The World According to Garp is not my favorite John Irving book, but as it is the one that he’s arguably the most famous for, I’m going to start with it. I’ll say this straight out: I am a John Irving fan. He’s not perfect (criticisms will follow) but he’s ambitious and while he can be messy, the messiness often creates a beauty all its own.
This is definitely one of his messier books that works. Irving overall seems to have Stephen King Disease, an affliction that causes him to use a lot of words to tell a story that probably could have been told using half of them. I don’t think he’s nearly as bad as King in this regard, but there are bits in this book, for instance, which don’t seem to have a lot to do with the narrative except that Irving wanted to make some sort of commentary on current social issues (what about the Ellen Jamesians needed to be said that his mother wasn’t, for instance, already saying?).
Okay, I do have to get one huge criticism of Irving of mine out of the way; this reason, in fact, is why I couldn’t in the end give the book the full-on 4 stars. For whatever reason, John Irving is just really, really bad at drawing female characters. There’s a small bit of debate out there as to whether male writers can accurately portray female characters at all (and vice versa) and to be honest I think that’s mostly bunk. I can think of lots and lots of male writers who do just fine understanding the “feminine psyche”, whatever that is. Irving is just not one of them. You kind of have to accept, going into his books, that pretty much all the female characters in there are going to be placeholders and 2-dimensional cut-outs while the males are interesting blends of bizarre idiosyncracies, horrible character issues, and just enough good things about them to make a good lot of them likeable.* I can understand that this could be off-putting for some, but, well… on the flip side, Margaret Atwood isn’t particularly good at drawing men and her books are pretty fantastic as well, so it’s not a fatal flaw in my mind.
What you do get with Irving at his best is this almost Victorian tying up of loose ends in the plot wherein a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated things alluded to at various times somehow manage to combine themselves to create extreme scenes of tragedy. This is something Irving does to the point of absurdity in A Prayer For Owen Meany,** but in Garp the car scene – if you’ve read the book, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about – is presaged at maybe 6 or 7 different points by little tics by Garp and his wife and the various antics of his children, many of which seemed so trivial that you may have glossed over them. It lends a sense of divine planning to his work, although I do have to say in the case of Garp my feelings on the heavy-handedness of this effect; it’s similar to how the movie Memento is at once brilliant and a bit overdone.
This book is more of a character study than anything else… well, it’s a lot of things, I guess. Garp defies any attempts to pigeonhole it. Anyway, my point here is that it’s not really a sports novel in any sense but at the same time there is a recurring meme with wrestling/judo being something that T.S. Garp alternately finds solace in and gets into trouble with, and then of course there’s the TG former Philadelphia Eagles tight end Roberta Muldoon. With a sprawling novel like this, there’s something for everybody, I guess.
Speaking of having something for everyone, the book can be quite funny at times. You’ll want to watch this, as Irving is not always a comedian.He’s also acutely self-referential in his earlier work, a habit he loses later on for better or for worse.*** This book is a lot of peoples’ introduction to Irving, and I think that’s fair. It has all the oddball characters and neat plotting/theme stuff you expect from him, and most of his baggage is left behind for this. I guess you could get away with reading The Cider House Rules first, but that book, while overall a higher quality piece of work, doesn’t introduce you to the first half of Irving’s career the way Garp does.
*One notable exception, I have to say, is the protagonist in A Widow For One Year. More on that book later… perhaps.
**And I even like A Prayer For Owen Meany… that’s how good of a writer Irving can be. Chances are strong I’ll talk about that book later so I’ll save my thoughts on it for later.
***Yeah… on the one hand I quite enjoyed the references to Setting Free the Bears and some of his other earlier books (I want to say that The Water-Method Man got a reference too); on the other hand, how many books have to be written where the protagonist is himself a writer? Write what you know, I get it. The problem is, the overwhelming majority of readers are not writers, don’t particularly care about writing except for the quality of the work produced, and are just as likely if not more likely to be attracted to a writer’s knowledge about non-writery things (for instance, while I was kind of “meh” on Garp’s career as a novelist, I thought his stuff on wrestling was really interesting).
A Book A Day, That's All We Ask 