Damn... This comes to us from Publisher's Lunch:

John Irving's forthcoming novel is his longest-ever manuscript, at 345,000 words. But, "Twenty-eight days ago I woke up and said: It really should be in the third-person," he tells Toronto's Globe and Mail. "It's a first-person novel." Irving adds, "I don't normally like the first-person voice and I can't even remember what rationale led me to think this had to be a first-person novel, but for the five years I've been writing it, it was. And just one morning I woke up and thought: 'S--t. It's not right.' And it's already bought, you know? And I said: 'Well, too bad.' "

So he's rewriting, "eight to nine hours a day, seven days a week," trying to stay on track for publication next June.