About "The World According to Garp"
Garp was a natural storyteller, says the narrator of John Irving's incandescent novel, referring to the book's hero, the novelist Garp, who has much in common with Irving himself. He could make things up one right after the other, and they seemed to fit.
Irving packs wild characters and weird events into his classic--officially recognized as such in a Modern Library edition with a new introduction by the author--while amazingly maintaining the rough feel of realism in every scene and the pulse of life in every heart. Many novelists of his time might have populated a novel with a novelist protagonist whose life and books comment on each other and the novel we're reading. Transsexual football players, ball turret gunners lobotomized in battle, multiple adultery, unicycling bears, mad feminists who amputate their tongues in sympathy with the celebrated victim of a horrifying rape--Irving made them all people. Even the bear is a fitting character.
In a crucial episode, Garp's wife's seduction of a young man coincidentally occurs at the moment when Garp is delighting their young sons with a reckless car trick (one of the few scenes beautifully, eerily, heartbreakingly captured in the film version as well). Many authors would have been content with the harsh comedy of the scene, but Irving respects its integrity, and he builds the rest of the book on the consequences of the event. How does he get away with his killer cocktail of slapstick and horror? Because it's simply what we all face daily, rearranged into soul-satisfying art. Life is an X-rated soap opera, according to Garp, and who can contradict him?
Rereading Garp 20 years later, one is struck by how elegantly Irving structures his bizarre and complex story. Take the two most celebrated bits in the book, the Under Toad and Garp's story The Pension Grillparzer, which shimmers like an exquisite Kafkaesque insect in the amber of the novel. When Garp warns his son about the undertow at the beach, the boy imagines a monster out of Beowulf who lurks beneath the waves to suck you under: the Under Toad. It's funny at first, but we soon find that the Under Toad is a metaphor with teeth--he connects with a prophetic dream of death in The Pension Grillparzer, set in Vienna. Garp's son's last words are, It's like a dream! And as Irving--who studied at the University of Vienna--can certainly tell you, the German word for death sounds precisely like the English word toad.
All that death, and yet Garp is mainly exuberant. This story is, as Garp's stuttering writing teacher puts it, rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow. It enriches literature, and our lives. --Tim Appelo
Reviews
25.07.2008 / Chad Johnson / va
GARP REVIEW
This book is fantastic. Irving deftly mixes humor with tragedy. His skill in undeniable. It is evident in every sentence. He possesses the ablility to make the reader laugh and cry within the same scene. Superbly written and universally meaningful, you cannot go wrong with The World According to Gar...
[> more]07.07.2008 / Henry W. Wagner / Rockaway, NJ USA
Fatalistic, yet optimistic
The accomplished fantasist Gene Wolfe has been quoted as saying that his definition of good literature is "that which can be read with pleasure by an educated reader, and re-read with increased pleasure." By that standard, The World According to Garp, at least in my mind, is good literature,...
[> more]23.05.2008 / Ransom Carroll / Moving around in North America
Who shall review the reviewers?
This is a serious effort by a skilled and hard This is a serious effort by a skilled and hard working writer. It will be immediately appealing to many readers, especially young men turning around 17 or 18 who have a smattering of education. It is definitely a page-turner, so it is only when one has...
[> more]The book "The World According to Garp" belongs to the following genres:
Literary Fiction / Literary Fiction Fiction - General
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About John Irving
John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt, Jr.; March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. Some of Irving's novels, such as The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, have been bestsellers and many have been made into movies. Several of Irving's books (Garp, Meany, A Widow for One Year) and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire where Irving grew up as the son of an Exeter faculty member, Colin F.N. Irving (1941), and nephew of another, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell (1929). (Both Irving and Bissell, and other members of the Exeter community, appear somewhat disguised in many of his novels.)
Irving was in the Exeter wrestling program both as a wrestler and as an assistant coach, and w...