John Irving’s Passage to India . . . and the Bizarre : Literature: In his latest work, the creator of ‘Garp’ explores the strange realms of the circus to tackle themes of alienation and identity.

“I’d left the brothel and was on my way to the club,” John Irving is saying, “when I said, ‘I haven’t seen the transsexuals this morning! I’ve got to go back and see the transsexuals because I want to see what they look like now as opposed to what they look like after they’re dressed.’ And we turned around to go back.”

Irving is describing his visit to India, which took place more than four years ago, when he gathered much of the material for his novel, “A Son of the Circus,” recently published by Random House.

Even though the book has more plot twists than the Mahabharata and a cast of characters that includes dwarfs, prostitutes, movie stars, self-emasculating transsexuals and a serial killer, the author seems proudest of the research that went into it.

“Many people who look upon me as the creator of freaks and the bizarre will never know that all the Indian material is not invented. That there are 5,000 Hijras in Bombay and their emasculation is done under the exact same terms I describe. . . .”

And, he boasts, “All of the circus acts are real--including the cricket-playing elephants.”

Irving is in the spacious, light-filled kitchen of his Vermont home, chopping vegetables for dinner. “I talk better if I’m doing something,” he explains, attacking a zucchini with neat, strong strokes.

The 52-year-old writer, who supported himself as a wrestling coach for years before “The World According to Garp” catapulted him to literary stardom in the ‘70s, still makes an athletic impression. Dressed in red running shorts and sport sandals, he is deeply tanned and has the bold carriage and quick energy of a younger man. The bulldog pugnacity of his handsome face is softened by a silver mane that he sweeps back dramatically while talking.

He recently remarried and at one point is interrupted when he thinks he hears crying on the intercom and runs to check on his 3-year-old son. His manner of speaking is disarmingly flamboyant.

“I think you can make demands on the reader if you have the confidence that you have readers,” he says, alluding to the rather complex opening of his vast novel.

Readers are one thing Irving certainly has. His last five novels have all been reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. There are more than 10 million copies of “Garp” in print.

It has not always been like that. Irving’s early novels sold fewer than 10,000 copies apiece. “You develop what they call a track record,” he says, “and my track record was that I lost money.”

He is keenly aware of the change wrought by fame. “Right up through ‘Garp’ I used to sit around wondering who the hell’s reading these books? Once I had an audience, I stopped thinking about it. And that became one of the great liberties.”

Although grateful for the freedom fame has bestowed, Irving is touchy about the way critics view him now that his books are virtually born on the bestseller lists.

“I recognize there’s a funny transition. I write four books and whether they get good reviews or bad reviews, it goes without saying, in all that I’m a literary writer. After ‘Garp,’ half the reviews take the position that I’m a best-selling hack. Well, I don’t know how these changes happen.”

Irving seems particularly resentful of the assumption that he is merely a seeker of the bizarre.

“People come up to me at cocktail parties and say, ‘You’ll never guess what happened to my grandmother. She was backing out of the garage when her house fell down and her car rolled down into the pool.’ If it’s really stupid, they say it could be in one of my novels.”

*

But when his friends Mary Ellen Mark and Martin Bell told him about the Indian circus, he had to admit that it did indeed sound like something that belonged in one of his novels.

Mark and Bell had been trying to make a documentary about the circus and, finding no funding, proposed to Irving that he write the screenplay for a feature film.

Irving had already been thinking about India. A few years before in Toronto, he had been sitting in the back of a taxi waiting for the light to change when he saw a man waiting to cross the street.

“He was much as I describe Dr. Daruwalla,” Irving explains, referring to the hero of his novel. “Well-dressed, in his early 60s, very dignified-looking.” The man might have been Indian, although Irving wasn’t sure. What was clear was that as he stared, Irving realized he was making the man uncomfortable.

“His wariness was racial. This was a man who had suffered some verbal abuse in the past.” Then the light changed and he was gone.

From that moment on, the idea of a novel began vaguely to emerge. It was the man’s alienation that worked on Irving’s imagination.

“I thought, when he goes home it must not feel like home anymore. When he is here, how much like home does this feel?” This was something Irving frequently heard from Indian-born friends who urged him to write about the sidewalk apparition.

“Make him an Indian but not an Indian,” Irving recalls them saying.

*

Irving worked out many things about his hero: He would be a doctor born in Bombay, educated in Europe, living in Toronto. He would be a Parsee convert to Christianity. He would work with joint diseases of children and be a closet screenwriter of garish Hindi detective films.

But something was missing.

When he heard about the Indian circus, and how children were sold into it to save them from a life on the streets, he realized he had the final piece. Dr. Daruwalla’s path would somehow cross the path of the Indian circus.

A bargain was struck. “I would go, live with the circus, write the script for Martin’s movie--but I would do that on the condition that I could at the same time make use of my friends and their friends and their friends’ friends to work on my own story.”

Even though he did produce a screenplay as well as a novel--the screenplay is cleverly inserted into the novel--Irving has no great love of movies.

“I’m not a movie person,” he says. “They’re collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.”

*

The collaborative aspect of his novel, however, fills him with gratitude. Irving visited India for only one month, but he was able to pack a virtual lifetime into it. He was met at every turn by expert Indian guides who ferried him around Bombay.

“I set up a shopping list,” he explains, recalling his list of demands: “I want to go to Mass at 7 o’clock in the morning. I want to go directly from Mass to the brothel, the same brothel I left at midnight the night before. I want to go to a private club. . . . “

He is effusive in his thanks to Indian friends, who not only guided him through the city but acted as readers and critics of the manuscript.

“I couldn’t have gotten anywhere with this book if it wasn’t for the help of these people.”

*

Although the New Hampshire-born writer felt daunted by the wealth of information about India he knew he would have to assimilate, the task of imagining an immigrant came naturally.

“I don’t feel I really belong anywhere, either. I always feel like someone who just moved to town wherever I live,” he admits.

Irving, who spends part of each year in Canada, seems to be drifting farther from America. His previous novel, “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” includes an angry defense of Canadian literature against the insulting claims of an American professor. And the writers he lists as favorites--Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie--are all practitioners of a kind of international novel.

“I think the novel must become more international in certain ways. I don’t think you need to be an Indian-born, European-educated man living in Canada in order to feel Dr. Daruwalla’s kind of alienation. I think a century from now, many of the most sophisticated, better educated people in the world will have been born one place, educated in a second place and then wind up living in a fifth and sixth place after that.”

Irving clearly knows a number of people who straddle multiple cultures, and the book is dedicated to one such friend. The dedication reads simply: “For Salman.”

He explains that his introduction to Bombay came years earlier when he read Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” in manuscript. Rushdie had turned up at a reading Irving gave in London, introduced himself and handed Irving his unpublished book.

“I’ve been very close to him ever since. We were having dinner together in Toronto when he learned that India had banned ‘The Satanic Verses.’ ”

Irving says he wanted to avoid using Rushdie’s name as a political tag. “The reason the book is for Salman and not Salman Rushdie is that if you say ‘Salman Rushdie’ now, it sounds like you’re making a political statement. It becomes one of those political knee-jerk solidarity kind of things. . . . This book would always have been for Salman, with or without that damned fatwa.”

Still, Irving doesn’t deny that the spirit of the post-fatwa Rushdie hovers over the book as well. The comic absurdity of the novel is darkened by an awareness of the dangers of sectarianism, of religious fanaticism and of racial hatred. In Irving’s mind, though, it is comic absurdity itself that so rankles his own and Rushdie’s critics.

“I don’t believe Salman would have been in trouble at all if he hadn’t been funny,” Irving says passionately, going on to say of his own work: “It’s not the transsexuals or the penises bitten off in cars or various extravagant things people attach to my books that makes people angry. It’s that they’re supposed to be funny.”