<i>The Cider House Rules</i>, revisited by Ric Hess

John Winslow Irving made his literary debut at the age of 26 with the publication of his first novel, Setting Free the Bears. Two books and ten years later, The World According to Garp became a international best-seller and Mr. Irving was able to set aside teaching and devote himself full time to the development of his career as a writer.

Seven years after Garp, in 1985, Mr. Irving published The Cider House Rules, a
sprawling novel, set in Maine, and one whose central theme examines the thorny debate that surrounds the topic of abortion – and the degree to which women should be allowed to control the development of an unborn child, specifically when that fetus is doing its developing in their own womb.

As The Cider House Rules makes clear, there are no easy answers here. The novel, weighing in at 576 pages, needs every one of those pages for Mr. Irving to fully develop his narrative. Irving establishes both liberal and semi-conservative arguments surrounding abortion early on, through the vehicle of the novel’s protagonist, the differently educated young medical apprentice, Homer Wells.

Homer comes of age on the grounds of an antiquated and hopelessly rural orphanage, Saint Cloud’s, Maine, an institution cobbled together near a failed logging village of the same name, a place that, despite several attempts, Homer cannot seem to escape. The kindly, eccentric headmaster of the orphanage is one Wilbur Larch, a doctor and ether addict who offers to the women who make their way to his frozen clinic a choice. Larch, “…help(s) them have what they want. An orphan or an abortion.” Larch is decidedly what would be called today pro-choice, but he is not blind to the consequences of his patient’s decisions. As the reader shall see, never are the options ideal; rarely is either choice a good one.

When Homer, whose mother’s choice is obvious, is born in “192_”, his educational opportunities are limited. The nearest school in Three Mile Falls, the nearest town, offers classes only through grade six and – because of intermittent and shoddy train service – Homer is only able to attend these classes a few days a week, at best. After the sixth grade, available public education is nonexistent. The world beyond Three Mile Falls, where more alternatives could undoubtedly be found, is denied him. Through a series of fated accidents, Homer is unable to be placed in a family with whom he can successfully establish himself. He invariably returns to Saint Cloud’s. Finally, both he and Dr. Larch, come to the reluctant conclusion that Homer “belongs there.” And once that determination is made, there is only one absolute directive the doctor gives to his perpetual charge, “Well, then, Homer… I expect you to be of use.”

“He was nothing (Homer Wells) if not of use.” Homer has the run of the grounds at St. Cloud’s. He helps out with the various chores. He reads to the other, younger, orphans at night. The books he reads (primarily David Copperfield and Jane Eyre) he reads and reads, again and again; the insights of Dickens and Bronte serve him in lieu of a more classical curriculum. And Homer assists Dr. Larch in the hospital, until the day he examines a partially formed fetus and finally understands that what Dr. Larch calls the “Lord’s work” is the indiscriminate offer of choice to the usually poor, largely uneducated and often abused women who come to St. Cloud’s for assistance.

Homer extracts enough information from his readings, and from the instruction provided by his occasional tutors, to attain a reasonable education. And he is intelligent and skilled enough to master many of the tasks required in the assistance of Dr. Larch. After determining just exactly what services St. Cloud’s provides, Homer comes to a different conclusion than Dr. Larch did; he agrees with the Doctor that a woman should be afforded the right to choose, should she wish to terminate her pregnancy, but he, although he has attained the requisite skills, refuses to participate. He is a “very accomplished midwife” as Dr. Larch points out, a “qualified abortionist”. But he will have nothing to do with providing abortions. For that, Dr. Larch is on his own.

Shortly after Homer reaches this philosophical watershed, St. Cloud’s is visited by a young couple from the lovely Atlantic coast town of Heart’s Haven (or, arguably, they arrive from the less lovely Heart’s Rock, but that’s another part of the story). Wally Worthington and Candace Kendall are young and beautiful and in love. Candy is also pregnant. They make the long drive to the bruised, rocky grounds of St. Cloud’s, arriving with more splendor and panache than most of the clinic’s visitors, but with the same fundamental problem; what will they choose, an orphan or an abortion?

By almost any account, Candy and Wally are the kind of people who should be having babies. But this is not their time, or rather they decide that it isn’t; Candy has her abortion and the couple returns to costal Maine, to Ocean View Orchards, the apple orchard that Wally’s family owns. Along with the unwanted fetus, they leave behind at the orphanage an assortment of the orchard’s bounty; apples and cider and honey and jelly. But they do not leave empty-handed. They take back with them the boy who could not find a home, the boy who is “an accomplished midwife”, but who “won’t perform an abortion, not ever,” they return to the world that, for lack of a better word, most people would consider normal; they escape from St. Cloud’s with Homer Wells.

Thus the stage is set for everything that will follow. Homer falls in love with Candy and she with him. But Wally and Homer love each other too. Wally’s family provides, at long last, the home that Homer has always sought. Soon after Homer arrives at Ocean View, Wally is accepted into the service, where he will become a pilot, flying supply runs high up over the mountains of Burma during World War II. Wally and Homer are firm friends; Homer would never betray him. But Homer and Candy find, after Wally’s plane disappears into the dense Burmese mountain fog, that the demands of their youthful appetites and their own mutual, physical attraction are too much for their well-intentioned loyalties to ignore. They consummate their love, although in a difficult and awkward manner that befits Homer’s destiny. In the usual course of events, they have a child. They visit St. Cloud’s together and the orphanage experiences that rarest of all events in its troubled history; a wanted baby.

All this is the merest summary of what is an incredibly rich and layered story. One of Irving’s personal heroes is Homer’s early mentor, Charles Dickens, and The Cider House Rules is Dickensian in its scope and breadth. There are many deeply formed characters here that are not only worthy of attention but demand it; there is neither the space nor the time to do that in the scope of this limited review.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this is a great book. Read it, if only for the excellence of the craft Irving employs to tell his story (which is to say, visit the Louvre, only because it is a museum, or the Cathedral at Notre Dame, simply because it’s a church). But in this time, when strident voices so vociferously attempt to insist on a universal morality, The Cider House Rules also stands out as a voice of reason against those who would imply that there is only one right and one wrong when a young woman is faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Cider House is about much more than the issue of abortion, but it is especially timely, twenty-two years after its original publication, because the issue of abortion is even more of a divisive social issue than it was twenty-two years ago.

Candy aborts Wally’s child; later she bears Homer’s son. Homer loves both Candy and Wally; he sleeps with Candy and has a child with her. Homer and Candy and their son, Angel, return to live at Ocean View. Wally is found, alive though crippled, and he comes back to Maine as well. The true parentage of Angel is an ill-kept secret; despite of all this, Candy and Homer and Wally maintain a complicated love for one another.

But Homer also loves Olive, Wally’s mother, and Ray, Candy’s father, and all the cast of the Ocean View Orchards, where Homer attempts, for many years, to escape his responsibility to St. Cloud’s and to Saint Larch, who loves Homer as the son he never had and who Homer loves equally in return. Despite love, the problems of life intervene. What is Homer doing, there at the Ocean View Orchards, if he is not being of use? What should he be doing? All of this is intriguingly complicated, as life usually is; fortunately, for the characters of The Cider House Rules, though their world is big on problems, is not an environment that is short on love.

Nor is The Cider House Rules short on demanding that the issue of abortion require more than a summary right and wrong approach to its questions. Irving does a masterful job of laying the ground work, in the novel’s early pages, that illustrates the gruesome reality of the world before Roe VS Wade. Back alley abortions are not pretty, they are not ideal, they are not safe. What they are, in lieu of reasonable alternatives, is a fact – they are what will happen. No matter how opposed someone may be, the life of the mother must carry some weight in deciding the fate of an unborn child.

Nathan Lane’s character, in the movie The Bird Cage, perhaps said it to comedic best effect. Attempting to ironically bond with the staunch conservative father of his gay lover’s son, he advocates criminal punishment for those women seeking an abortion, “Oh, I know what you’re going to say. If you kill the mother, the fetus dies too. But the fetus is going to be aborted anyway, so why not let it go down with the ship?” And we laugh because such a statement is so absurd, but is it any more absurd than the spectacle of Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park Bomber, killing and injuring hundreds of people to make a statement against, the “abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand”? What act is more abominable? What life more sacred?

Abortion is never ideal; what is less ideal is to force those who choose abortions to have the procedure carried out in a manner that endangers both the lives of the mother and her unborn child. In the closing chapters of The Cider House Rules, Homer Wells is confronted with a young woman, the love interest of his now teenaged son, who has become pregnant after being repeatedly raped by her own father. Rose Rose is pregnant and all the circumstances, all humane instincts insist that the termination of this pregnancy is the right choice. Irving leads us purposefully to that acknowledgment. But if this one abortion is right, how can Homer, an “accomplished midwife”, a “qualified abortionist” refuse any woman? “Only a god makes that kind of decision. I’ll just give them what they want, he thought. An orphan or an abortion.” What gives any of us the right to decide, for anyone else, what is the correct choice?

There is no doubt that this review, no matter how impassioned, will do little to alter the views of anyone else; those who now support abortion will continue to do so, those who are opposed will continue to demand that women everywhere be subjected to the kind of butchery and negligence that was once common. But for anyone with any compassion for those unfortunates who find themselves in unfortunate circumstances and seek relief, for anyone who thinks, this is a book to read. Irving demands that we look at the picture that is larger than a knee-jerk, one-size-fits-all morality. Unfortunately, on both sides of this emotional and demanding subject, there is far too much rhetoric and too precious little thought. The Cider House Rules stands out because it is exemplary in its craftsmanship and for its story. But it also that rarest of fine novels in that it conveys the author’s arguments without becoming preachy or strident or forced; it is not a treatise disguised as a novel. It is difficult to imagine that anyone could read Mr. Irving’s work and not be a least a little swayed by his convictions. In undertaking the writing of The Cider House Rules, Mr. Irving has certainly proven himself to have been of use.

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~ by Kristin Scott on October 29, 2007.