Author John Irving is working on his 11th and morst complicated novel. “If he weren’t a novelist, the guy could run seminars on the art of discipline. His work ethic has always been prodigious. “How many times can I rewrite this book that is three times longer and five times more complicated than most people’s novels? More times than anybody else. If I value one thing in myself as a writer, it’s that I could work and could learn to be proud of how many times I could revisit the same sentence, the same character.”