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Title: The World According to Garp
Author: John Irving
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: The life story of an author with a screwed up relationship with sex and a tendency to make people mad at him.
Thoughts: Garp lost my sympathy early in the book when it was declared that he wasn't a reader.
He's a writer. The two most important women in his life, his mother the famous author and his wife the English professor, inhale books like air. But Garp prefers to stick to a handful of stories and read them over and over again. For the rest of the book, he exhibits a jealous suspicion of anyone who reads that I, as both a writer and an inhaler of books, cannot find justifiable. If you have the arrogance to impose your writing on others (and writing is its own particular arrogance), the least you can do is submit to others' writing.
I have extremely mixed feelings about this highly applauded work of literary fiction. I never warmed to Garp, or to his coldly efficient mother, or to most of the characters, really. I find them petty and self-absorbed and the endless parade of meaningless sex becomes irritating. The repeated recurrance of rape as a theme is less irritating, as it's clearly a major point of the book, but disturbing nonethless, and not in a particularly useful way.
This book is written almost as if it was the biography of a major figure that we cared a great deal about. And yet, I can't help but feel that Garp is kind of a useless person. He writes two short stories, two literary novels, one lurid novel, and half of what might be a masterpiece but is never completed. He becomes a famous figure mostly not of his own merit and does little of use with that fame. For all the tragedy inherent in this book, nothing much happens and nothing much is learned. Perhaps the very point is the pointlessness of fame, and how it is bestowed upon people at random, but it more annoys than captures.
Oddly enough, while I do not care for Garp the person very much at all, I find that I like his writing quite a lot. His first short story and the first chapter of his lurid novel are both contained within the text, and I found them the most fascinating part of the book. Too often, when artists try to portray a character of talent, they do not themselves have the talent to pull it off. (If your protagonist is a fabulous poet, you'd better be able to write some amazing poetry for them.) In some ways, I found Irving-as-Garp a more compelling writer than Irving himself.
The tone is attractively off-putting, a humorous cynicism at tragedy that reminds me more of Catch-22 than anything else. Horrible things occur with ironic commentary that is genuinely funny, but distancing as well. It's hard to love characters who are so laughably vain.
There is one particular passage that I think works exceptionally well. The tragedy at the center of the novel is so well set up, with clues planted so far in advance, that when it finally materializes, there is both a sense of shock and of inevitability. I could see it coming two pages in advance, but realized afterwards that the details had been laid a hundred and fifty pages before. And it rolls over you while you watch as helplessly as the characters. The full ramifications are then left unspoken for another twenty or so pages, and when you finally understand what happened, your shock mirrors that of the characters. It's a beautiful tour-de-force of excellent writing.
Unfortunately, the climax of the novel is heavy-handed and obvious in comparison. It's rather a let down.
And the relationship with feminism...is still confusing to me. Irving clearly has a great deal of sympathy with feminist goals and a great deal of vitriol for feminist leaders. (Which I can sympathize with to a certain extent.) But the over-the-topness of his strawmen clouds his message to the point that I'm not actually sure what exactly it is he believes, and I don't think that he has made his case. Given how much feminism as a cause and responses to rape are woven through this book, it's an important point to understand and I still don't feel I've understood it.
So I enjoyed reading this sentence by sentence--but did not enjoy spending time with most of these people. There are parts that are brilliant and parts that are murky and I can't say that I liked the experience much overall. I have a lot of trouble distinguishing Irving's views from his characters and so I'm not sure whether I dislike them or him. I can see why it might be considered an important book, but it still feels self-indulgent and its characters self-absorbed.
Author: John Irving
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: The life story of an author with a screwed up relationship with sex and a tendency to make people mad at him.
Thoughts: Garp lost my sympathy early in the book when it was declared that he wasn't a reader.
He's a writer. The two most important women in his life, his mother the famous author and his wife the English professor, inhale books like air. But Garp prefers to stick to a handful of stories and read them over and over again. For the rest of the book, he exhibits a jealous suspicion of anyone who reads that I, as both a writer and an inhaler of books, cannot find justifiable. If you have the arrogance to impose your writing on others (and writing is its own particular arrogance), the least you can do is submit to others' writing.
I have extremely mixed feelings about this highly applauded work of literary fiction. I never warmed to Garp, or to his coldly efficient mother, or to most of the characters, really. I find them petty and self-absorbed and the endless parade of meaningless sex becomes irritating. The repeated recurrance of rape as a theme is less irritating, as it's clearly a major point of the book, but disturbing nonethless, and not in a particularly useful way.
This book is written almost as if it was the biography of a major figure that we cared a great deal about. And yet, I can't help but feel that Garp is kind of a useless person. He writes two short stories, two literary novels, one lurid novel, and half of what might be a masterpiece but is never completed. He becomes a famous figure mostly not of his own merit and does little of use with that fame. For all the tragedy inherent in this book, nothing much happens and nothing much is learned. Perhaps the very point is the pointlessness of fame, and how it is bestowed upon people at random, but it more annoys than captures.
Oddly enough, while I do not care for Garp the person very much at all, I find that I like his writing quite a lot. His first short story and the first chapter of his lurid novel are both contained within the text, and I found them the most fascinating part of the book. Too often, when artists try to portray a character of talent, they do not themselves have the talent to pull it off. (If your protagonist is a fabulous poet, you'd better be able to write some amazing poetry for them.) In some ways, I found Irving-as-Garp a more compelling writer than Irving himself.
The tone is attractively off-putting, a humorous cynicism at tragedy that reminds me more of Catch-22 than anything else. Horrible things occur with ironic commentary that is genuinely funny, but distancing as well. It's hard to love characters who are so laughably vain.
There is one particular passage that I think works exceptionally well. The tragedy at the center of the novel is so well set up, with clues planted so far in advance, that when it finally materializes, there is both a sense of shock and of inevitability. I could see it coming two pages in advance, but realized afterwards that the details had been laid a hundred and fifty pages before. And it rolls over you while you watch as helplessly as the characters. The full ramifications are then left unspoken for another twenty or so pages, and when you finally understand what happened, your shock mirrors that of the characters. It's a beautiful tour-de-force of excellent writing.
Unfortunately, the climax of the novel is heavy-handed and obvious in comparison. It's rather a let down.
And the relationship with feminism...is still confusing to me. Irving clearly has a great deal of sympathy with feminist goals and a great deal of vitriol for feminist leaders. (Which I can sympathize with to a certain extent.) But the over-the-topness of his strawmen clouds his message to the point that I'm not actually sure what exactly it is he believes, and I don't think that he has made his case. Given how much feminism as a cause and responses to rape are woven through this book, it's an important point to understand and I still don't feel I've understood it.
So I enjoyed reading this sentence by sentence--but did not enjoy spending time with most of these people. There are parts that are brilliant and parts that are murky and I can't say that I liked the experience much overall. I have a lot of trouble distinguishing Irving's views from his characters and so I'm not sure whether I dislike them or him. I can see why it might be considered an important book, but it still feels self-indulgent and its characters self-absorbed.
