I’m not going to pretend that Irving is anything other than a popular fiction writer (slash screenplay writer, I guess). This isn’t, let’s face it, literature. But still.
Although it’s a long time since I read Garp, I can still remember how, at the time, it was the first time I’d read anything like it. I think Irving’s gift really lies in the creation of his characters, which are not only unique and memorable, but which seem to have something otherworldly about them, to be somehow a signifier of an unknowable other. That gift is also at work in Owen Meany, and gives us the narrator, John Wheelwright, once impatient to leave adolescence, now living out his days in the frustration of hindsight; his grandmother, the family’s firm-minded old-money matriarch with her addiction to trashy television; his gentle but fiercely loyal stepfather, Dan; and Owen, the title character, a tiny, squeaky-voiced visionary who cuts to the truth others half-glimpse, and who believes he knows the date and manner of his death.
I think Garp is probably the superior novel, but there’s a lot to enjoy here. The events of the novel build themselves with an inexorability that point to its end, though that can be a two-edged sword: there were some elements of the book which I felt should have amounted to more than they did, which in a novel that layers its plot into a kind of pseudo-Dickensian edifice has left me feeling a little cheated that it didn’t make more of itself. The writing is good, solid without being extraordinary, and the dismal standards of popular contemporary fiction are endemic enough for me to be grateful for what should be a small mercy.
Finally, a small personal note: I credit John Irving with having revealed to me the true versatility of the semicolon. For that, I am in his debt.