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The World According to Garp
This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes—even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with "lunacy and sorrow"; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries—with more than ten million copies in print—this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: "In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases."
610 pages, Hardcover
First published April 24, 1978
3499 people are currently reading
107490 people want to read
About the author
John Irving
176 books15.7k followersJOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven.
Mr. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times—winning once, in 1980, for his novel The World According to Garp. He received an O. Henry Award in 1981 for his short story “Interior Space.” In 2000, Mr. Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his novel In One Person.
An international writer—his novels have been translated into more than thirty-five languages—John Irving lives in Toronto. His all-time best-selling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Avenue of Mysteries is his fourteenth novel.
Mr. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times—winning once, in 1980, for his novel The World According to Garp. He received an O. Henry Award in 1981 for his short story “Interior Space.” In 2000, Mr. Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his novel In One Person.
An international writer—his novels have been translated into more than thirty-five languages—John Irving lives in Toronto. His all-time best-selling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Avenue of Mysteries is his fourteenth novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 7,322 reviews
June 5, 2007
This book is one of my favorites. Because I like it so much, I'm not going to say much, except that it's always worth reading, even if you have read it before.
There's a scene in this book it's a revealed that a high-up publisher gives all his manuscripts to his cleaning lady, and she's the one that tells him whether they're worth publishing or not. When he asks her why she read a particularly disturbing novel, she answers "To find out what happens next." Later, she adds, "A book's true when you can say "yeah! That's how damn people behave all the time."
This says a lot about John Irving. I love John Irving in particular, partly because I'm always wondering what's always going to happen next, and partly because, despite all the outrageousness of his characters, they behave the way real people behave.
Of course, I wouldn't want to be a John Irving character,because terrible things are always happening to them. They're orphaned, abandoned, stranded, confused or unhappily pregnant. They're the victims of rape, car accidents, and infidelity. They're a mess (and Garp may get the worst lot of all) but that's why I like them. Some authors fade to black when things get gruesome, messy, or explicit, but John Irving never does (and life never does). Some authors use disasters or deaths or drama to end their novels, but John Irving understands that those things aren't really closure, they don't really end anything; they just force you to get up and continue, wounded or not.
I could continue for a while, about John Irving, and why I love him, but as they said on Reading Rainbow, "Don't take my word for it..."
There's a scene in this book it's a revealed that a high-up publisher gives all his manuscripts to his cleaning lady, and she's the one that tells him whether they're worth publishing or not. When he asks her why she read a particularly disturbing novel, she answers "To find out what happens next." Later, she adds, "A book's true when you can say "yeah! That's how damn people behave all the time."
This says a lot about John Irving. I love John Irving in particular, partly because I'm always wondering what's always going to happen next, and partly because, despite all the outrageousness of his characters, they behave the way real people behave.
Of course, I wouldn't want to be a John Irving character,because terrible things are always happening to them. They're orphaned, abandoned, stranded, confused or unhappily pregnant. They're the victims of rape, car accidents, and infidelity. They're a mess (and Garp may get the worst lot of all) but that's why I like them. Some authors fade to black when things get gruesome, messy, or explicit, but John Irving never does (and life never does). Some authors use disasters or deaths or drama to end their novels, but John Irving understands that those things aren't really closure, they don't really end anything; they just force you to get up and continue, wounded or not.
I could continue for a while, about John Irving, and why I love him, but as they said on Reading Rainbow, "Don't take my word for it..."
August 1, 2012
I had heard so much positive about this book...that it was on my 'Books to Read Before I Die'...list.
Well, I will die with having read 1/2 of it. I kept reading, I guess...because of how great it was supposed to be. I mean...John Irving! I got to the half way point and thought..."Where is this going?!" I then realized I really didn't care. And put it down. Page after page, I finally came to the realization there wasn't enough of a story/plot to get me to turn another page.
'So many books...too little time.'
Well, I will die with having read 1/2 of it. I kept reading, I guess...because of how great it was supposed to be. I mean...John Irving! I got to the half way point and thought..."Where is this going?!" I then realized I really didn't care. And put it down. Page after page, I finally came to the realization there wasn't enough of a story/plot to get me to turn another page.
'So many books...too little time.'
January 9, 2022
A dry witted, sarcastic masterpiece, the funniest novel Irving wrote and dealing with the creative process, free love, emancipation, and parenthood.
A cool fact about Irvings´ writing style is how he mixes epic descriptions with prosaic, short passages and especially hides shocking plot twists in a way that creates ultimate WTF moments that leave the reader staggering between laughing and catatonia. And he does it again and again, one reads, doesn´t expect something because everything is easygoing, subtle, and funny and again, insidious out of nothing, bam, in your face, the next attack in the quality of a high class thriller.
Another trademark is that the characters are often partly omniscient, extremely smart, and close to mentalists and oracles, but stay stoic and ultra badass cool regarding their own fate, happenings around them, the world in general, quite kind of Chuck Norris style like „John Irvings´ characters don´t get surprised by calamities, calamities are awaited by emotionless superhuman psi powered protagonists and then ignored.“
The novel gets really dark towards the end and I guess that the one or other reader might not finish it for this reason, but the allegories and metaphors around abuse and how society and victims react to it, leave room for endless discussions and interpretations. And when I say dark I mean worse than normal horror with jump scares and then it´s over, this is a terror that stays forever with one in the readers' mind.
When the novel was released in 1978 the themes, especially transsexuality, sexual abuse, and feminism, were surrounded by, for today's standards, unbelievable conservatism, bigotry, stigmas, and hatred and the reason why Garp was Irvings´ breakthrough may lie too in the unique way he dealt with those topics and brought them to a broader audience. And his genius, of course.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
A cool fact about Irvings´ writing style is how he mixes epic descriptions with prosaic, short passages and especially hides shocking plot twists in a way that creates ultimate WTF moments that leave the reader staggering between laughing and catatonia. And he does it again and again, one reads, doesn´t expect something because everything is easygoing, subtle, and funny and again, insidious out of nothing, bam, in your face, the next attack in the quality of a high class thriller.
Another trademark is that the characters are often partly omniscient, extremely smart, and close to mentalists and oracles, but stay stoic and ultra badass cool regarding their own fate, happenings around them, the world in general, quite kind of Chuck Norris style like „John Irvings´ characters don´t get surprised by calamities, calamities are awaited by emotionless superhuman psi powered protagonists and then ignored.“
The novel gets really dark towards the end and I guess that the one or other reader might not finish it for this reason, but the allegories and metaphors around abuse and how society and victims react to it, leave room for endless discussions and interpretations. And when I say dark I mean worse than normal horror with jump scares and then it´s over, this is a terror that stays forever with one in the readers' mind.
When the novel was released in 1978 the themes, especially transsexuality, sexual abuse, and feminism, were surrounded by, for today's standards, unbelievable conservatism, bigotry, stigmas, and hatred and the reason why Garp was Irvings´ breakthrough may lie too in the unique way he dealt with those topics and brought them to a broader audience. And his genius, of course.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
January 29, 2008
I'd say that "Lolita" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" are the two best written books I've ever read. But if I had to pick my all time favorite book I'd probably go with "The World According to Garp". Irving takes us on the path of T.S. Garp's life from conception to death and I was enthralled every step of the way. This book is full of humanity, full of both light and dark humor, and full of insight into the human condition. Irving took over from Charles Dickens and put his own unique spin on telling a tale and creating characters that stay with you. I'll also add that while the movie based on it is less than a masterpiece (not that it wasn't a valiant effort to condense a lenghthy complex story), Robin Williams gave an admirable performance that showed he had a lot more range and substance as an actor than most people probably realized at the time, and John Lithgow was nothing short of glorious. But this not a movie review, so let me conclude by stating that if you are a fan of masterful story telling and larger than life but still quite realistic characters, pick up this book. I'm jealous of everyone who gets to accomplish what I can do no longer - to read this wonderful book for the very first time.
October 10, 2021
Beautifully bawdy, is there any other way to describe it? Sex is funny--far from the holy institution many make it out to be--and John Irving understands that. There's the usual--academia, Vienna, sex, New England, handicaps, stories-within-stories, squash, bears, whores, wrestling, writers, circuses, India--but this is one of the books that helped cement these elements as 'the usual' when discussing John Irving. The World According to Garp is hilarious and surprisingly violent. Charming but not sugary--at times there's much not to like about TS Garp and he seems like the world's biggest deadbeat, but it makes him human and simply adds to the appeal. What I really want is for John Irving to tell me a bed time story like the one Garp tells Walt and Helen--oh wait, he just did, though the version I got is much too long for a single night and would have to be told like One Thousand and One Nights.
May 1, 2025
It was not an easy book for me, I read about 30 pages in one sitting, I used to wonder what the hell I was reading here... but I found the desire to return again and again.
February 15, 2010
Dull, dull, dull. Boring people doing boring things. Even the sex is boring.
I've spent some time wondering whether everyone is so boring because it's the world according to Garp, and Garp himself is boring. The novel is cleverly structured (it could be a literary theorist's wet dream); Garp himself is a novelist, and shards of his work appear throughout this novel, including the third chapter of his third novel, The World According to Bensenhaver. (Excuse me if I got the name wrong). Both start with rape (well, in the case of Garp, that's pushing it, but the relationship is clearly intentional). Lots of clever stuff that might be interesting to think about... Is Garp so boring because his (boring) mom ascribes all the world's problems to "lust," which she understands about as well as the Victorians who put dresses on table legs? (I shouldn't demean the Victorians; they had it all over her.)
There's plenty of stuff that could be interesting. There's plenty of stuff that could be funny. There's even plenty of stuff that could be sexy. There's a scene that could be interesting, hilarious, and sexy, when Garp's mother hires a high-class Viennese prostitute to explain "lust." Since the prostitute doesn't speak English, and the mom doesn't speak German, Garp (who's just graduated from an exclusive prep school) has to translate. But this scene doesn't work any better than any of the others.
At the end of the day, Garp is a book about boring people being boring.
I've spent some time wondering whether everyone is so boring because it's the world according to Garp, and Garp himself is boring. The novel is cleverly structured (it could be a literary theorist's wet dream); Garp himself is a novelist, and shards of his work appear throughout this novel, including the third chapter of his third novel, The World According to Bensenhaver. (Excuse me if I got the name wrong). Both start with rape (well, in the case of Garp, that's pushing it, but the relationship is clearly intentional). Lots of clever stuff that might be interesting to think about... Is Garp so boring because his (boring) mom ascribes all the world's problems to "lust," which she understands about as well as the Victorians who put dresses on table legs? (I shouldn't demean the Victorians; they had it all over her.)
There's plenty of stuff that could be interesting. There's plenty of stuff that could be funny. There's even plenty of stuff that could be sexy. There's a scene that could be interesting, hilarious, and sexy, when Garp's mother hires a high-class Viennese prostitute to explain "lust." Since the prostitute doesn't speak English, and the mom doesn't speak German, Garp (who's just graduated from an exclusive prep school) has to translate. But this scene doesn't work any better than any of the others.
At the end of the day, Garp is a book about boring people being boring.
September 20, 2020
Indeed there are enough freaks & sufficient eccentricity here to make this a SUPER enjoyable read. It lacks what the only other Irving novel I've read so far, "A Prayer for Owen Meany," has plenty of: principally melancholia. It deviates to a semibiography of a writer, from an incredible birth story involving a strictly asexual nurse and a vegetable (memento from the war) named Garp. The name is onomatopoeia. She becomes an early figure of the feminist movement. Hilarity ensues...
The son, Garp, is a writer who becomes one to "conquer the girl." Forgive my disgust for this Norman Rockwell portrait, this American fairy tale convention...
But wait a minute. This is like a distortion of a Rockwell American dreamscape, really. There are mutilations aplenty. Garp's life is one of self-awareness & inflated-to-the-point-of-exploding superego. There are poetic afterthoughts and wondrous threads of whimsy. But though I must admit parts read like my all-time-fave "Confederacy of Dunces" (keeping colloquialisms intact!), this is No masterpiece. But it IS a front runner in modern-day fiction... and I can't help but think that this one started all these moder-day melodramas rife with style (emblematic quirks in character, caricaturization of "serious" players...) over substance (...depth).
The son, Garp, is a writer who becomes one to "conquer the girl." Forgive my disgust for this Norman Rockwell portrait, this American fairy tale convention...
But wait a minute. This is like a distortion of a Rockwell American dreamscape, really. There are mutilations aplenty. Garp's life is one of self-awareness & inflated-to-the-point-of-exploding superego. There are poetic afterthoughts and wondrous threads of whimsy. But though I must admit parts read like my all-time-fave "Confederacy of Dunces" (keeping colloquialisms intact!), this is No masterpiece. But it IS a front runner in modern-day fiction... and I can't help but think that this one started all these moder-day melodramas rife with style (emblematic quirks in character, caricaturization of "serious" players...) over substance (...depth).
February 7, 2017
This broke my heart, then broke my heart a little more every time. Why did I continue? Habit, I guess. It’s damn well written even if not really a dazzling ball of a time. I always read through the pages no matter how upsetting because something better might happen, or something else. I guess in this case it paid off because, if you’re reading this, then I’ve written a review. I promised myself I’m going to write something worthwhile, but honestly I feel like this won’t live up to the sincerity, this’ll probably be crap. I just hope it’s the kind of crap that’ll make you feel better, or the kind of crap that’ll emphasize something important you already know, or the kind of crap that feels real, like my experience with this book. Well, here goes.
The World According to Garp is a powerful caricature of life’s odds and evens, a condensed experience of what hearts go through in all the years you’ve had and all that’s left. The novel tells the birth, life, and death of T.S. Garp, father, husband, son, writer, feminist, wrestler, and cook. His joys, his troubles, his weaknesses, his anxieties, all abound in the pages.
There really is a sort of characteristic richness to American literature that separates their body of work from other countries, and there is no better writer who exemplifies this literary richness like John Irving. It is a dying form really, works of grand narratives and sweeping lifetimes. But maybe in this dying field this book of fatalities called The World According to Garp is one of the best ever written. I know, it is quite unfair to generalize this as a book about deaths, quite hard to really pinpoint what the central theme is. It mires itself in a whole range of issues from feminism, rape, sexuality, infidelity, and parenting to name a few. In any case, it’s a book about life, fittingly, chock full with deaths. It’s also a very forward-thinking book about women and their plight, especially for a book written in the 70s. It’s a book about a lot of things, somewhat a little too muddled at times, but it’s its got its heart in the right place, and a lot of heart it has.
One of the more significant elements to this novel is marriage. I’ve always approached the topic with careful apprehension. Not because of any experience, my parents’ marriage is fine despite its blemishes, better than most I would think. However these days I’m not sure about how practical it can be, especially among my disillusioned generation. Despite that, Garp’s marriage gives me a little insight to the flawed sensibility of marriage, if not its perfection. I have never forgiven nor tolerated infidelity. I’ve suffered at the receiving end of it, and it is one of the worst experiences a human can withstand. In my experience, I never forgave her. Yet in this case, I understood how married people can survive it. How marriage can work despite rough, gruelling patches. How parents, husbands, wives can learn to forgive, if not for each other, then for their children. I felt hurt reading this, but I felt love despite the faithless nature of human beings. Its raw emotions got through to me, I felt the glasses in my heart break and mend. I don’t want to seem impressionable, but after some thinking maybe marriage might not totally be a bad idea after all, just maybe.
There is this recurring theme in the novel of an ‘under toad,’ called as it is because Garp’s youngest son, always warned to be careful of the sea’s undertow by his parents, mishears it as ‘under toad’ and has always imagined a giant toad hiding under the sea ready to drown him if he ever strays too far. This symbolic under toad would go on to represent the anxieties and fears of Garp and his family, especially with regards to death. A living being, an amphibious undertaker, whose presence one never detects until it has come and plucked you with its tongue like an insect to be devoured. It does seem like an appropriate analogy. Like the underwater current transformed into a giant amphibious monster, maybe we do indeed transform death into a monster of our own imaginings. And maybe what we dread and loathe is something different from the final departure of a beloved. Often we fear the monster inside our heads, but then maybe what we fear is, in reality, a peaceful current taking those we love into the eternal sea we too shall reach one day. Is it really so dreadful? Maybe life really is like that, maybe the things that hurt appear from time to time, cloaked with our anxiety amplifying our pain. Usually it’s the surprise that elevates our suffering, coming out of nowhere, not unlike a slippery beast ensnaring its unsuspecting prey. It hits us when we are most vulnerable and we crumble as a result. You can’t blame people for seeing it worse than it is, but you can help the bereaved feel that life still has more in store for them, that life is still rich, that people come and go but our memories and our stories can never be taken by the monsters inside our heads. And in the same space occupied by our monsters, our anxieties, there lies our memories and the stories of the angels we hold dear. Life is bittersweet, but it’s not so bad, right?
“Horace Walpole once said that the world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel. I hope you’ll agree with me that Horace Walpole somewhat simplifies the world by saying this. Surely both of us think and feel.”
Garp always says that life is a tragic comedy, he’s not wrong. In life our strongest memories are often associated with either laughing or crying. Not opposite emotional responses but two beautiful things. When we cry it helps lessen the pain we feel, when we laugh it provides an outlet of joy we can share to those around us. They’re both infectious mechanisms as well, these outward manifestations of emotions like sadness and mirth enable us to empathize to the people who exhibit them. We all experience one or the other, sometimes, amazingly, both at the same time. Isn’t that also a nice aspect to life?
People are born, they fall in love, have children, make mistakes, they cry, they live through their mistakes, they forgive, they make mistakes again, they learn, they laugh, they grow old, then they die. Haha. Life is funny, is painful, it’s messy, it’s meandering, it’s even repetitive, but hey, it feels real, so does this book.
The World According to Garp is a powerful caricature of life’s odds and evens, a condensed experience of what hearts go through in all the years you’ve had and all that’s left. The novel tells the birth, life, and death of T.S. Garp, father, husband, son, writer, feminist, wrestler, and cook. His joys, his troubles, his weaknesses, his anxieties, all abound in the pages.
There really is a sort of characteristic richness to American literature that separates their body of work from other countries, and there is no better writer who exemplifies this literary richness like John Irving. It is a dying form really, works of grand narratives and sweeping lifetimes. But maybe in this dying field this book of fatalities called The World According to Garp is one of the best ever written. I know, it is quite unfair to generalize this as a book about deaths, quite hard to really pinpoint what the central theme is. It mires itself in a whole range of issues from feminism, rape, sexuality, infidelity, and parenting to name a few. In any case, it’s a book about life, fittingly, chock full with deaths. It’s also a very forward-thinking book about women and their plight, especially for a book written in the 70s. It’s a book about a lot of things, somewhat a little too muddled at times, but it’s its got its heart in the right place, and a lot of heart it has.
One of the more significant elements to this novel is marriage. I’ve always approached the topic with careful apprehension. Not because of any experience, my parents’ marriage is fine despite its blemishes, better than most I would think. However these days I’m not sure about how practical it can be, especially among my disillusioned generation. Despite that, Garp’s marriage gives me a little insight to the flawed sensibility of marriage, if not its perfection. I have never forgiven nor tolerated infidelity. I’ve suffered at the receiving end of it, and it is one of the worst experiences a human can withstand. In my experience, I never forgave her. Yet in this case, I understood how married people can survive it. How marriage can work despite rough, gruelling patches. How parents, husbands, wives can learn to forgive, if not for each other, then for their children. I felt hurt reading this, but I felt love despite the faithless nature of human beings. Its raw emotions got through to me, I felt the glasses in my heart break and mend. I don’t want to seem impressionable, but after some thinking maybe marriage might not totally be a bad idea after all, just maybe.
There is this recurring theme in the novel of an ‘under toad,’ called as it is because Garp’s youngest son, always warned to be careful of the sea’s undertow by his parents, mishears it as ‘under toad’ and has always imagined a giant toad hiding under the sea ready to drown him if he ever strays too far. This symbolic under toad would go on to represent the anxieties and fears of Garp and his family, especially with regards to death. A living being, an amphibious undertaker, whose presence one never detects until it has come and plucked you with its tongue like an insect to be devoured. It does seem like an appropriate analogy. Like the underwater current transformed into a giant amphibious monster, maybe we do indeed transform death into a monster of our own imaginings. And maybe what we dread and loathe is something different from the final departure of a beloved. Often we fear the monster inside our heads, but then maybe what we fear is, in reality, a peaceful current taking those we love into the eternal sea we too shall reach one day. Is it really so dreadful? Maybe life really is like that, maybe the things that hurt appear from time to time, cloaked with our anxiety amplifying our pain. Usually it’s the surprise that elevates our suffering, coming out of nowhere, not unlike a slippery beast ensnaring its unsuspecting prey. It hits us when we are most vulnerable and we crumble as a result. You can’t blame people for seeing it worse than it is, but you can help the bereaved feel that life still has more in store for them, that life is still rich, that people come and go but our memories and our stories can never be taken by the monsters inside our heads. And in the same space occupied by our monsters, our anxieties, there lies our memories and the stories of the angels we hold dear. Life is bittersweet, but it’s not so bad, right?
“Horace Walpole once said that the world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel. I hope you’ll agree with me that Horace Walpole somewhat simplifies the world by saying this. Surely both of us think and feel.”
Garp always says that life is a tragic comedy, he’s not wrong. In life our strongest memories are often associated with either laughing or crying. Not opposite emotional responses but two beautiful things. When we cry it helps lessen the pain we feel, when we laugh it provides an outlet of joy we can share to those around us. They’re both infectious mechanisms as well, these outward manifestations of emotions like sadness and mirth enable us to empathize to the people who exhibit them. We all experience one or the other, sometimes, amazingly, both at the same time. Isn’t that also a nice aspect to life?
People are born, they fall in love, have children, make mistakes, they cry, they live through their mistakes, they forgive, they make mistakes again, they learn, they laugh, they grow old, then they die. Haha. Life is funny, is painful, it’s messy, it’s meandering, it’s even repetitive, but hey, it feels real, so does this book.
June 24, 2016
Oh My ---I think I need to read this again........
Maybe I was on drugs the first time I read it.................(wait: I didn't do drugs --even during the 60's while living in Berkeley .....I was a straight arrow)! Maybe that was my problem........
Help.............I must read this book again!
I have my reasons --I'm leaving it at that!
Maybe I was on drugs the first time I read it.................(wait: I didn't do drugs --even during the 60's while living in Berkeley .....I was a straight arrow)! Maybe that was my problem........
Help.............I must read this book again!
I have my reasons --I'm leaving it at that!
February 1, 2024
Mark Twain said to "Write what you know".
This seems to be advice John Irving has taken to heart. I swear, each of his novels has the same characters with different names and hairstyles, which leads me to think his novels are partially autobiographical.
The World according to Garp is no exception. As in many other Irving novels, we have:
•A boy who attends a private boy's school in New England
•A boy who grows up fatherless
•A main character who is an author
•A character who enjoys wrestling and/or playing squash or other Rich-People-Sport
•A secretive mother
There are also large excerpts from said author-character's books (boring).
I'm sure I could come up with more if I thought about it for a few minutes but I got things to do and don't want to spend more time on this novel than I already did.
It's not bad - it's well-written. Irving is a good storyteller and brings his characters to life.... all 4 or 5 of them that make up his stories.
I think I'm done with his books because it was a real chore to get through this one, even though I was really "into" it at various times. It's too similar to all the other books of his I've read.
Also, it could/should have been half as long. His books almost always make me wish they'd gone to the chopping block - a few times. (A Prayer for Owen Meany being the exception though that's also the first book of his I read.)
This seems to be advice John Irving has taken to heart. I swear, each of his novels has the same characters with different names and hairstyles, which leads me to think his novels are partially autobiographical.
The World according to Garp is no exception. As in many other Irving novels, we have:
•A boy who attends a private boy's school in New England
•A boy who grows up fatherless
•A main character who is an author
•A character who enjoys wrestling and/or playing squash or other Rich-People-Sport
•A secretive mother
There are also large excerpts from said author-character's books (boring).
I'm sure I could come up with more if I thought about it for a few minutes but I got things to do and don't want to spend more time on this novel than I already did.
It's not bad - it's well-written. Irving is a good storyteller and brings his characters to life.... all 4 or 5 of them that make up his stories.
I think I'm done with his books because it was a real chore to get through this one, even though I was really "into" it at various times. It's too similar to all the other books of his I've read.
Also, it could/should have been half as long. His books almost always make me wish they'd gone to the chopping block - a few times. (A Prayer for Owen Meany being the exception though that's also the first book of his I read.)
December 29, 2019
My introduction to the fiction of John Irving is The World According To Garp. My familiarity with the author was limited to two film adaptations of his work that I've seen: The Cider House Rules which I recall well, and The World According To Garp, which has fled my memory. That meant I opened this book, published in 1976, with few expectations or comparisons. Stuffed with vignettes that alternate between the picturesque, risque, silly and tedious, I was often tickled by the writing and at times moved by the insight Irving soaked from his characters, but like a party guest who sticks a lampshade on his head, the author wore me down and I wanted him to stop.
Irving qualifies as a good storyteller and knows how to begin a chapter well, and a novel:
Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater. This was shortly after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and people were being tolerant of soldiers, because suddenly everyone was a soldier, but Jenny Fields was quite firm in her intolerance of the behavior of men in general and soldiers in particular. In the movie theater she had to move three times, but each time the soldier moved closer to her until she was sitting against the musty wall, her view of the newsreel almost blocked by some silly colonnade, and she resolved she would not get up and move again. The soldier moved once more and sat beside her.
The narrative begins with a 22-year-old nurse named Jenny Fields, whose family is based on the New Hampshire shore at Dog's Head Harbor and maintains a small fortune from their ownership of a shoe factory. Feeling detached from her family, Jenny attends Wellesley to major in English literature, but drops out when she suspects her parents and older brothers expect her college enrollment to result in dating and marying a well-bred man. She finds a practical vocation with a very comfortable uniform and goes into nursing, carrying a scalpel in her purse for close encounters like those in the movie theater.
Applying herself to the maternity ward at Boston Mercy, Jenny Fields determines that she'd like to find a man to make her pregnant one day (in one try) and then go away. This offends both those who think she's joking and those who suspect she isn't. As Garp wrote of his mother's dilemma: "Her colleagues detected that she felt herself superior to them. Nobody's colleagues appreciate this." Transferred to a trauma unit, she cares for Technical Sergeant Garp, a ball turret gunner who catches flak that amounts to a prefrontal lobotomy. Capable of pronouncing one word ("Garp"), Jenny Fields surmises that her patient is a Goner, but small and neat and as mindless as a young child.
Thus was the world given T.S. Garp: born from a good nurse with a will of her own, and the seed of a ball turret gunner--his last shot.
Hired as a school nurse at the all-boys prep school in New Hampshire her father and brothers attended, Jenny Fields lives on campus and her son--known as "Garp"--grows up in the infirmary annex. Later named head nurse, his mother continues her education by building the most renowned private library at The Steering School and sitting in on classes, determining which would most benefit her son when he becomes a student. She overlooks athletics and when a teenaged Garp searches for a sport not involving balls, stumbles onto the wrestling program, befriending the divorced coach and his teenaged daughter, Helen Holm, who initially mistakes Jenny Fields for her estranged mother.
Garp writes a short story every month from freshman year to graduation. To impress Helen, he determines that he'll be a writer, making college pointless to him. Helen suggests he travel to Europe and when Garp discusses the idea with his mother, she decides to go with him. Selecting a postwar, post-Soviet occupation Vienna, on the advice of his English teacher and mentor Mr. Tinch, Garp discovers that Jenny Fields has some writing to do of her own. While he mostly pens puffed up letters to Helen, Jenny Fields completes her autobiography. Titled A Sexual Suspect, Jenny marches it into the office of a publisher in New York and not only sells it, but becomes a feminist icon.
Garp seduces Helen with the short story he completes in Vienna. Garp's first published work becomes, in the view of his wife Helen, the best he's ever written. Garp and Helen begin a family immediately, overwhelming Garp with anxiety and over-protectiveness of their two sons, Duncan and Walt. His lust diverts him into short-lived affairs with babysitters and later, swapping partners with a married couple whose husband Jenny meets at the English department of the state university she teaches at. These human blunders become fodder for Garp's novels, each more poorly received than the last. Throughout this, Garp struggles to make sense of it all.
In the Yellow Pages of Garp's phone directory, Marriage was listed near Lumber. After Lumber came Machine Shops, Mail Order Houses, Manholes, Maple Sugar, and Marine Equipment; then came Marriage and Family Counselors. Garp was looking for Lumber when he discovered Marriage; he had some innocent questions to ask about two-by-fours when Marriage caught his eye and raised more interesting and disturbing questions. Garp had never realized, for example, that there were more marriage counselors than lumberyards. But this surely depends on where you live, he thought. In the country, wouldn't people have more to do with lumber?
Garp had been married nearly eleven years; in that time he had found little use for lumber, still less for legal counsel. It was not for personal problems that Garp took an interest in the lost list of names in the Yellow Pages; it was because Garp spent a lot of time trying to imagine what it would be like to have a job.
I frequently laughed during The World According To Garp. Any literary character dwelling on the frustrations and eccentricities of writing, relationships and the greater world (just like Irving!) has my attention. The writing is the very definition of droll and often slapped a grin on my face. Jenny Fields is a character of terrific integrity and while I grew exhausted by how Irving uses her as a feminist icon and a political figure to Make Points, she is a memorable character. While Irving is given to rants, the novel at least has a point of view and is often entertaining to read.
Along with the good comes stuff I don't like being made to read. Irving includes Garp's Vienna short story in its entirety and excerpts from his novels within the text. John Steinbeck, or one of his characters in Sweet Thursday, called this "hooptedoodle." Like Steinbeck, I like that authors write this stuff, I just wish I didn't have to read it, preferring it be tucked away in an appendix instead of disrupting the story. Irving seems to have a very high opinion of his gifts as a satirist but when he gets stuck on ridiculing feminism, I started to skim too. It wasn't that I agreed or disagreed or didn't think he wasn't clever, I just don't want to read jokes like this from a male author in 2019.
Actually, I dislike all jokes, which is what The World According To Garp devolved into for me, a joke book. Characters are maimed, maim others, are maimed again and ultimately killed off in spectacular ways. Rather than emulate life, which often goes unfinished, every character is given this cruel send-off. Irving's fans might call this "satire" but I got to a point where I just needed it to stop. It's a clever book, a vignette-driven book that wore out its welcome for me. As a novel that's really five or six good short stories with recurring characters, I enjoyed picking the pieces off the plate that I liked and dumping the rest.
Irving qualifies as a good storyteller and knows how to begin a chapter well, and a novel:
Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater. This was shortly after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and people were being tolerant of soldiers, because suddenly everyone was a soldier, but Jenny Fields was quite firm in her intolerance of the behavior of men in general and soldiers in particular. In the movie theater she had to move three times, but each time the soldier moved closer to her until she was sitting against the musty wall, her view of the newsreel almost blocked by some silly colonnade, and she resolved she would not get up and move again. The soldier moved once more and sat beside her.
The narrative begins with a 22-year-old nurse named Jenny Fields, whose family is based on the New Hampshire shore at Dog's Head Harbor and maintains a small fortune from their ownership of a shoe factory. Feeling detached from her family, Jenny attends Wellesley to major in English literature, but drops out when she suspects her parents and older brothers expect her college enrollment to result in dating and marying a well-bred man. She finds a practical vocation with a very comfortable uniform and goes into nursing, carrying a scalpel in her purse for close encounters like those in the movie theater.
Applying herself to the maternity ward at Boston Mercy, Jenny Fields determines that she'd like to find a man to make her pregnant one day (in one try) and then go away. This offends both those who think she's joking and those who suspect she isn't. As Garp wrote of his mother's dilemma: "Her colleagues detected that she felt herself superior to them. Nobody's colleagues appreciate this." Transferred to a trauma unit, she cares for Technical Sergeant Garp, a ball turret gunner who catches flak that amounts to a prefrontal lobotomy. Capable of pronouncing one word ("Garp"), Jenny Fields surmises that her patient is a Goner, but small and neat and as mindless as a young child.
Thus was the world given T.S. Garp: born from a good nurse with a will of her own, and the seed of a ball turret gunner--his last shot.
Hired as a school nurse at the all-boys prep school in New Hampshire her father and brothers attended, Jenny Fields lives on campus and her son--known as "Garp"--grows up in the infirmary annex. Later named head nurse, his mother continues her education by building the most renowned private library at The Steering School and sitting in on classes, determining which would most benefit her son when he becomes a student. She overlooks athletics and when a teenaged Garp searches for a sport not involving balls, stumbles onto the wrestling program, befriending the divorced coach and his teenaged daughter, Helen Holm, who initially mistakes Jenny Fields for her estranged mother.
Garp writes a short story every month from freshman year to graduation. To impress Helen, he determines that he'll be a writer, making college pointless to him. Helen suggests he travel to Europe and when Garp discusses the idea with his mother, she decides to go with him. Selecting a postwar, post-Soviet occupation Vienna, on the advice of his English teacher and mentor Mr. Tinch, Garp discovers that Jenny Fields has some writing to do of her own. While he mostly pens puffed up letters to Helen, Jenny Fields completes her autobiography. Titled A Sexual Suspect, Jenny marches it into the office of a publisher in New York and not only sells it, but becomes a feminist icon.
Garp seduces Helen with the short story he completes in Vienna. Garp's first published work becomes, in the view of his wife Helen, the best he's ever written. Garp and Helen begin a family immediately, overwhelming Garp with anxiety and over-protectiveness of their two sons, Duncan and Walt. His lust diverts him into short-lived affairs with babysitters and later, swapping partners with a married couple whose husband Jenny meets at the English department of the state university she teaches at. These human blunders become fodder for Garp's novels, each more poorly received than the last. Throughout this, Garp struggles to make sense of it all.
In the Yellow Pages of Garp's phone directory, Marriage was listed near Lumber. After Lumber came Machine Shops, Mail Order Houses, Manholes, Maple Sugar, and Marine Equipment; then came Marriage and Family Counselors. Garp was looking for Lumber when he discovered Marriage; he had some innocent questions to ask about two-by-fours when Marriage caught his eye and raised more interesting and disturbing questions. Garp had never realized, for example, that there were more marriage counselors than lumberyards. But this surely depends on where you live, he thought. In the country, wouldn't people have more to do with lumber?
Garp had been married nearly eleven years; in that time he had found little use for lumber, still less for legal counsel. It was not for personal problems that Garp took an interest in the lost list of names in the Yellow Pages; it was because Garp spent a lot of time trying to imagine what it would be like to have a job.
I frequently laughed during The World According To Garp. Any literary character dwelling on the frustrations and eccentricities of writing, relationships and the greater world (just like Irving!) has my attention. The writing is the very definition of droll and often slapped a grin on my face. Jenny Fields is a character of terrific integrity and while I grew exhausted by how Irving uses her as a feminist icon and a political figure to Make Points, she is a memorable character. While Irving is given to rants, the novel at least has a point of view and is often entertaining to read.
Along with the good comes stuff I don't like being made to read. Irving includes Garp's Vienna short story in its entirety and excerpts from his novels within the text. John Steinbeck, or one of his characters in Sweet Thursday, called this "hooptedoodle." Like Steinbeck, I like that authors write this stuff, I just wish I didn't have to read it, preferring it be tucked away in an appendix instead of disrupting the story. Irving seems to have a very high opinion of his gifts as a satirist but when he gets stuck on ridiculing feminism, I started to skim too. It wasn't that I agreed or disagreed or didn't think he wasn't clever, I just don't want to read jokes like this from a male author in 2019.
Actually, I dislike all jokes, which is what The World According To Garp devolved into for me, a joke book. Characters are maimed, maim others, are maimed again and ultimately killed off in spectacular ways. Rather than emulate life, which often goes unfinished, every character is given this cruel send-off. Irving's fans might call this "satire" but I got to a point where I just needed it to stop. It's a clever book, a vignette-driven book that wore out its welcome for me. As a novel that's really five or six good short stories with recurring characters, I enjoyed picking the pieces off the plate that I liked and dumping the rest.
September 15, 2023
Garp is the kind of man who always says the wrong thing, but still, he is a worthy hero in this surprisingly still-relevant feminist novel. I don't really like 'funny' novels, but this book really made me laugh.
April 9, 2017
4.5/5 stars.
Right from the beginning, I saw that this was going to be one of Irving's quirky masterpieces. So many weird and crazy things were happened as we followed Garp and his mother, Jenny, but each quirky thing I encountered only made me fall in love with the book even more.
"The World According to Garp" is the story of Garp who got his ear bitten off by a dog as a child. His mother is a nurse who got pregnant through very worrisome measures. The book is the story of Garp from beginning to end, and it's a story that takes you from Vienna to New Hampshire, from generation to generation.
Like most of Irving's other novels I loved this book so much! It plays with narratives interestingly as Garp is a writer, and we get to actually read excerpts of his writing (quirky excerpts, I might add!). It's a story about feminism, loss and transsexuality as well as so many other things, and if you're a fan of John Irving it's a must-read!
Right from the beginning, I saw that this was going to be one of Irving's quirky masterpieces. So many weird and crazy things were happened as we followed Garp and his mother, Jenny, but each quirky thing I encountered only made me fall in love with the book even more.
"The World According to Garp" is the story of Garp who got his ear bitten off by a dog as a child. His mother is a nurse who got pregnant through very worrisome measures. The book is the story of Garp from beginning to end, and it's a story that takes you from Vienna to New Hampshire, from generation to generation.
Like most of Irving's other novels I loved this book so much! It plays with narratives interestingly as Garp is a writer, and we get to actually read excerpts of his writing (quirky excerpts, I might add!). It's a story about feminism, loss and transsexuality as well as so many other things, and if you're a fan of John Irving it's a must-read!
September 27, 2008
I had heard great things about this book. It deals a lot with feminism, parental paranoia, and the challenges of career ambitions. I kept assuming this book was on the brink of something totally earth-shattering, so I kept turning the pages, and it never came.
dnf
April 7, 2025DNF 1/4
Nie wykluczam, że wrócę, ale na pewno nie w najbliższym czasie.
Nie wykluczam, że wrócę, ale na pewno nie w najbliższym czasie.
June 8, 2022
There are grand novels that are literary, and there are grand novels that are not literary, but they are cool and singular and have a freshness and uniqueness that transcends normal literature; they become something more than just good books with literary merit. This book is none of those things, but it feels as if John Irving was given an assignment to write a book that fits the above description: a cool, epic, tragic, sprawling novel. But he fails. This novel is not grand, cool, or literary. It is sprawling and tragic, but those are only good qualities if combined with those other, more important qualities.
The beginning, regarding Jenny Fields, is better than the bulk of the book about Garp. Like the novel that birthed him, Garp is not cool; he is not a person with whom I would like to spend time. He is literary, I guess. He's a writer, and he likes Dostoevsky and Conrad.
There is one incident, one event that is executed well: the moments before it utilized to add poignancy to the crushing occurrence. There is also some good fiction within the book. The first chapter of one of the novels that Garp writes is presented to us in full, and it is good. But these things do not save the novel from being below average; they only save it from being absolutely horrible.
The last third is too expository and almost unreadable. I didn't care for any of the characters, which is not a must for me; if the writing were better I wouldn't need to care about the characters' hopes and fears.
Irving seems to be piling up catastrophes because a creative writing professor once told him to do terrible things to his characters. He's too eager to rip a body part off a child or give someone a quick death. This is fine if there is a nice build up or it was a vital part of the story. But generally, throughout the book, things aren't executed well, and much of the tragedy seems gratuitous and even senseless.
A 600 page, cohesive novel is not easy to write, even if it is below average. Also, many people admire and love this book; evidently the author did something right. On the other hand, I am reminded, as I often am, of a great philosopher's words:
"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."
The beginning, regarding Jenny Fields, is better than the bulk of the book about Garp. Like the novel that birthed him, Garp is not cool; he is not a person with whom I would like to spend time. He is literary, I guess. He's a writer, and he likes Dostoevsky and Conrad.
There is one incident, one event that is executed well: the moments before it utilized to add poignancy to the crushing occurrence. There is also some good fiction within the book. The first chapter of one of the novels that Garp writes is presented to us in full, and it is good. But these things do not save the novel from being below average; they only save it from being absolutely horrible.
The last third is too expository and almost unreadable. I didn't care for any of the characters, which is not a must for me; if the writing were better I wouldn't need to care about the characters' hopes and fears.
Irving seems to be piling up catastrophes because a creative writing professor once told him to do terrible things to his characters. He's too eager to rip a body part off a child or give someone a quick death. This is fine if there is a nice build up or it was a vital part of the story. But generally, throughout the book, things aren't executed well, and much of the tragedy seems gratuitous and even senseless.
A 600 page, cohesive novel is not easy to write, even if it is below average. Also, many people admire and love this book; evidently the author did something right. On the other hand, I am reminded, as I often am, of a great philosopher's words:
"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."
February 19, 2015
I heard about this book for the first time in early eighties ; this was a specific time in Poland . I ignored it completely escaping into music and books . Catch 22 , Birdy , One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , World according to Garp . Those are some examples from my reading list from that period . And I think one does not have to be too much insightful to see the common denominator for these readings .
World according to Garp , the most known Irving's novel narrates about this strange thing called life . We’ve got almost everything here : sex , love , writing , bears on bicycles , maimed people and all sort of misfits ; death is always tragic and lust mercilessly punished . This is a book people love or hate or love to hate . Ones say it’s too vulgar , obscene , too literal in some descriptions . Yes it is and what of it ? But it’s also touching , makes you laugh and cry .
And in spite of all its grotesqueness , dark humour and tragicomic accents , what's more , despite the killing of almost all the characters , is full of life . It’s America in distorting mirror , melange of caricatural behaviours and strange relationships . No , I didn’t dream about America . Not in geographical sense . For me America was state of mind , mixture freedom and positive craziness . And all this Garp gave to me .
And this statement that in the world according to Garp , we are all terminal cases somehow does not worry me at all . I know , there is a life after Garp .
April 16, 2025
Continuing on with my reviews of Books and Authors That I Loved But Haven't Read in a While and Need to Revisit, I come to a book that I can't, for the life of me, remember when I first read. My first time, I think, was in the mid- to late-80s, which doesn't make sense because I would have only been in middle school, and the book is far too mature in subject matter for a middle-schooler. Then again, I read Stephen King's "It" for the first time when in I was in 7th or 8th grade. I remember that.
Regardless, John Irving's "The World According to Garp" was an essential book in my reading development. First off, it introduced me to Irving, who set me on a path of wanting to read every single one of his books.
Written in 1978, "Garp" was an epic comedy-drama about the life of a young man named Garp , who is raised by a militant feminist mother. (Okay, "militant" for 1978 anyway.) The story follows the adventures and misadventures of Garp's social and sexual development.
If anything, this book was important for two reasons: shaping my own feminist ideology and creating a life-long pathological fear of blow jobs. (Those of you who have read this novel know exactly what I'm talking about...)
The 1982 film adaptation starring Robin Williams is a somewhat forgotten film gem, although as good as it was, it was definitely not as good as the book. To be fair, though, few if any movies are better than the books...
Regardless, John Irving's "The World According to Garp" was an essential book in my reading development. First off, it introduced me to Irving, who set me on a path of wanting to read every single one of his books.
Written in 1978, "Garp" was an epic comedy-drama about the life of a young man named Garp , who is raised by a militant feminist mother. (Okay, "militant" for 1978 anyway.) The story follows the adventures and misadventures of Garp's social and sexual development.
If anything, this book was important for two reasons: shaping my own feminist ideology and creating a life-long pathological fear of blow jobs. (Those of you who have read this novel know exactly what I'm talking about...)
The 1982 film adaptation starring Robin Williams is a somewhat forgotten film gem, although as good as it was, it was definitely not as good as the book. To be fair, though, few if any movies are better than the books...
March 23, 2017
Right from the opening chapter a lot of talk of masturbation and inappropriate erections....what was I getting into? The world that Garp inhabits is a strange wonderful world full of rich peculiar characters and absurd situations. The more I delved the more I was enticed by the world of Garp. I loved parts of this more than others but what I loved I really loved. What kind of man is John Irving to write such an interesting book and character with such groundbreaking issues.
This book really has so much to offer. Garp is full of contradictions and inner turmoil being the son of a leading feminist mother, he enters this world under questionable methods, Garp was always destined for an interesting life. Such diverse characters bring so many social issues to the fore, there is so much covered and artfully written how can you go past a book that thrusts rape, mutilation, feminism, sexuality, transgenders and depression and still entertain with humour. Garp having a prominent feminist mother conflicts with his own ideas of masculinity and gender identity bringing tumult and acute anxiety to his world, Garp is a multilayered complex character, often portraying the internal processes of a tortured writer causing the omnipresent Under Toad to lurk beneath the surface.
This book is a wonder, on one hand it's depressing as hell, there is death (a lot of death) references of rape is a recurring theme but amongst all the heaviness and serious issues what it's best at is finding the flaws but also embracing the eccentricities, these are the people that colour Garp's world and it's a joy to behold.
This book really has so much to offer. Garp is full of contradictions and inner turmoil being the son of a leading feminist mother, he enters this world under questionable methods, Garp was always destined for an interesting life. Such diverse characters bring so many social issues to the fore, there is so much covered and artfully written how can you go past a book that thrusts rape, mutilation, feminism, sexuality, transgenders and depression and still entertain with humour. Garp having a prominent feminist mother conflicts with his own ideas of masculinity and gender identity bringing tumult and acute anxiety to his world, Garp is a multilayered complex character, often portraying the internal processes of a tortured writer causing the omnipresent Under Toad to lurk beneath the surface.
This book is a wonder, on one hand it's depressing as hell, there is death (a lot of death) references of rape is a recurring theme but amongst all the heaviness and serious issues what it's best at is finding the flaws but also embracing the eccentricities, these are the people that colour Garp's world and it's a joy to behold.
February 12, 2012
"Mind you, it's awfully well written", Wolf had said, "but it's still, somehow, soap opera; it's too much, somehow." Garp had sighed. "Life,"Garp had said, "is too much, somehow. Life is an X-rated soap opera, John," Garp had said.
The world according to Garp is very much like a soap opera, full of situations and incidents that we don't usually see in real life. The world around Garp is full of craziness and absurdity. Many a times Irving stops just short of being unrealistic. While many of his stories are far from being plausible, they are still possible without breaking any rules of the universe. Even with all sorts of zaniness, Irving manages to keep the narrative under remarkable control. And despite everything, the novel still has a great semblance to real life. The fears and the concerns of the characters, the emotions which drive them, are same as our own. Irving takes one on a journey that ranges from boundless happiness to deep sorrow, from love to hatred and all that variety of emotions which real people feel in real lives. As a bonus to everything that this novel offers, it is quite some fun to read. It is an entertaining soap opera.
September 6, 2023
Though my life has felt rather full, time-wise, I did want to come back and say a little bit about how much I dug my first John Irving novel.
Though Dickensian is an oft-quoted descriptor, it fits The World According to Garp quite well. Aside from the eponymous lead, there's a sprawling cast that bounces all across the social, sexual, and political spectrum. There's a bevy of absurd situations that I had me eyebrow-raising at the novel's onset, but cherishing by the novel's end.
Though the novel follows T.S. Garp from cradle to grave, I was astonished by how easily Irving switches between characters, plots, and subplots in order to deliver a fully realized vision of Garp's world. Whether its the social commentary on extremism, the vilification of those who are intolerant, or a look at men's insecurities, Irving does a commendable job switching up subject even if they happen to orbit around the same themes. Indeed, though the novel goes in many different directions, it all feels thematically interconnected.
While thematically rich, I think it might be the writing and tone of the novel that struck me as most effective. I've rarely read a novel that so seamlessly slips from absurdist comedy to family tragedy without feeling like two different novels. Personally, by the time Garp leaves school for Vienna, I had full trust in whatever direction Irving wanted to steer me. The portions of the book that act as stories-within-stories (one of Garp's short stories and the first chapter of a novel) are exceptionally readable and help the main narrative pivot in its next direction. Luckily, the book is a pleasure to read: not too verbose, but rich in descriptive passages.
Overall, a really enjoyable and sumptuous novel. I thought Irving's commentary on sexual orientation, gender dysphoria, and gender discrimination was oddly woke for the time in which it was written. I'm sure a lot of the book wouldn't go over super well in today's climate, but I found it to be humanistic and thoughtful. This is the type of book that I would have loved to have studied in university, though I think it is a bit more appropriate and relevant as a more mature adult. It is also the type of book on which one could write endlessly, but I've got a lot more Irving in my future based on this book, so I'll cap it off there.
Finally, a big thanks to my wife on selecting this one for my birthday: she always seems to pick winners!
[4.5 Stars]
Though Dickensian is an oft-quoted descriptor, it fits The World According to Garp quite well. Aside from the eponymous lead, there's a sprawling cast that bounces all across the social, sexual, and political spectrum. There's a bevy of absurd situations that I had me eyebrow-raising at the novel's onset, but cherishing by the novel's end.
Though the novel follows T.S. Garp from cradle to grave, I was astonished by how easily Irving switches between characters, plots, and subplots in order to deliver a fully realized vision of Garp's world. Whether its the social commentary on extremism, the vilification of those who are intolerant, or a look at men's insecurities, Irving does a commendable job switching up subject even if they happen to orbit around the same themes. Indeed, though the novel goes in many different directions, it all feels thematically interconnected.
While thematically rich, I think it might be the writing and tone of the novel that struck me as most effective. I've rarely read a novel that so seamlessly slips from absurdist comedy to family tragedy without feeling like two different novels. Personally, by the time Garp leaves school for Vienna, I had full trust in whatever direction Irving wanted to steer me. The portions of the book that act as stories-within-stories (one of Garp's short stories and the first chapter of a novel) are exceptionally readable and help the main narrative pivot in its next direction. Luckily, the book is a pleasure to read: not too verbose, but rich in descriptive passages.
Overall, a really enjoyable and sumptuous novel. I thought Irving's commentary on sexual orientation, gender dysphoria, and gender discrimination was oddly woke for the time in which it was written. I'm sure a lot of the book wouldn't go over super well in today's climate, but I found it to be humanistic and thoughtful. This is the type of book that I would have loved to have studied in university, though I think it is a bit more appropriate and relevant as a more mature adult. It is also the type of book on which one could write endlessly, but I've got a lot more Irving in my future based on this book, so I'll cap it off there.
Finally, a big thanks to my wife on selecting this one for my birthday: she always seems to pick winners!
[4.5 Stars]
May 7, 2019
In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rush-light, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.
I have a confession to make : I have great admiration and respect for the talent of John Irving, and this novel is one of the finest examples of the heights his art can reach. But I cared little for Garp and his tragicomic life rarely moved me beyond intellectual stimulation. I had a similar reaction to Owen Meany, another BIG novel from Irving, which makes me wonder a little why I feel both stories are manipulative of the reader and more than a little conceited, while my favorite remains "A Son of the Circus".
There are plenty of answers between the many pages of the present novel, and of the novels within a novel included in the text, since Garp the protagonist of the story is also a writer. Meaning a lot of pages describe how to write, what to write, the publishing world, the critics, even the readers reactions.
There are so many themes (and I had a metric ton of bookmarks that I have already discarded) that it's a hard choice where to begin. I went with the Marc Aurelius quote both because it captures perfectly the way Garp looks at the world around him, even from an early age, as a post-graduate student in Vienna, and because it caused me an inappropriate fit of the giggles, given the fact I had read about the Roman emperor/philosopher only a couple of days before in another novel:
“I think you’re going to find Marcus Aurelius particularly useful.’ ‘For what?’ I asked. Nightingale hesitated. ‘Quoting, mainly,’ he said. ‘And thus maintaining an air of erudition and authority.” (Ben Aaronovich)
I don't think mr. Irving would mind my misuse his tone setting quote. First, because he also likes to mention other authors and books in his novels (Garp states that Joseph Conrad is his childhood favorite), and secondly because throughout the novel the tragedy walks hand in hand with the comedy. Garp becomes a writer not because he wants to become rich and famous, but because he has great empathy for the suffering of others, because he wants, with all the powers in his possession, to make the world a safer place for parents and children. He wants to keep the Under Toad away or, if that is not possible, to offer some consolation and support.
Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.
>>><<<>>><<<
Another possible starting point is to go back to the beginning, to Garp's mother, and look at the novel as a morality play about the sexual revolution in post-War America. Irving himself mentions this in the foreword – that his initial subject was the way men and women drift apart, despite loving each other in the beginning.
In this dirty-minded world, she thought, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore – or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you. [1]
I did like the militant / liberating part of the novel, especially in the context of a recent drift back in society towards intransigence and condemnation of 'otherness'. I could even say that I found Jenny Fields more likable as a character than Garp, her son. She's a pragmatist and a common sense preacher, while he is a bunch of nerves and contradictory impulses.
Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.
After growing up in a college campus, mother and son go to Vienna, both to discover their abilities as writers. While Jenny Fields discovers the importance of opening phrases, Garp discovers decadence and alienation. Here are a couple of illustrative quotes:
That sentence [1] inspired others like it, and Jenny wove them as she might have woven a bright and binding thread of brilliant color through a sprawling tapestry of no apparent design.
and,
Years later, Garp read in a critical introduction to Grillparzer's work that Grillparzer was "sensitive, tortured, fitfully paranoid, often depressed, cranky, and choked with melancholy; in short, a complex and modern man."
'The Pension Grillparzer' is the first of stories within stories in the present novel and, according to Garp's publisher, to his wife and even to himself, the best he ever wrote. I tend to agree, mostly because it has something the rest of Irving's work lacks : briefness. It's a short story instead of a doorstopper. The other reason I love it is because it is a lot more honest than his efforts to impress either by shocking his readers or by clever turns of phrase.
"Liars and Criminals," Grandmother said. "Mystics and refugees and broken down animals."
"They were trying hard," Father said, "but they weren't coming up with the prizes."
In this condensed form is the credo of Irving's art of the novel. We are all terminal cases, but at least we get to try. The end is known before the start of the performance, but the show must go on. And a novelist is supposed to make stories better than life, to make them make sense as well as entertain. It's all a circus show with tragic clowns trying to get a laugh out of us, make us forget our troubles for a moment, before we have to go out into the night, alone. Writing a response to an angry reader, Garp the writer mentions this:
I am ashamed, however, that you think I am laughing at people, or making fun of them. I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave – and nothing but laughter to console them with.
In another place, as he grapples with writer's block, Garp rages against psychiatrists who oversimplify a man's personality. He plans to become a marriage counselor, but his wife Helen is unimpressed:
"You're a writer," she told him.
"Perfect qualifications for the job. Years spent pondering the morals of human relationships; hours spent divining what it is that people have in common. The failure of love, the complexity of compromise, the need for compassion."
That's because a writer starts by observing the world, digesting the information, even the one coming from direct, personal experience, before reorganizing it on paper. I do believe that the reason Irving's novels are a great 'imitation of life' is because he writes about the things he knows intimately – his own childhood in a New Hampshire college campus, his years of wrestling, his tribulations as a writer, his relationships with other people. The mistake most of the readers and critics make, at least according to Garp, is to use the novel to search for autobiographical elements. Nothing could be wronger.
Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the art of fiction was the act of 'imagining' truly – was, like any art, a process of selection. Memories and personal histories – "all the recollected traumas of our unmemorable lives" – were suspicious models for fiction, Garp would say. "Fiction has to be better made than life," Garp wrote.
also,
"Christ," Garp said, "it sounds as if I wrote a 'thesis'. It's a f-cking 'novel', it's a 'story', and I made it up!"
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So, without looking for autobiographical elements, Garp becomes a writer, marries, has children, cheats on his wife, joins the Swinger movement ( "Oh boy," Helen murmured. "This is the last time I try to save anyone's marriage except my own." ) , becomes a feminist, then an antifeminist, experiences joy and devastating loss, publishing fame and hate-filled criticism – he is full of Life, for a while, and then he becomes immortal through Art. Who can ask for more? even if it's only a fictional character in a story?
Of course, 'The world according to Bensenhaver' is his most original, even if it is an X-rated soap opera – which it is. But it's so harsh; it's raw food – good food, but very raw. I mean, who wants it? Who needs to suffer such abuse?
As usual, it's up to the reader to digest this raw material and decide if it is abuse or food for thought. One of my favorite characters in the book is Jillsy Sloper, the unlikely proof-reader at the New York publishing house, the woman who reads because she must, not because she wants to escape or to be entertained.
If you ask me, that's just like men: rape you half to death one minute and the next minute go crazy fussin' over who you're givin' it to – of your own free will! It's not their damn business, either way, is it?
From Jillsy I naturally jump to Ellen James, a mute victim of rape, and another character I found more memorable than Garp himself. She refuses to become an icon for a radical movement, and only wants to rebuild her life as best she can.
I'm not an antifeminist! They make everything so black and white. That's why I hate them. They force you to be like them – or else you're their enemy.
>>><<<>>><<<
I didn't plan to end my review with these two clarion calls, but that's the way the dice rolled for this 'sprawling tapestry of no apparent design', this 'X-rated soap opera' , another BIG story from John Irving that I can now cross off my TBR pile. I'm not in any way disappointed for the time I spent in the company of Garp and his circus of freaks. I even think a second reading of Garp would prove as satisfying as the first, but there are so many more books beckoning. Even 'Hotel New Hampshire' at some point in the future.
June 30, 2025
Last year was my year of reading master writers. Part of that has spilled into this year because it is always a treat to read those considered to be the best at their craft. My reading often includes memoirs where these writers detail their writing process, which I find fascinating. A memoir I read toward the end of the end was John Irving’s My Imaginary Girlfriend. I had not read anything of Irving’s in years and knew I had to add one of his novels to my yearly reading plans. The question then was which novel. People are constantly asking me if I’ve read A Prayer for Owen Meany (or The Art of Fielding, etc) because of my love for baseball. For the most part, baseball fiction does not grab me because the game tells its own story judging from the prodigious amount of baseball nonfiction written over the years. I actually did intend to read Owen Meany, but I got nowhere. I could not read a book involving death at a baseball game; however, I did not want to give up on John Irving. Years ago, probably in high school, I read The World According to Garp. Obviously there was no Goodreads then; there was barely an internet then. Other than the name Garp, my memory of the book had been fuzzy so I decided it was long time for a reread. What awaited me was a multilayered novel that was better than what my vague memories provided me.
A generation and longer ago the gap of style between male and female writers was wide. Few male writers, or it seemed, could delve into and create sympathetic female characters. For action one read male writers; for character driven novels one read women. For the most part, that was the ongoing storyline to the point where the ongoing narrative from readers a generation older than me is that master writers such as Hemingway were male chauvinist. Having read Hemingway I beg to differ but that is a story for another time. In the 1970s, the women’s movement was in full force. John Irving comes from distinct worlds where he would certainly have garnered an opinion of the women’s movement at the time. He grew up in northeastern prep school culture and chose wrestling for his sport. This culture was devoid of women and the epitome of masculinity. Irving also was a budding writer and later attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop for his MFA. He partially chose Iowa for its wrestling reputation because he continued to train even as an adult but also for the school’s writing program which is top of the line and still is (go Hawks!). From these environments one would not picture John Irving as a likely candidate to write a feminist novel, especially during an era when the most ardent feminists demanded an end to the patriarchy. With Garp, and taking many anecdotes from his own life, that is exactly what Irving did, creating a feminist novel from a male point of view.
Jenny Fields wanted a child but did not want a man to share her body. This was in the 1940s on the cusp of the baby boom. Unwed mothers were scorned and on the fringes of society. Yet Jenny Fields was determined. As a nurse, she seduced a patient she knew was dying and got pregnant by him. Of course, she had to give up her job and move back in with her parents, albeit members of the upper class of society. Her parents viewed Jenny as a fallen woman but also helped her find a job as the nurse at Steering School for boys. It is in this environment of wealthy, and mainly pompous, young men that young Garp grew up. Jenny Fields wanted the best for her son at Steering School. She audited every class she could and told her son which classes to take. She also was a voracious reader, and the school infirmary’s bookshelves contained all the classics. From his mother, Garp got the writing bug. Becoming a good writer is not necessarily genetic and takes time to hone one’s craft; however, through his mother’s encouragement, Garp enjoyed writing the best of all his subjects. From a young age he decided that he would become a writer and forgo college to write. While at Steering, he also took up wrestling, the only other thing he was ever good at. He developed a relationship with his coach Ernie Holm and grew smitten with his daughter Helen, his future wife. The wrestling narrative is taken from Irving’s life; readers often asked if he was Garp. Parts of Garp’s character are based on Irving’s life but not all. For starters, Helen read as much as Jenny Fields, as did Irving’s second wife, who early read and edited his manuscripts. Garp would need to woo her with his writing. That would take time, and Jenny had a master plan that would vault her son to become a writer.
Instead of remaining at Steering and honing his craft, Garp and Jenny spent over a year in Vienna. Jenny rarely ventured out and worked on her own book, an autobiography called Sexual Suspect. Garp took three years of German at Steering and explored the city. It is in Vienna where one first sees that he has empathy for women in his relationship with three whores, who become like older sister figures for him. Meanwhile, he manages to write a short story that becomes his best work. The Pension Grillzparzer is far fetched and not the autobiographical work one would expect from a first time author, yet after the test of time it would be viewed as Garp’s best work. He sent a copy to Helen to read, and she enjoyed it. Garp knew that he would have to return to the United States to publish this work, but it was Jenny who had a best seller on her hands. Against all odds, publisher John Wolf was mesmerized by A Sexual Suspect. At over eleven hundred pages, the book became a feminist treatise, and Jenny Fields became the symbol and leader of the feminist movement. She did not ask for this position yet grew into it and transformed her parents’ home at Dogs Head Harbor into a retreat for scorned women who wanted another chance in life. Irving noted that he could have written an entire novel about Jenny but moved in the direction of making Garp and Helen the centerpieces of the novel. In Garp he had a multilayered character that he would never create with Jenny Fields.
Garp and Helen marry at nineteen and Duncan is born less than a year later. Although this is the 1970s, Garp is a stay at home dad. Helen is the intellectual and works in the English department of a college. Garp stays home, keeps house, and writes. This might be more of a norm in the 2020s but not in the 1970s. Even though the family, that expands to include Walt, lives in the safety of a suburban neighborhood, Garp develops more neuroses than a Jewish mother. Meanwhile Jenny Fields develops a large feminist following including a transsexual named Roberta Muldoon who over time grows to become Garp’s best friend. Garp writes two novels that could have been better and grows bored at his role at keeping house. During this time he engages in affairs with babysitters and later with a friend named Alice. Helen loves Garp anyway although later she engages in her own affair with a student. Reading novels that occur in the 1970s, affairs seem like the norm, which lead to more divorces than ever before. It takes a tragic event, bringing many of Garp’s neuroses to the surface, that cement Garp and Helen as a family. It is during this time that Jenny Fields and Roberta Muldoon play key roles in the novel, and I grew to enjoy their characters more so than those of Garp and Helen. Irving reiterates that he is not Garp other than the wrestling and that many of Garp’s personality facets come from his imagination; however, during the era in which he wrote this novel, the concept of a Roberta Muldoon was original, and that is most likely why I enjoyed the sections featuring her the most.
Irving writes a novel within a novel as Garp grasps with a family tragedy and begins work on The World According to Bensenhaver. Although doubly fictional, Bensenhaver was also a highlight for me in this novel. Garp never had a family besides his mother. In his fictional works, he creates uncles and grandparents, people he never had in his life. The work is not his best but includes enough action that readers would need to read quickly to find out what happens. This is in the words of Jillsy Sloper, a cleaning lady who is one of John Wolf’s trusted readers. She thought the book was horrible so Wolf convinces the family to travel abroad for a few months to coincide with the publicity surrounding the book’s publication. It is here that the novel reaches its denouement; however, Irving believed he owed it to his reads to include an epilogue. There were too many important characters and readers wanted to see where they ended up. This postscript is better than an unnecessary sequel. The story is stand alone and even if there are memorable characters across the spectrum, it is unnecessary to create new novels based off of them, as is often done now. Irving had other stories to tell after Garp although it would be viewed as his best early work. In the end Garp would empathize with his mother’s place within the women’s movement, although it came a little too late. Girls were even admitted to Steering School, and Helen joined the English faculty while their daughter became one of the school’s top students. One would say that Garp’s life came full circle.
Reading The World According to Garp in the 21st century, I am surprised that Irving wrote this novel nearly fifty years ago. I have heard from people that the 1970s were a time to be you and me and that open marriages were more of a thing. Being a stay at home dad who enjoyed cooking was almost unheard of. Becoming a transsexual woman after enjoying s career as an NFL tight end was almost equally unheard of. These important story lines could have been written within the last few years. Both Jenny Fields and Garp live their own lives and develop large followings long before the advent of the internet. The measure of a book in terms of being viewed as a classic is how well it ages. John Irving wrote Garp nearly fifty years ago, and its themes are still hot button issues in society today. I did not glean much from the storylines as an idealistic teenager. I was only a few years older than Irving’s son when he read an early draft as a twelve year old, and Irving notes that portions of the novel are not appropriate for adolescent readers. I would have to concur. As someone who has now experienced more life, Garp aptly crafts a tragicomic family while also containing bits of humor. Garp has aged these fifty years because he and the beliefs in this novel are still relevant issues. I doubt that John Irving was making a political statement when he wrote Garp. He just wanted to tell a story. And what a story it turned out to be.
4.5 stars
A generation and longer ago the gap of style between male and female writers was wide. Few male writers, or it seemed, could delve into and create sympathetic female characters. For action one read male writers; for character driven novels one read women. For the most part, that was the ongoing storyline to the point where the ongoing narrative from readers a generation older than me is that master writers such as Hemingway were male chauvinist. Having read Hemingway I beg to differ but that is a story for another time. In the 1970s, the women’s movement was in full force. John Irving comes from distinct worlds where he would certainly have garnered an opinion of the women’s movement at the time. He grew up in northeastern prep school culture and chose wrestling for his sport. This culture was devoid of women and the epitome of masculinity. Irving also was a budding writer and later attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop for his MFA. He partially chose Iowa for its wrestling reputation because he continued to train even as an adult but also for the school’s writing program which is top of the line and still is (go Hawks!). From these environments one would not picture John Irving as a likely candidate to write a feminist novel, especially during an era when the most ardent feminists demanded an end to the patriarchy. With Garp, and taking many anecdotes from his own life, that is exactly what Irving did, creating a feminist novel from a male point of view.
Jenny Fields wanted a child but did not want a man to share her body. This was in the 1940s on the cusp of the baby boom. Unwed mothers were scorned and on the fringes of society. Yet Jenny Fields was determined. As a nurse, she seduced a patient she knew was dying and got pregnant by him. Of course, she had to give up her job and move back in with her parents, albeit members of the upper class of society. Her parents viewed Jenny as a fallen woman but also helped her find a job as the nurse at Steering School for boys. It is in this environment of wealthy, and mainly pompous, young men that young Garp grew up. Jenny Fields wanted the best for her son at Steering School. She audited every class she could and told her son which classes to take. She also was a voracious reader, and the school infirmary’s bookshelves contained all the classics. From his mother, Garp got the writing bug. Becoming a good writer is not necessarily genetic and takes time to hone one’s craft; however, through his mother’s encouragement, Garp enjoyed writing the best of all his subjects. From a young age he decided that he would become a writer and forgo college to write. While at Steering, he also took up wrestling, the only other thing he was ever good at. He developed a relationship with his coach Ernie Holm and grew smitten with his daughter Helen, his future wife. The wrestling narrative is taken from Irving’s life; readers often asked if he was Garp. Parts of Garp’s character are based on Irving’s life but not all. For starters, Helen read as much as Jenny Fields, as did Irving’s second wife, who early read and edited his manuscripts. Garp would need to woo her with his writing. That would take time, and Jenny had a master plan that would vault her son to become a writer.
Instead of remaining at Steering and honing his craft, Garp and Jenny spent over a year in Vienna. Jenny rarely ventured out and worked on her own book, an autobiography called Sexual Suspect. Garp took three years of German at Steering and explored the city. It is in Vienna where one first sees that he has empathy for women in his relationship with three whores, who become like older sister figures for him. Meanwhile, he manages to write a short story that becomes his best work. The Pension Grillzparzer is far fetched and not the autobiographical work one would expect from a first time author, yet after the test of time it would be viewed as Garp’s best work. He sent a copy to Helen to read, and she enjoyed it. Garp knew that he would have to return to the United States to publish this work, but it was Jenny who had a best seller on her hands. Against all odds, publisher John Wolf was mesmerized by A Sexual Suspect. At over eleven hundred pages, the book became a feminist treatise, and Jenny Fields became the symbol and leader of the feminist movement. She did not ask for this position yet grew into it and transformed her parents’ home at Dogs Head Harbor into a retreat for scorned women who wanted another chance in life. Irving noted that he could have written an entire novel about Jenny but moved in the direction of making Garp and Helen the centerpieces of the novel. In Garp he had a multilayered character that he would never create with Jenny Fields.
Garp and Helen marry at nineteen and Duncan is born less than a year later. Although this is the 1970s, Garp is a stay at home dad. Helen is the intellectual and works in the English department of a college. Garp stays home, keeps house, and writes. This might be more of a norm in the 2020s but not in the 1970s. Even though the family, that expands to include Walt, lives in the safety of a suburban neighborhood, Garp develops more neuroses than a Jewish mother. Meanwhile Jenny Fields develops a large feminist following including a transsexual named Roberta Muldoon who over time grows to become Garp’s best friend. Garp writes two novels that could have been better and grows bored at his role at keeping house. During this time he engages in affairs with babysitters and later with a friend named Alice. Helen loves Garp anyway although later she engages in her own affair with a student. Reading novels that occur in the 1970s, affairs seem like the norm, which lead to more divorces than ever before. It takes a tragic event, bringing many of Garp’s neuroses to the surface, that cement Garp and Helen as a family. It is during this time that Jenny Fields and Roberta Muldoon play key roles in the novel, and I grew to enjoy their characters more so than those of Garp and Helen. Irving reiterates that he is not Garp other than the wrestling and that many of Garp’s personality facets come from his imagination; however, during the era in which he wrote this novel, the concept of a Roberta Muldoon was original, and that is most likely why I enjoyed the sections featuring her the most.
Irving writes a novel within a novel as Garp grasps with a family tragedy and begins work on The World According to Bensenhaver. Although doubly fictional, Bensenhaver was also a highlight for me in this novel. Garp never had a family besides his mother. In his fictional works, he creates uncles and grandparents, people he never had in his life. The work is not his best but includes enough action that readers would need to read quickly to find out what happens. This is in the words of Jillsy Sloper, a cleaning lady who is one of John Wolf’s trusted readers. She thought the book was horrible so Wolf convinces the family to travel abroad for a few months to coincide with the publicity surrounding the book’s publication. It is here that the novel reaches its denouement; however, Irving believed he owed it to his reads to include an epilogue. There were too many important characters and readers wanted to see where they ended up. This postscript is better than an unnecessary sequel. The story is stand alone and even if there are memorable characters across the spectrum, it is unnecessary to create new novels based off of them, as is often done now. Irving had other stories to tell after Garp although it would be viewed as his best early work. In the end Garp would empathize with his mother’s place within the women’s movement, although it came a little too late. Girls were even admitted to Steering School, and Helen joined the English faculty while their daughter became one of the school’s top students. One would say that Garp’s life came full circle.
Reading The World According to Garp in the 21st century, I am surprised that Irving wrote this novel nearly fifty years ago. I have heard from people that the 1970s were a time to be you and me and that open marriages were more of a thing. Being a stay at home dad who enjoyed cooking was almost unheard of. Becoming a transsexual woman after enjoying s career as an NFL tight end was almost equally unheard of. These important story lines could have been written within the last few years. Both Jenny Fields and Garp live their own lives and develop large followings long before the advent of the internet. The measure of a book in terms of being viewed as a classic is how well it ages. John Irving wrote Garp nearly fifty years ago, and its themes are still hot button issues in society today. I did not glean much from the storylines as an idealistic teenager. I was only a few years older than Irving’s son when he read an early draft as a twelve year old, and Irving notes that portions of the novel are not appropriate for adolescent readers. I would have to concur. As someone who has now experienced more life, Garp aptly crafts a tragicomic family while also containing bits of humor. Garp has aged these fifty years because he and the beliefs in this novel are still relevant issues. I doubt that John Irving was making a political statement when he wrote Garp. He just wanted to tell a story. And what a story it turned out to be.
4.5 stars
July 30, 2018
Ci sono degli autori che sono poco letti o che sono caduti in oblio, che non fanno tendenza, John Irving per esempio.
E ciò nonostante la sua produzione sia quantitativamente parlando feconda, e anche meritevole da un punto di vista qualitativo, secondo il mio modesto parere.
John Irving è innanzitutto un autore inconfondibile credo che la riconoscibilità - attenzione non il ripetere se stessi – ma l’aver una propria peculiare cifra stilistica sia un pregio notevole per un autore. Infatti la sua scrittura si riconosce, forse accade per ogni autore ma Irving ha un modo di raccontare e di creare fiction che indubbiamente riconducono a lui.
Potresti per gioco aprire un suo romanzo a caso, cominciare a leggerne una frase nel bel mezzo di una pagina e capiresti al volo chi è l’autore, come un neonato che vede a mala pena intorno a sé ma sa riconoscere, tra mille seni, quell’unico seno della madre, o come quando da lontano si riconosce una persona cara solo dal modo di camminare, dalla sua andatura tipica quelle spalle erette o un po’ all’in giù, quella falcata allegra o spenta, come si abbandonano le braccia o la testa che si piega da un lato.
Un altro merito di Irving è saper confezionare delle storie o, meglio, saper tratteggiare dei personaggi che rimangono a lungo, direi per sempre, scolpiti nel cuore.
Garp per esempio o Owen in Preghiera per un amico, o anche la stramba famiglia di Hotel New Hampshire, personaggi che hanno uno smalto che resta brillante nei ricordi, senza mai sbiadire.
Eppure i romanzi di Irving non sono perfetti né esenti da difetti, sono spesso troppo lunghi e alternano parti che ti strappano il cuore, ti strappano il riso e parti che invece sarebbe igienico saltare.
Ma è un maestro nel maneggiare tragico e comico con un senso di levità surreale, per esempio riesce a rendere buffa la morte dei suoi personaggi, come fosse un evento, uno tra i tanti che costellano la vita e non l’Evento, perché sì, insomma, dobbiamo dire che i suoi personaggi muoiono molto nei suoi romanzi, forse anche troppo e la lacrima e il sorriso si contendono continuamente la pagina.
Tornando al libro Il mondo secondo Garp è la storia di Garp della sua originale madre, icona suo malgrado del femminismo più becero e dannoso; è la storia della famiglia di Garp moglie, figli, amanti annessi e connessi, ed è anche la storia della fatica di essere scrittori (sì Garp è uno scrittore), di come si concilia la scrittura con la vita di famiglia, dell’ispirazione ballerina che c’è e non c’è e che quando latita deve essere rincorsa come una lepre un bracco.
Ma nel romanzo si toccano anche temi importanti lo stupro, l’emancipazione delle donne, la cura dei figli, il loro iperprotezionismo che poi non serve a salvarli.
Garp è un eccentrico, ma non troppo, ha una sua visione specifica del mondo appunto il mondo secondo Garp, ma è un giovane uomo molto quadrato e metodico i cui spigoli non si smussano quasi mai, fissa dei paletti nella sua vita e non li sposta, raramente li supera, ma Garp è anche fondamentalmente un buono, e i buoni di Irving non sono mai stucchevoli, sono dei buoni veri, non so come dire.
Ho anche letto in qualche posto che nel libro abbonda il sesso, non è precisamente così, anzi non è proprio così, anche se, un sesso non romantico ma quasi grottesco e perverso, rappresentato da un fatto in particolare che stupirà moltissimo chi lo leggerà finirà per avere un ruolo importante nell’economia della storia.
E ciò nonostante la sua produzione sia quantitativamente parlando feconda, e anche meritevole da un punto di vista qualitativo, secondo il mio modesto parere.
John Irving è innanzitutto un autore inconfondibile credo che la riconoscibilità - attenzione non il ripetere se stessi – ma l’aver una propria peculiare cifra stilistica sia un pregio notevole per un autore. Infatti la sua scrittura si riconosce, forse accade per ogni autore ma Irving ha un modo di raccontare e di creare fiction che indubbiamente riconducono a lui.
Potresti per gioco aprire un suo romanzo a caso, cominciare a leggerne una frase nel bel mezzo di una pagina e capiresti al volo chi è l’autore, come un neonato che vede a mala pena intorno a sé ma sa riconoscere, tra mille seni, quell’unico seno della madre, o come quando da lontano si riconosce una persona cara solo dal modo di camminare, dalla sua andatura tipica quelle spalle erette o un po’ all’in giù, quella falcata allegra o spenta, come si abbandonano le braccia o la testa che si piega da un lato.
Un altro merito di Irving è saper confezionare delle storie o, meglio, saper tratteggiare dei personaggi che rimangono a lungo, direi per sempre, scolpiti nel cuore.
Garp per esempio o Owen in Preghiera per un amico, o anche la stramba famiglia di Hotel New Hampshire, personaggi che hanno uno smalto che resta brillante nei ricordi, senza mai sbiadire.
Eppure i romanzi di Irving non sono perfetti né esenti da difetti, sono spesso troppo lunghi e alternano parti che ti strappano il cuore, ti strappano il riso e parti che invece sarebbe igienico saltare.
Ma è un maestro nel maneggiare tragico e comico con un senso di levità surreale, per esempio riesce a rendere buffa la morte dei suoi personaggi, come fosse un evento, uno tra i tanti che costellano la vita e non l’Evento, perché sì, insomma, dobbiamo dire che i suoi personaggi muoiono molto nei suoi romanzi, forse anche troppo e la lacrima e il sorriso si contendono continuamente la pagina.
Tornando al libro Il mondo secondo Garp è la storia di Garp della sua originale madre, icona suo malgrado del femminismo più becero e dannoso; è la storia della famiglia di Garp moglie, figli, amanti annessi e connessi, ed è anche la storia della fatica di essere scrittori (sì Garp è uno scrittore), di come si concilia la scrittura con la vita di famiglia, dell’ispirazione ballerina che c’è e non c’è e che quando latita deve essere rincorsa come una lepre un bracco.
Ma nel romanzo si toccano anche temi importanti lo stupro, l’emancipazione delle donne, la cura dei figli, il loro iperprotezionismo che poi non serve a salvarli.
Garp è un eccentrico, ma non troppo, ha una sua visione specifica del mondo appunto il mondo secondo Garp, ma è un giovane uomo molto quadrato e metodico i cui spigoli non si smussano quasi mai, fissa dei paletti nella sua vita e non li sposta, raramente li supera, ma Garp è anche fondamentalmente un buono, e i buoni di Irving non sono mai stucchevoli, sono dei buoni veri, non so come dire.
Ho anche letto in qualche posto che nel libro abbonda il sesso, non è precisamente così, anzi non è proprio così, anche se, un sesso non romantico ma quasi grottesco e perverso, rappresentato da un fatto in particolare che stupirà moltissimo chi lo leggerà finirà per avere un ruolo importante nell’economia della storia.
December 15, 2017
"The World According to Garp" was recommended to me at university by a friend, back in the olden days when there were not even any smart-phones, can you believe it?
Anyway, I started reading this masterpiece one sunny day, and by the end of the next sunny day I'd finished it, satisfied in the knowledge that I had just completed a book that deserves the accolade of masterpiece. Did I tell you I like this book?
Irving's work is nothing short of genius, and one of my three favourite books ever (the other two are Crime and Punishment and Catch-22).
I love the unconventional when it comes to fiction, and TWATG is certainly that.
Funny and sad, optimistic and fatalistic, this work takes you on a magic carpet ride with a cast of some of the most outrageous, lovable and grotesque characters you'll ever encounter in a book.
From Garp's stubbornly focused mother, Jenny, to lusty Garp himself, and the show-stealing transgender Roberta Muldoon, these folks leave you breathless as they careen through their roller-coaster lives.
Gender roles - such a hot and controversial topic today - was foreshadowed as a big social issue by Irving all those years ago. And sexuality as a theme is also pervasive, which itself has to be interesting to readers, right? And of course, everybody's favourite topic, death, gets plenty of airtime. There are some very unusual sticky ends that score high marks for originality and perverseness.
So, do yourself a huge, huge favour, and get a hold of this book. If you haven't seen the movie with Robin Williams in the starring role and John Lithgow giving a superb performance as Roberta Muldoon, watch it. It's also a beauty!
Anyway, I started reading this masterpiece one sunny day, and by the end of the next sunny day I'd finished it, satisfied in the knowledge that I had just completed a book that deserves the accolade of masterpiece. Did I tell you I like this book?
Irving's work is nothing short of genius, and one of my three favourite books ever (the other two are Crime and Punishment and Catch-22).
I love the unconventional when it comes to fiction, and TWATG is certainly that.
Funny and sad, optimistic and fatalistic, this work takes you on a magic carpet ride with a cast of some of the most outrageous, lovable and grotesque characters you'll ever encounter in a book.
From Garp's stubbornly focused mother, Jenny, to lusty Garp himself, and the show-stealing transgender Roberta Muldoon, these folks leave you breathless as they careen through their roller-coaster lives.
Gender roles - such a hot and controversial topic today - was foreshadowed as a big social issue by Irving all those years ago. And sexuality as a theme is also pervasive, which itself has to be interesting to readers, right? And of course, everybody's favourite topic, death, gets plenty of airtime. There are some very unusual sticky ends that score high marks for originality and perverseness.
So, do yourself a huge, huge favour, and get a hold of this book. If you haven't seen the movie with Robin Williams in the starring role and John Lithgow giving a superb performance as Roberta Muldoon, watch it. It's also a beauty!
April 20, 2018
Looking back, such a great book, have to re-read this one too!
July 20, 2014
While a large portion of bibliophiles read and adored The World According To Garp during their adolescence, I was too busy reading of apocalypses brought on by green meteorites, three-pronged killer plants and the bomb. Reading it now I understand the attraction that it may have had to a teenager, but I question what a teenager would have taken away from it. Because I know that I am questioning what I have taken away from this book at my age, and I even question the motives and the meaning of this book, if there is any.
While the novel starts off innocently with a coherent voice and some sense of reality, the progression of the novel, and indeed Garp's life, is a progression into soap opera and a ridiculousness that undermined the whole novel for me. I might be too dim to realise that this was the author's intention, or even too dim to see a bigger message here, but it seems that this novel goes so far into not taking itself seriously that I can only surmise that this was just a great big wank for Irving.
I can only try to discern any message that the author had on sex, lust and individuality by glossing over the complete mess that he smears over any message by presenting farcical situations in an otherwise traditional setting and by using Garp's writing to mock the novel that it contains. Just when you start to feel for a character, or start to see a message coming through you are presented with an over-the-top death, killer fanatics, Tootsie style drag or some other contrived scenario that makes you go "Ugh". Maybe this was the intention of the author, I'm too dim to tell.
While I am critical of the motives of the author and story there is still a lot to enjoy here. The outer characters I have a lot more sympathy for and they were a joy to read about. Even Jenny in her way was a pleasure. There is some damn fine writing going on here. Writing that will stick to your sides and and keep you reading despite being about a character that is a selfish, bumbling and likeable asshole.
So I can see why teenagers would gravitate to this story. It was Kurt Cobain before Kurt Cobain. It's full of extremism, sex, lust and lost people. Everyone is a figurehead for something. I just wish that the smear of undermining bullshit wasn't there.
While the novel starts off innocently with a coherent voice and some sense of reality, the progression of the novel, and indeed Garp's life, is a progression into soap opera and a ridiculousness that undermined the whole novel for me. I might be too dim to realise that this was the author's intention, or even too dim to see a bigger message here, but it seems that this novel goes so far into not taking itself seriously that I can only surmise that this was just a great big wank for Irving.
I can only try to discern any message that the author had on sex, lust and individuality by glossing over the complete mess that he smears over any message by presenting farcical situations in an otherwise traditional setting and by using Garp's writing to mock the novel that it contains. Just when you start to feel for a character, or start to see a message coming through you are presented with an over-the-top death, killer fanatics, Tootsie style drag or some other contrived scenario that makes you go "Ugh". Maybe this was the intention of the author, I'm too dim to tell.
While I am critical of the motives of the author and story there is still a lot to enjoy here. The outer characters I have a lot more sympathy for and they were a joy to read about. Even Jenny in her way was a pleasure. There is some damn fine writing going on here. Writing that will stick to your sides and and keep you reading despite being about a character that is a selfish, bumbling and likeable asshole.
So I can see why teenagers would gravitate to this story. It was Kurt Cobain before Kurt Cobain. It's full of extremism, sex, lust and lost people. Everyone is a figurehead for something. I just wish that the smear of undermining bullshit wasn't there.
September 4, 2022
Ich hatte dieses Buch schon in meinen jungen Jahren gelesen und ich war neugierig ob sich meine Meinung geändert hat.
Dieses Buch war damals mit all seinem teils schwarzem ,dreckigem , überspannten aber immer warmen Humor und seiner Anarchie für mich( bis dato Lieblingsautoren, Fontane ,Böll, Tolstoi, Christie) etwas Neues.
Und auch heute hatte ich soo viel Freude an seinen skurrilen Einfällen, auch wenn ich zwischendurch Längen empfunden habe und auch die Augen verdreht habe bei der nächsten "Geschichte in der Geschichte" . In der Rückschau wüßte ich nicht was er hätte weglassen sollen , so rund war das Gefühl für mich am Schluß.
Spannend für mich ,wie stark er die Mechanismen gesellschaftlichen Diskurses thematisiert . Die Fanatisierung und das Unversöhnliche. Feministinnen ,die sich in Solidarität mit Opfern selber schädigen. Männer, die Frauen an ihren Platz weisen wollen. Und dazwischen Menschen, die auf ihrer Individualität bestehen .
Kam mir direkt brandaktuell vor.
Traurig, daß wir Menschen auch heute nach darüber diskutieren wie stromlinienförmig der Einzelne sein muß und doch in der Gesellschaft dazu neigen jeden ,der aus der gewöhnliche Schublade fällt aber doch gerne in eine andere , mit tollen neuen Etiketten zu stecken.
Womöglich ist es uns nicht gegeben, Mitmenschen einfach mal ohne Etikett so sein zu lassen wie sie sind. Solange sie niemanden schädigen. Und vielleicht wollen wir auch selber uns irgendwo einordnen können.
Und dabei schreibt Irving voller Wärme und Respekt über die Menschen und das Leben.
Spannend, daß er anscheinend polarisiert. Ich kenne viele Leser, die mit seinen Romanen nichts anfangen können oder die er sogar erbost.
Ich habe ihn wieder sehr gemocht.
Dieses Buch war damals mit all seinem teils schwarzem ,dreckigem , überspannten aber immer warmen Humor und seiner Anarchie für mich( bis dato Lieblingsautoren, Fontane ,Böll, Tolstoi, Christie) etwas Neues.
Und auch heute hatte ich soo viel Freude an seinen skurrilen Einfällen, auch wenn ich zwischendurch Längen empfunden habe und auch die Augen verdreht habe bei der nächsten "Geschichte in der Geschichte" . In der Rückschau wüßte ich nicht was er hätte weglassen sollen , so rund war das Gefühl für mich am Schluß.
Spannend für mich ,wie stark er die Mechanismen gesellschaftlichen Diskurses thematisiert . Die Fanatisierung und das Unversöhnliche. Feministinnen ,die sich in Solidarität mit Opfern selber schädigen. Männer, die Frauen an ihren Platz weisen wollen. Und dazwischen Menschen, die auf ihrer Individualität bestehen .
Kam mir direkt brandaktuell vor.
Traurig, daß wir Menschen auch heute nach darüber diskutieren wie stromlinienförmig der Einzelne sein muß und doch in der Gesellschaft dazu neigen jeden ,der aus der gewöhnliche Schublade fällt aber doch gerne in eine andere , mit tollen neuen Etiketten zu stecken.
Womöglich ist es uns nicht gegeben, Mitmenschen einfach mal ohne Etikett so sein zu lassen wie sie sind. Solange sie niemanden schädigen. Und vielleicht wollen wir auch selber uns irgendwo einordnen können.
Und dabei schreibt Irving voller Wärme und Respekt über die Menschen und das Leben.
Spannend, daß er anscheinend polarisiert. Ich kenne viele Leser, die mit seinen Romanen nichts anfangen können oder die er sogar erbost.
Ich habe ihn wieder sehr gemocht.
January 4, 2022
Ako su sva Irvingova dela ovakva, ja sam presrećan čovek. Svet po Garpu je topao, edukativan, emotivan, inteligentan bildungsroman. Od prvih stranica me je uvukao i nije me ispuštao do samog kraja do te mere da sam imao osećaj da mi je T.S. Garp daleki rođak o kome su se priče prenosile s kolena na koleno, s kontinenta na kontinent.
Dodatna veličina romana se ogleda u neverovatnim "sporednim" likovima. Jedini razlog zbog kojeg ih nazivam sporednim je zato što delo ne nosi njihovo ime. Svi su bogato razvijeni, njihovi životi i motivi su jasni (ili makar logični) i uklapaju se savršeno u svaku Garpovu eru: ne kao posledice, ne kao uzroci, već kao njeni neodvojivi delovi.
Plakao sam, smejao se, ostajao bez reči i navijao. Ovo je svet po Garpu, ali svet za sve.
Dodatna veličina romana se ogleda u neverovatnim "sporednim" likovima. Jedini razlog zbog kojeg ih nazivam sporednim je zato što delo ne nosi njihovo ime. Svi su bogato razvijeni, njihovi životi i motivi su jasni (ili makar logični) i uklapaju se savršeno u svaku Garpovu eru: ne kao posledice, ne kao uzroci, već kao njeni neodvojivi delovi.
Plakao sam, smejao se, ostajao bez reči i navijao. Ovo je svet po Garpu, ali svet za sve.
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