A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The first chapter of this work appeared in The New Yorker in slightly different form.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred Publishing Co. Inc.: Three lines from "Four Strong Winds" by Ian Tyson, copyright (c) 1963 (renewed) by Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co. Inc.
Henry Holt and Company, LLC: Excerpt from "The Gift Outright" from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright (c) 1942 by Robert Frost and copyright renewed 1970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, copyright (c) 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Excerpt from In One Person copyright (c) 2012 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd.
Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
P.S.TM is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY. Copyright (c) 1989 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2012.
ISBN 978-0-06-220409-7
EPub Edition (c) MARCH 2012 ISBN 9780062204103
12 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
P.S.
Insights, Interviews & More ...
About the author
Meet John Irving
About the book
My Favorite First Sentence
Read on
More from John Irving
About the Author
* * *
Meet John Irving
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, which won the National Book Award in 1980, was John Irving's fourth novel and his first international bestseller; it also became a George Roy Hill film. Tony Richardson wrote and directed the adaptation for the screen of The Hotel New Hampshire (1984). Irving's novels are now translated into thirty-five languages, and he has had nine international bestsellers. Worldwide, the Irving novel most often called "an American classic" is A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), the portrayal of an enduring friendship at that time when the Vietnam War had its most divisive effect on the United States.
In 1992, John Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. (He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, until he was thirty-four, and coached the sport until he was forty-seven.) In 2000, Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules--a Lasse Hallstrom film that earned seven Academy Award nominations. Tod Williams wrote and directed The Door in the Floor--the 2004 film adapted from Mr. Irving's ninth novel, A Widow for One Year.
In One Person (2012) is John Irving's thirteenth novel.
About the Book
* * *
My Favorite First Sentence
I MAY ONE DAY write a better first sentence to a novel than that of A Prayer for Owen Meany, but I doubt it. I have a feeling for first sentences, and I've written some pretty good ones. As is my habit, however, I wrote the last sentence of The World According to Garp before I wrote the first one. "But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases." The actual first sentence isn't bad. "Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater." It works. After all, the primary function of a first sentence is to make you keep reading.
The first sentence of The Cider House Rules also has some staying power. "In the hospital of the orphanage--the boys' division at St. Cloud's, Maine--two nurses were in charge of naming the new babies and checking that their little penises were healing from the obligatory circumcision." The juxtaposition of naming baby boys and examining their penises has a certain charm, and many readers will wonder (rightly) why the circumcision is "obligatory."
The first sentence of A Son of the Circus is enhanced by the subtitle to the first chapter, which is tempting all by itself--Blood from Dwarfs. The first sentence merely serves to deepen the mystery. "Usually, the dwarfs kept bringing him back--back to the circus and back to India."
And my 2001 novel, The Fourth Hand, offers a traditional first sentence of the keep-reading kind. "Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event--the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age." The reader is forewarned that a grisly accident is about to happen; few readers will look away from grisly accidents.
The greatest of all accidents, of course, is an accidental death, which brings me back to the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany. "I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."
The semicolon helps, but the clause that follows it was a risk; doubtless there were some readers who'd had it up to here with Christians and stopped right there. I don't blame them. In the United States today, there is an excess of Christian bragging--too many holier-than-thou zealots in politics, too much righteous indignation in God's name--but that's another story. What makes the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany such a good one is that the whole novel is contained in it.
I never write the first sentence until I know all the important things that happen in the story, especially--and I mean exactly--what happens at the end of the novel. If I haven't already written the ending--and I mean more than a rough draft--I can't write the first sentence.
For example, the idea that Owen Meany is God's instrument, or that he believes he is--and so does the narrator--is specifically connected not only to Owen's diminutive size but to the illusion of his weightlessness. That image of how the children can lift Owen over their heads in Sunday school--how he is light enough so they can easily pass him back and forth when the teacher is out of the room--is not only as near to the beginning of the novel as I could find a place for it; that image is echoed at the end of the novel, where Owen's seeming weightlessness is interpreted to mean that he was always in God's hands.
But the penultimate paragraph of the novel is naturally the passage I wrote first. "When we held Owen Meany above our heads, when we passed him back and forth--so effortlessly--we believed that Owen weighed nothing at all. We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play. Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion of Owen's weightlessness; they were the forces we didn't have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in--and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands."
I added the last paragraph, only two sentences long, a day later. "O God--please give him back! I shall keep asking You."
I didn't arrive at the first sentence ("I am doomed to remember . . .") until a year or eighteen months after that.
The origin of that Sunday school image is autobiographical, in part. I was home for Christmas one year--home being Exeter, New Hampshire, the year being 1983 or '84. I spent the better part of one night with some childhood friends. I hadn't seen them in years. Morosely, we were remembering our friends who had been killed in Vietnam, or who had returned from the war so badly damaged that they would never recover from it. In addition to these casualties, we included those friends whose lives had been forever changed--in some cases, ruined--because of what extreme measures they took not to go to Vietnam.
The list was depressing; it being Christmas was strangely interwoven with the sadness. Suddenly one of my friends mentioned a name that drew a blank with me--a Russell somebody. Either I never knew him or I didn't remember him.
Then another of my friends reminded me that, in Sunday school, we used to lift up this little boy; he was our age, about eight or nine, but he was so tiny that we could pass him back and forth over our heads. It enraged him, which was why we did it. It might even have been my idea. At least it was the opinion of my friends that I was the first one to have picked up Russell whatever-his-name-was.
I remembered him instantly. He and his family moved away, long before we were teenagers. I'd had no further contact with him, but someone had heard he'd been killed in Vietnam. I was amazed. I said one of the stupidest things I've ever said.
"But he was too small to go to Vietnam!"
My friends looked at me with pity and concern.
"Johnny," one of them said, "I presume he grew."
That night I lay awake in bed, pondering the "What if ..." that is the beginning of every novel for me. What if he didn't grow? I was thinking.
At Owen Meany's burial, one of Owen's Sunday school classmates remembers how easy he was to lift up. "He was so light--he weighed nothing at all! How could he have been so light?"
Because God already had His hands on him--that's how.
Because of A Prayer for Owen Meany, many of my readers assume I am "religious." I go to church only occasionally--like a lot of people, I believe in God in times of crisis. But I have had no religious "experience"; I've never been a witness to a miracle. The reason A Prayer for Owen Meany has a first-person narrator is that you can't have a religious experience or witness a miracle except through the eyes of a believer. And the believer I chose, Johnny Wheelwright, has been so tormented by what happens to his best friend that he is more than a little crazy--as I expect most witnesses to so-called miracles are. Both Johnny Wheelwright's anger and his craziness are inseparable from what he saw.
The other religious question I am asked about the novel--second only to "Are you a believer?"--is "Do the capital letters mark Owen Meany as a Christ figure, sort of like those red-letter editions of the Bible?"
Sort of, yes. To have Owen speak in red letters might have been too expensive for my publishers, but I also thought the capitals would be more irritating than red letters. Owen's voice is irritating, not only because of how it sounds but because of how right he is. People who are always right, and are given to reminding us of it, are irritating; prophets are irritating, and Owen Meany is decidedly a prophet.
Because I don't start a novel until I know the ending, every novel of mine is predestined. In A Prayer for Owen Meany, it was not that much of a stretch to make the main character aware (to some degree) of his own predestination. After all, I am always aware of the predestination of my characters. In Owen's case, he bears the terrible burden of foreseeing his own death. His tenacious faith tells him that even his death--like his size, like his voice, like practicing the shot--is for a reason.
Separate from the Vietnam background and the apparent religious miracle, A Prayer for Owen Meany is also a novel about the loss of childhood, which I thought was best signified by the loss of a childhood friend. People are always losing things in my novels--not just, as Johnny Wheelwright does, a finger and a mother and a best friend.
In my first novel, Setting Free the Bears, another best friend is lost--stung to death by bees! In my second and third novels, The Water-Method Man and The 158-Pound Marriage, two marriages are lost and a third appears to be mortally compromised. In The World According to Garp, both an eye and a penis are lost--not to mention a child's life, and a mother's, and even the life of the main character. In The Hotel New Hampshire, more children die--and another mother, and a grandfather, and a terrorist, and even a bear and a dog. In The Cider House Rules, there are too many casualties to count; and since a major-minor character in A Son of the Circus is a serial killer, suffice it to say that death abounds. I needn't mention A Widow for One Year--four deaths and another murderer. And the eponymous fourth hand in The Fourth Hand is not a hand at all; it is, rather, the phantom pain the main character feels in his missing left hand, which he has lost twice.
Of course, all good writers repeat themselves, but when repetition is as specific as a sentence, it is usually unconscious.
My first physical description of Owen Meany gave me pause. I loved it, but it sounded like something I'd read before. It struck me as unoriginal; it was so familiar that I worried I was plagiarizing someone. Here is the sentence. "He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times--especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon)."
The sentence struck me, the day I wrote it, as too familiar.
I was sure it was plagiarism. I showed the suspicious sentence to my wife.
"Have you ever read anything like that?" I asked her.
"Sure," she said. "In The Cider House Rules."
I had plagiarized myself. I went to find the source--my description of the dying orphan Fuzzy Stone. "In the daylight Fuzzy seemed almost transparent, as if--if you held him up to a bright enough source of light--you could see right through him, see all his frail organs working to save him."
In retrospect, I wouldn't change a word in either sentence. I conclude that repetition is the necessary concomitant of having anything worthwhile to say.
What was my Vietnam experience? readers of A Prayer for Owen Meany ask. I was married and had my first child when I was still in college. I went from 2-S, a student deferment, to 3-A, married-with-child. I was virtually ineligible for the draft. (I might as well have cut off my trigger finger.) This effectively removed me from my generation; I stood apart and watched. My friends, in their late teens and early twenties, faced my generation's most agonizing decision: go to Vietnam or do something drastic in order not to go there.
My eldest son, Colin, spared me the decision, although I wouldn't have agonized over it. I would have gone. Not because I believed in the war--on more than one occasion, I demonstrated against it. And not because I felt an obligation to my country--not then, not in the case of that war. But I would have gone to Vietnam for worse reasons--namely, because I knew I wanted to be a writer and I was curious to see and be in a war.
Before I was married and had a child, I'd even enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. I wouldn't have gone to Vietnam just because I was drafted; I'd already signed up. But it just wasn't to be.
As for Vietnam, and all the rest, I take Johnny Wheelwright's view of the 1960s--"precious little irony." And I take Owen Meany's view of television; it seems even truer now. Much of the self-seriousness and lunacy in the world is, in Owen's words, "MADE FOR TELEVISION."
Twelve years later, this observation is taken to greater extremes in The Fourth Hand; yet in A Prayer for Owen Meany, the death of Johnny's grandmother is a precursor to the vacuousness of what's on television today. "The night she died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels--looking for something good."
At the time, in 1989, it seemed a fairly unusual way to die. Nowadays, I suspect, more and more people are dropping off that way. And we're still looking for something good on television. We won't find it. There's precious little on TV that can keep us awake or alive.
Ever the prophet, Owen Meany was right about television, too.
Read on
* * *
More from John Irving
SETTING FREE THE BEARS
It is 1967 and two Viennese university students want to liberate the Vienna Zoo, as was done after World War II. But their good intentions have both comic and gruesome consequences, in this first novel written by a twenty-five-year-old John Irving, already a master storyteller.
THE WATER-METHOD MAN
The main character of John Irving's second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first....
"Three or four times as funny as most novels."
--The New Yorker
THE 158-POUND MARRIAGE
The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this erotic, ironic tale about a menage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author's generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving's cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on one another; but the sexual intrigue among them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well intentioned, destructive.
"Irving looks cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance to the morning-after implications."
--Washington Post
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."
"The most powerful and profound nove
The first chapter of this work appeared in The New Yorker in slightly different form.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred Publishing Co. Inc.: Three lines from "Four Strong Winds" by Ian Tyson, copyright (c) 1963 (renewed) by Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co. Inc.
Henry Holt and Company, LLC: Excerpt from "The Gift Outright" from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright (c) 1942 by Robert Frost and copyright renewed 1970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, copyright (c) 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Excerpt from In One Person copyright (c) 2012 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd.
Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
P.S.TM is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY. Copyright (c) 1989 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2012.
ISBN 978-0-06-220409-7
EPub Edition (c) MARCH 2012 ISBN 9780062204103
12 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
P.S.
Insights, Interviews & More ...
About the author
Meet John Irving
About the book
My Favorite First Sentence
Read on
More from John Irving
About the Author
* * *
Meet John Irving
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, which won the National Book Award in 1980, was John Irving's fourth novel and his first international bestseller; it also became a George Roy Hill film. Tony Richardson wrote and directed the adaptation for the screen of The Hotel New Hampshire (1984). Irving's novels are now translated into thirty-five languages, and he has had nine international bestsellers. Worldwide, the Irving novel most often called "an American classic" is A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), the portrayal of an enduring friendship at that time when the Vietnam War had its most divisive effect on the United States.
In 1992, John Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. (He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, until he was thirty-four, and coached the sport until he was forty-seven.) In 2000, Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules--a Lasse Hallstrom film that earned seven Academy Award nominations. Tod Williams wrote and directed The Door in the Floor--the 2004 film adapted from Mr. Irving's ninth novel, A Widow for One Year.
In One Person (2012) is John Irving's thirteenth novel.
About the Book
* * *
My Favorite First Sentence
I MAY ONE DAY write a better first sentence to a novel than that of A Prayer for Owen Meany, but I doubt it. I have a feeling for first sentences, and I've written some pretty good ones. As is my habit, however, I wrote the last sentence of The World According to Garp before I wrote the first one. "But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases." The actual first sentence isn't bad. "Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater." It works. After all, the primary function of a first sentence is to make you keep reading.
The first sentence of The Cider House Rules also has some staying power. "In the hospital of the orphanage--the boys' division at St. Cloud's, Maine--two nurses were in charge of naming the new babies and checking that their little penises were healing from the obligatory circumcision." The juxtaposition of naming baby boys and examining their penises has a certain charm, and many readers will wonder (rightly) why the circumcision is "obligatory."
The first sentence of A Son of the Circus is enhanced by the subtitle to the first chapter, which is tempting all by itself--Blood from Dwarfs. The first sentence merely serves to deepen the mystery. "Usually, the dwarfs kept bringing him back--back to the circus and back to India."
And my 2001 novel, The Fourth Hand, offers a traditional first sentence of the keep-reading kind. "Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event--the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age." The reader is forewarned that a grisly accident is about to happen; few readers will look away from grisly accidents.
The greatest of all accidents, of course, is an accidental death, which brings me back to the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany. "I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."
The semicolon helps, but the clause that follows it was a risk; doubtless there were some readers who'd had it up to here with Christians and stopped right there. I don't blame them. In the United States today, there is an excess of Christian bragging--too many holier-than-thou zealots in politics, too much righteous indignation in God's name--but that's another story. What makes the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany such a good one is that the whole novel is contained in it.
I never write the first sentence until I know all the important things that happen in the story, especially--and I mean exactly--what happens at the end of the novel. If I haven't already written the ending--and I mean more than a rough draft--I can't write the first sentence.
For example, the idea that Owen Meany is God's instrument, or that he believes he is--and so does the narrator--is specifically connected not only to Owen's diminutive size but to the illusion of his weightlessness. That image of how the children can lift Owen over their heads in Sunday school--how he is light enough so they can easily pass him back and forth when the teacher is out of the room--is not only as near to the beginning of the novel as I could find a place for it; that image is echoed at the end of the novel, where Owen's seeming weightlessness is interpreted to mean that he was always in God's hands.
But the penultimate paragraph of the novel is naturally the passage I wrote first. "When we held Owen Meany above our heads, when we passed him back and forth--so effortlessly--we believed that Owen weighed nothing at all. We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play. Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion of Owen's weightlessness; they were the forces we didn't have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in--and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands."
I added the last paragraph, only two sentences long, a day later. "O God--please give him back! I shall keep asking You."
I didn't arrive at the first sentence ("I am doomed to remember . . .") until a year or eighteen months after that.
The origin of that Sunday school image is autobiographical, in part. I was home for Christmas one year--home being Exeter, New Hampshire, the year being 1983 or '84. I spent the better part of one night with some childhood friends. I hadn't seen them in years. Morosely, we were remembering our friends who had been killed in Vietnam, or who had returned from the war so badly damaged that they would never recover from it. In addition to these casualties, we included those friends whose lives had been forever changed--in some cases, ruined--because of what extreme measures they took not to go to Vietnam.
The list was depressing; it being Christmas was strangely interwoven with the sadness. Suddenly one of my friends mentioned a name that drew a blank with me--a Russell somebody. Either I never knew him or I didn't remember him.
Then another of my friends reminded me that, in Sunday school, we used to lift up this little boy; he was our age, about eight or nine, but he was so tiny that we could pass him back and forth over our heads. It enraged him, which was why we did it. It might even have been my idea. At least it was the opinion of my friends that I was the first one to have picked up Russell whatever-his-name-was.
I remembered him instantly. He and his family moved away, long before we were teenagers. I'd had no further contact with him, but someone had heard he'd been killed in Vietnam. I was amazed. I said one of the stupidest things I've ever said.
"But he was too small to go to Vietnam!"
My friends looked at me with pity and concern.
"Johnny," one of them said, "I presume he grew."
That night I lay awake in bed, pondering the "What if ..." that is the beginning of every novel for me. What if he didn't grow? I was thinking.
At Owen Meany's burial, one of Owen's Sunday school classmates remembers how easy he was to lift up. "He was so light--he weighed nothing at all! How could he have been so light?"
Because God already had His hands on him--that's how.
Because of A Prayer for Owen Meany, many of my readers assume I am "religious." I go to church only occasionally--like a lot of people, I believe in God in times of crisis. But I have had no religious "experience"; I've never been a witness to a miracle. The reason A Prayer for Owen Meany has a first-person narrator is that you can't have a religious experience or witness a miracle except through the eyes of a believer. And the believer I chose, Johnny Wheelwright, has been so tormented by what happens to his best friend that he is more than a little crazy--as I expect most witnesses to so-called miracles are. Both Johnny Wheelwright's anger and his craziness are inseparable from what he saw.
The other religious question I am asked about the novel--second only to "Are you a believer?"--is "Do the capital letters mark Owen Meany as a Christ figure, sort of like those red-letter editions of the Bible?"
Sort of, yes. To have Owen speak in red letters might have been too expensive for my publishers, but I also thought the capitals would be more irritating than red letters. Owen's voice is irritating, not only because of how it sounds but because of how right he is. People who are always right, and are given to reminding us of it, are irritating; prophets are irritating, and Owen Meany is decidedly a prophet.
Because I don't start a novel until I know the ending, every novel of mine is predestined. In A Prayer for Owen Meany, it was not that much of a stretch to make the main character aware (to some degree) of his own predestination. After all, I am always aware of the predestination of my characters. In Owen's case, he bears the terrible burden of foreseeing his own death. His tenacious faith tells him that even his death--like his size, like his voice, like practicing the shot--is for a reason.
Separate from the Vietnam background and the apparent religious miracle, A Prayer for Owen Meany is also a novel about the loss of childhood, which I thought was best signified by the loss of a childhood friend. People are always losing things in my novels--not just, as Johnny Wheelwright does, a finger and a mother and a best friend.
In my first novel, Setting Free the Bears, another best friend is lost--stung to death by bees! In my second and third novels, The Water-Method Man and The 158-Pound Marriage, two marriages are lost and a third appears to be mortally compromised. In The World According to Garp, both an eye and a penis are lost--not to mention a child's life, and a mother's, and even the life of the main character. In The Hotel New Hampshire, more children die--and another mother, and a grandfather, and a terrorist, and even a bear and a dog. In The Cider House Rules, there are too many casualties to count; and since a major-minor character in A Son of the Circus is a serial killer, suffice it to say that death abounds. I needn't mention A Widow for One Year--four deaths and another murderer. And the eponymous fourth hand in The Fourth Hand is not a hand at all; it is, rather, the phantom pain the main character feels in his missing left hand, which he has lost twice.
Of course, all good writers repeat themselves, but when repetition is as specific as a sentence, it is usually unconscious.
My first physical description of Owen Meany gave me pause. I loved it, but it sounded like something I'd read before. It struck me as unoriginal; it was so familiar that I worried I was plagiarizing someone. Here is the sentence. "He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times--especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon)."
The sentence struck me, the day I wrote it, as too familiar.
I was sure it was plagiarism. I showed the suspicious sentence to my wife.
"Have you ever read anything like that?" I asked her.
"Sure," she said. "In The Cider House Rules."
I had plagiarized myself. I went to find the source--my description of the dying orphan Fuzzy Stone. "In the daylight Fuzzy seemed almost transparent, as if--if you held him up to a bright enough source of light--you could see right through him, see all his frail organs working to save him."
In retrospect, I wouldn't change a word in either sentence. I conclude that repetition is the necessary concomitant of having anything worthwhile to say.
What was my Vietnam experience? readers of A Prayer for Owen Meany ask. I was married and had my first child when I was still in college. I went from 2-S, a student deferment, to 3-A, married-with-child. I was virtually ineligible for the draft. (I might as well have cut off my trigger finger.) This effectively removed me from my generation; I stood apart and watched. My friends, in their late teens and early twenties, faced my generation's most agonizing decision: go to Vietnam or do something drastic in order not to go there.
My eldest son, Colin, spared me the decision, although I wouldn't have agonized over it. I would have gone. Not because I believed in the war--on more than one occasion, I demonstrated against it. And not because I felt an obligation to my country--not then, not in the case of that war. But I would have gone to Vietnam for worse reasons--namely, because I knew I wanted to be a writer and I was curious to see and be in a war.
Before I was married and had a child, I'd even enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. I wouldn't have gone to Vietnam just because I was drafted; I'd already signed up. But it just wasn't to be.
As for Vietnam, and all the rest, I take Johnny Wheelwright's view of the 1960s--"precious little irony." And I take Owen Meany's view of television; it seems even truer now. Much of the self-seriousness and lunacy in the world is, in Owen's words, "MADE FOR TELEVISION."
Twelve years later, this observation is taken to greater extremes in The Fourth Hand; yet in A Prayer for Owen Meany, the death of Johnny's grandmother is a precursor to the vacuousness of what's on television today. "The night she died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels--looking for something good."
At the time, in 1989, it seemed a fairly unusual way to die. Nowadays, I suspect, more and more people are dropping off that way. And we're still looking for something good on television. We won't find it. There's precious little on TV that can keep us awake or alive.
Ever the prophet, Owen Meany was right about television, too.
Read on
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More from John Irving
SETTING FREE THE BEARS
It is 1967 and two Viennese university students want to liberate the Vienna Zoo, as was done after World War II. But their good intentions have both comic and gruesome consequences, in this first novel written by a twenty-five-year-old John Irving, already a master storyteller.
THE WATER-METHOD MAN
The main character of John Irving's second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first....
"Three or four times as funny as most novels."
--The New Yorker
THE 158-POUND MARRIAGE
The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this erotic, ironic tale about a menage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author's generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving's cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on one another; but the sexual intrigue among them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well intentioned, destructive.
"Irving looks cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance to the morning-after implications."
--Washington Post
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."
"The most powerful and profound nove