Many many years ago, my dear mother introduced me to the eloquent writings of John Irving. She did so by presenting me with the novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. Amazon.com reviews the book as:
Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras. The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.I fell in love with it and Irving himself within the first 10 pages of the book! Then promptly went on to read several of this other titles, including, but certainly not limited to: The World According to Garp, Hotel New Hampshire (a close second favorite!), and several others. (Don't tell Irving, but I was sorely disappointed with his last two most recent novels!)
Anyway, I love Owen Meany that I've read it three, maybe four times over! Earlier this week I got an email from the Denver Center for Performing Arts that invited me to see Owen Meany on the stage! Looksee:
OWEN MEANY ON THE BIG STAGE!!! It's enough to give me "the SHIVERS!!!!!!"
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3 comments:
Okay, now I'm going to have to get this book, because I ADORED "The World According to Garp!"
-Candace
(I'm so glad you get to see the stage version.)
Wow. I've never read this book. I have no good reason for this.
You've piqued my interest, though. It was the Flannery O'Connor reference - I'm bonkers about her stories.
Not for the Christian themes, but for the oddness of her work.
Have fun at the show!!!
I didn't know that this was one of your mom's favorites, nor that it is one of yours. I read it last summer for the first time, after having heard a recommendation for it a number of years ago during a sermon by Deason Sally at your mom's church. It's a GREAT book!! Thank you for sharing that your mother introduced you to it; I like knowing that.
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