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Fiction. Literature. HTML:A special 40th anniversary edition of the bestselling coming-of-age classic novel by John Irving, with a new introduction by the author. "He is more than popular. He is a Populist, determined to keep alive the Dickensian tradition that revels in colorful set pieces...and teaches moral lessons."â??The New York Times The opening sentence of John Irving's breakout novel, The World According to Garp, signals the start of sexual violence, which becomes increasingly political. "Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater." Jenny is an unmarried nurse; she becomes a single mom and a feminist leader, beloved but polarizing. Her son, Garp, is less beloved, but no less polarizing. From the tragicomic tone of its first sentence to its mordantly funny last lineâ??"we are all terminal cases"â??The World According to Garp maintains a breakneck pace. The subject of sexual hatredâ??of intolerance of sexual minorities and differencesâ??runs the gamut of "lunacy and sorrow." Winner of the National Book Award, Garp is a comedy with forebodings of doom. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countriesâ??with more than ten million copies in printâ??Garp is the precursor of John Irving's… (more)
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In its portrayal of fringe and sexual politics, the novel never fails to stimulate the reader's interest. Few will ever forget Roberta (formerly Robert) Muldoon, a retired football player. As with many of Irving's works, the novel traces through a series of set-pieces, some outrageously funny, some undeniably dark, many a combination of the two. Infidelity, paranoia, fame and crushing grief all play their parts.
In the end, people stumble trying to determine what the book is "about"; therein lies the mistake. Life is not about anything, but what you make of it. The reader lives, loves, laughs and lies along with Garp. Rather than relying on cheap thrills to hold interest, the characters themselves manage this - you will not be able to stop without finding out what happens next.
Not my favourite I have to admit, but written with his usual humour for quite uncomfortable subjects. I wasn't sure if I had missed the point, but when you read his afterword in the book, you realize that John Irving was a bit unsure himself and only realized when his son told him that the book was about loss and losing things dear to you! that this was in fact the case. Every dads nightmare about keeping his family safe.
anyway, the book.
Irvingâs prose was solid but didnât quite mimic the richness of the screen version for me. nonetheless, the book was epic in scope and satisfying. i loved being able to see more into the lives of the people in Garpâs life, especially his mother. it felt like a life, a whole life, when i finished the book. like i had witnessed something special and real and meaningful even if it wasnât profound.
twists and turns throughout the novel gave it an interesting flavor that also served to keep it on the verge of tongue-in-cheek to the end. ironies and metaphors abound that reach out into greater philosophies but they only ask questions or make gentle assumptions. iâm not sure if Irving put a lot his own life into this (iâm fairly certain he did) but it seemed like he might have been writing a whimsical bit of fiction in which he could explore some of his own aspirations and write out or publish some of his own âlesserâ works like the excerpts and short stories written by Garp.
if Irving had scratched the surface a little deeper, i think something truly great and timeless would have emerged. the meandering story felt out-of-focus fuzzy or tilt-shifted where only foreground objects were sharp and the host context was an impressionistâs painting. still, this story will stay with me in ways that other, âdeeper,â novels will not.
Mr. Irving sure does love writing novels about men who like older women. He sure does like starting those novels well before the actual story starts, which leaves you reading 200 pages of boring
This all might be forgivable except that Irving is very much a plot-driven author. His writing is solid and all but it's the characters that get you through his bloated works. And when you're reading basically the same story for the 3rd time, well, those characters aren't quite so compelling anymore.
This theme is often repeated through the book, and I suspect that its repetition was no accident. John Irving is not one to waste words. And so, if he says a thing more than once, I take it he wants his readers to
The World According to Garp is a modern-day classic at the level â in their own time â of the works of such literary mainstays as Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens. It contains its own kind of pathos, its own kind of humor, its own kind of grandiosity. In short, the novel is big in every respect.
When I first saw the film 20 or 30 years ago, I loved it. At the time (or shortly before that time), my girlfriend in college had praised the book and told me I ought to read it. Snob that I was, I didnât. At the time, I wouldnât touch anything newer than Chaucer or â worst case â Fielding. My loss (as Iâve come to realize 20 or 30 years later). That, or I first needed to grow up.
There are several âquotablesâ in Irvingâs book. Iâve already spearheaded this review with one of them. But there are othersâŠ.
âLife,â Garp wrote, âis sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead, an ending occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All thatâs left is memory. But a nihilist has a memoryâ (p. 582, ibid).
There are, of course, others that simply wouldnât make any sense (or strike a reader dumb) out of context. But in context, theyâre gems.
Irving is not a stylist in the truest sense of the word, but he is a story-teller almost sans pareille. The World According to Garp is over 600 pages in length â something almost unheard of in our day and celebration of Patience Little & Attention Spanless. But I, for one, havenât been as captivated by a novel since â oh, I donât know â Tom Jones; pretty much anything contained in La ComĂ©die humaine; Great Expectations; Bleak House or David Copperfield.
âNough said. If you havenât already read it, do yourself a favor: read the book, then watch the movie. Maybe you, too, will arrive at the same conclusion: viz., that John Irving and George Roy Hill (the Director of the film) are a pair of American classics almost on a par with Mark Twain.
Overall, I liked the novel. It's main flaw was that Irving stresses the complexity of characters so much through his novelist, Garp, but some of his characters seem very black and white and their complexity is never explained. What made Kenny Truckenmiller into the desperate figure he became? What caused the insecurities of Michael Milton? It seemed that Irving believed that everyone was complex and no one is black and white, except for conservative hillbillies and horny college students. His inability to explain these characters better served to detract from one of the major themes of the novel.
However, despite that flaw, it was well written, although preachy at times. Irving definitely knows how to hook a reader, and I found that I couldn't put it down. The complexity of the themes and overall purpose of the novel did leave me thinking about it a bit after I finished reading it. Irving clearly has a special talent as a story teller and this book deserves to still be read over thirty years after it was originally printed.
(I am glad that the version I read did not have this cover on it.)
Garp grows up, becoming interested in sex, wrestling, and writing fictionâthree topics in which his mother has little interest. He launches his writing career, courts and marries the wrestling coach's daughter, and fathers three children. Meanwhile, his mother suddenly becomes a feminist icon after publishing a best-selling autobiography called A Sexual Suspect (referring to the general assessment of her as a woman who does not care to bind herself to a man, and who chooses to raise a child on her own).
Garp and his family experience dark and violent events through which the characters change and grow. Garp learns (often painfully) from the women in his life (including transsexual ex-football player Roberta Muldoon) struggling to become more tolerant in the face of intolerance. The story is decidedly rich with (in the words of the fictional Garp's teacher) "lunacy and sorrow," and the sometimes ridiculous chains of events the characters experience still resonate with painful truth.
One of the most interesting aspects of the novel are the several framed narratives embedded within the narrative, including: Garp's first novella, The Pension Grillparzer; a short story; and a portion of one of his novels, The World According to Bensenhaver. The book also contains some motifs that reappear in other Irving novels: bears, wrestling, Vienna, New England, people who are uninterested in having sex, and a complex Dickensian plot that spans the protagonist's whole life. Adultery (another common Irving motif) also plays a large part, culminating in one of the novel's most harrowing and memorable scenes.
The combination of unusual events makes this one of the most interesting, albeit strange, novels that I have read. However, after being diappointed with Irving's next novel, The Hotel New Hampshire, I have yet to read another of his works.
This book has everything â a great story, wonderful writing and storytelling, and characters that you care about. Sometimes John Irving had these beautiful, complex sentences with coordinating or subordinating clauses. I love it when an author focuses on the art of writing instead of focusing on the art of writing crappy bestsellers. The World According to Garp also has sexual content and violence (war injuries, rape, car accidents, etc.) if you like that sort of thing.
Garp is a writer (as well as his mother Jenny Fields), so John Irving included a lot of Garp's own writing. It's interesting to see how Irving develops Garp's distinct writing style, so it's a writing style within a writing style.
By the way, I think it's sick how Jenny Fields conceives Garp.
What I also loved about this book was all of the references to other classics such as books from Homer, Woolf, Conrad, Twain, Melville, Dickens, Hemingway and Dostoyevsky. I especially enjoyed Garp's discussion with Mrs. Ralph about Dostoyevsky's The Eternal Husband. I've never read it, but after reading their discussion about it, I'm intrigued. Garp described the book as "a wonderful story," "neatly complicated," with "complex characters." Mrs. Ralph described it as "a sick story" and "His women are less than objects. They don't even have a shape. They're just ideas that men talk about and play with." Now I want to find out who is correct.
I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a great classic.
(I liked/understood A Prayer for
Irving is, after reading A Prayer For Owen Meany and The World According To Garp, my favourite writer.
Jenny Fields becomes a nurse and because she doesn't particularly like men decides to use one for
On their return to the US Garp finds that his mother has become famous or infamous depending on your gender and sets up a kind of refuge for women. Garp himself manages to get a book published but not to the same critical acclaim or financially successful, he marries bookish Helen with whom he has two young sons and becomes a house husband. Years later a horrific accident involving the entire family leaves one dead and the remainder horribly injured. Years later Jenny Fields is assassinated.
I won't give any more of the plot away but will state that included within the novel are excerpts from Garp's own published works. The subjects that are covered are wide ranging taking in death, feminism, friendship, infidelity, loss, parenthood, rape to name but a few but the over-riding theme is lust. There are several horrific incidents and certainly rape and murder are not particularly funny yet despite their horror you still end up laughing out loud which says much for Irving's writing style. Now I loved this book (in particular the book excerpts which I found really enjoyable and shows great imagination) however, I must say that I was a little disappointed with the final chapter which is written as a kind of epilogue. Personally I did not feel that it was at all necessary to try and tidy up all the loose ends but this is only a minor complaint and do not feel that it really detracted from the overall.
My complaints are few but: the parts where it had Garp's writings I thought were boring. I tried to read them, and