Country: USA
Genre: Literary
Pages: 606
Order THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP here
So Jenny waited for her brothers to clear things up. They were law-school men from Cambridge, across the river. One was a law student, the other one taught in the law school.
"Both," Garp wrote, "were of the opinion that the practice of law was vulgar, but the study of it was sublime."
John Irving is a beloved, iconic American writer. The reason for that, goes way beyond the content of his novels. The way he writes makes him very easy to love. He's an old-school, "Dickensian" * storyteller, who takes his pleasure from storytelling, rather than from his witty use of language and unlike most traditional "literary" writers, he doesn't seem to write for a misunderstood elite. He creates great, larger-than-life characters who appeals to the most readers possible. These characteristics were present in A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, but something about that novel was too "E-for-Everyone" for me, so the "Irvingites" club told me to seek THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP instead. The vibe in his National Book Award winner is indeed more mature. I'm still words, pages...even books away from seizing John Irving as a writer, but I have to say, T.S Garp and his eccentric family found their way with me a lot better than Owen Meany.
When I say John Irving is a "Dickensian" *shudders* writer, it's because of its scope and ambitions. Not only THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP covers the life of writers T.S Garp from before the cradle to beyond his grave, but it also chronicles post-war America, in which he grows up and lives in. Irving goes from the struggle of his feminist pioneer mother Jenny Fields, for the right to have a child without engaging herself to a man and from there, he goes over the stages of T.S Garp's life, one by one. His childhood spent in the private school his mother worked at, his first love and first sexual experience, the blossoming of his literary career, you see where this is going. All the way to the end of Garp's life and the older he gets, the nuttier his life is. He's constantly surrounded with women, who fiercely debate the nature of feminism all the time, his life is marked by violent events he cannot get away from, he gets tangled up in crazy sexual quid pro quo and it all transpires through his writing.
If THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP was so pleasant to me, it's that it's a compelling metanarrative puzzle. You know, the story-within-a-story thing? I'm sure you've noticed Irving's approach to Garp's life is biographical. It's the biography of a fictional character and yet, Garp's biography is written by the end of THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, by a writer named Donald Whitcomb. Is that biography, the book you're reading? I don't know. The fact that Whitcomb is mentioned in the book isn't a guaranteed he really isn't the point-of-view character (because you can make a case that he is **) There are also dips into Garp's own writing (which I didn't find interesting at all, by the way) and draw parallels to his own life. You can also almost draw as many parallel to Irving's own life. He too was born from a single mother, wrestled and wrote about Vienna a whole lot, amongst other things. The way Irving slaloms between the narrative layers of his novels keeps things fresh and unpredictable.
“Stewart, Jr. who was called Stewie Two, graduated from Steering before
Garp was even of age to enter the school; Jenny treated Stewie Two twice
for a sprained ankle and once for gonorrhea. He later went through
Harvard Business School, a staph infection, and a divorce.”
I love the bizarre themes John Irving seems to be obsessed with. Mutilation, malformation, sex (in the wildest possible ways), wrestling, Vienna, bears, writers, anxiety...all this sets up for crazy novels and yet, Irving is so nice about it, in the way he writes. He integrates these variables as a normal, almost healthy part of life. THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, really is about a writer, struggling to balance his dreams and his responsibilities, which is a boring premise, but John Irving makes is such a journey, populated with charming, colorful misfits that gives life to such dry and abstract preoccupations. The main interest to Irving's writing, so far for me, lies in his capacity to give life to ideas through scenes of fiction, which sometimes handicaps their emotional appeal greatly (and lead me to groan several times), but it's quite a talent to be able to do this in an intelligible way, that most readers can understand without needing twenty different cultural references.
The biggest downside of THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP is that Garp's own fiction is terrible. When a writer who shapes ideas through fiction writes a novel about a writer who shapes ideas through fiction, there is a real threat that things could go overboard and they do. I tried reading most of the Garp fiction segments, but gave up about ten pages in. But I can't say THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP suffers too much from it, because it's the only real flaw it has and some might not even consider it one (although I'm wondering who really enjoyed Garp's fiction). I have minor complains about the structure also, but they are asinine. There is a reason why THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP won awards and beat father time. It's both an involving portrait of a man and of an era.
THREE STARS
* I hate that word. I'm sorry for using it.
** If you want to debate this point with me, I'll be happy to do so. But please let's do this via email and not spoil the book for its potential readers.
Classic Award Winner