Meany kills the mother of his best friend, the narrator Johnny Wheelwright, with a foul ball while playing in a school baseball game, but convinces himself that there is no such thing as an accident and that he is the instrument of God. It is a book for people who want life to be explicable, who can't bear loose ends.Ī Prayer for Owen Meany counterposes what we are prepared to believe in and what should we believe in. A Prayer For Owen Meany is rather too perfectly constructed. Like Garp it is unnecessarily prolix and self-interrupting, but where Garp rambled to no purpose. It contains many of the themes found in shots for the Great American novel - it's an anti-war Vietnam book, it's a rites of passage book, it's a loss of innocence, blessed childhood, where did America go wrong sort of book. But this time, Irving has found a treatment which allows him to be laboured, producing a more overtly religious gospel than Garp was - in spite of its name - about faith and what passes for faith among the children of the Founding Fathers.Ī prayer For Owen Meany concerns a schoolboy - Owen Meany - who in spite of being severely undersized, suffering a voice defect, and being tortured by his classmates, comes to command love, respect and fear before dying a hero's death. Again, there is a hectoring quality - this book is going to be good for you. Again, it concerns a captivating mother, an unidentified father, and the child of a never-repeated sexual coupling. Although the emphasis is less on the bizarre than on the consoling, the book is again a New England fable, set now in the wealthy, white community of Gravesend, New Hampshire. The same questions recur in a Prayer For Owen Meany. Even Irving's relationship with his characters was ambiguous - was he for them, against them or neutral? In place of the wit and insight that the book required, Irving could only manage a series of stilted, long-winded yarns that never seemed to reveal their underlying subject. There was, however, an emptiness in the book - a sense that like the scene on the front seat of the Buick, Irving had bitten off more than he could chew. But at the time of its publication - Monty Python was big on US college campuses just then - what mattered was that it was bizarre.
It was sick, especially when set against its academic, Waspy background. Although it was unlikely to travel, The World According To Garp caught on in America as a piece of contemporary surrealism with a handful of 'memorable' incidents - like an English major whose penis gets bitten off in a car crash. In The World According To Garp (1978), he created a set of half-comic, half-serious characters dispensing a dull New England wisdom. J ohn Irving is the author of one of the oddest cult novels ever written.
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