The World According to Garp by John Irving

Having finished John Irving's The World According to Garp late Saturday night, I have now read 81 books in 2008, matching my total for all of 2007 with more than three months still remaining. This should put me well on my way to meeting my original goal of reading 100 books this year, and within striking distance of 109, which would make a total of 400 books in the five years I have been keeping track.

It is hard to know where to start in describing Garp. I'm not the first to have this problem; after all, the New York Times review of the book starts with "This is not going to be easy to explain." The novel is at once large, full of characters, expansive in its "lunacy and sorrow," and yet also confined, intimate, familiar. It is more or less just the life story of T.S. Garp. But consider his origin: his mother, Jenny Fields, is a nurse during World War II who wants to have a child without having a relationship with a man. When Technical Sergeant Garp is admitted to her ward in a near-vegetative state after being hit with shrapnel, she nurses him, has sex with him, and after his death, gives birth to a son:

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.

Clearly nothing in Garp's life will be simple. His mother takes a job as a nurse at Steering School, an all-boys prep school likely modeled after Irving's alma mater, Philips Exeter. Here we are introduced to a number of characters who will play varying roles in the remainder of Garp's life: the wrestling coach Ernie Holm, his daughter (and Garp's future wife) Helen, Dean Bodger, the Percy family. John Irving has discussed the influence that Charles Dickens had on him as a teenage reader, and it shows in Garp: the elaborate plotting, the eccentric characters, and the way those characters reappear in unexpected ways as the novel develops.

Irving's work is noted for its recurring themes and Garp goes 7 for 7: New England, prostitutes, wrestling, Vienna, bears, deadly accidents, and a main character dealing with an absent or unknown parent. And it is no coincidence that Garp is a writer. If this book is about one thing, it is probably (as Irving notes in afterword) "about being careful, and about that not being enough." The anxieties of life, of parenthood, and the inability to fully control the fate of you and your loved ones. But if it is about two things, it is also about the life of a writer, the life of writing:

Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else. Vienna was dying, the zoo was not as well restored from the war damage as the home the people lived in; the history of a city was like the history of a family--there is closeness, and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

Garp is motivated to become a great writer because that is what teenage Helen Holm hinted would be required to win her heart. He thus produces "The Pension Grillparzer," a story that even Garp will look back on as his best work, and proceeds to marry Helen. Irving uses Garp's work as a frame narrative, reproducing the story in whole (as well a later story, "Vigilance" and the first chapter of Garp's third novel, The World According to Bensenhaver); the content of Garp's writing foreshadows or parallels much of his own life. Yet Garp warns against the temptation to inquire about the autobiographical source of a fictional work:

Garp always said that the question he most hated to be asked, about his work, was how much of it was "true"--how much of it was based on "personal experience." Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the autobiographical basis--if there even was one--was the least interesting level on which to read a novel. He would say that the art of fiction was the act of imagining truly--was, like any art, a process of selection... He wrote that the worst reason for anything being part of a novel was that it really happened.

Of course, to wonder whether Irving himself holds this position is to engage in the very inquiry Garp is condemning. Ironically, as Garp gets older and his life is filled with its share of experiences, and more than its share of suffering, his writing suffers. He finds that instead of "imagining," he is constantly "remembering." Considering the ordeals the man suffers by the novel's end, this is an understandable reaction.

Yet for all the pain, all the tragedy, all the death that the book holds (and it holds plenty of each), the book makes you laugh. Even at the pain, the tragedy, the death. Irving manages to make the most unfunny things funny. He does so, I think, at the cost of failing to fully grapple with the meaning of many of these tragedies, which is why this not a perfect novel. But he makes an effort few would attempt, to render comic the deepest sorrows of life, and succeeds where a more ordinary writer could not.