless. 
 Beyond the head-on way Irving addresses gender identity, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS, I also appreciate the way he portrays the differences between generations. We see the progression in tolerance from the pre-World War II generation through to the Millennials, although I do sense a little Baby Boomer reticence about GenX. While Baby Boomers and Millennials get starring roles in Irving's world, GenX features hardly at all (by my count, just two characters who reach adulthood) and always as the pragmatists stuck in between a generation of navel-gazers and a generation of phone-gazers. That's not really Irving's fault, though; by underappreciating (or perhaps just misunderstanding) GenX, he's just reflecting reality. (Boo-hoo, I know.) 
 At any rate, aside from the sidelining of my generation, I like the way that Irving shows how tolerance grows gradually and in a nonlinear fashion as the paradigms of each generation shift. What was once unthinkable becomes not only possible but almost normal two generations down the line. Or in the case of Shakespeare and casting men in women's roles and vice versa, it goes more "acceptable, unacceptable, unacceptable but necessary, acceptable but edgy, acceptable." Or something like that. Nonlinear. 
 I also enjoy how disappointingly human Irving's characters are. With the possible exception of Miss Frost, there are no perfect characters. Everyone's just muddling along the way we all do. It's not always satisfying, but I wouldn't trust a novel in which it was any other way.