by John Irving
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 t
o 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 ménage à 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 novel about women written by a man in our generation.... Like all extraordinary books, Garp defies synopsis.... A marvelous, important, permanent novel by a serious artist of remarkable powers.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE
“The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.” So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel.
“A hectic, gaudy saga with the verve of a Marx Brothers movie.”
—New York Times Book Review
THE CIDER HOUSE RULES
First published in 1985 by William Morrow, The Cider House Rules is John Irving’s sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch—saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud’s, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch’s favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.
“[Irving] is among the very best storytellers at work today. At the base of Irving’s own moral concerns is a rare and lasting regard for human kindness.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
TRYING TO SAVE PIGGY SNEED
Here is a treat for John Irving addicts and a perfect introduction to his work for the uninitiated. To open this spirited collection, Irving explains how he became a writer. There follow six scintillating stories written over the last twenty years ending with an homage to Charles Dickens. This irresistible collection cannot fail to delight and charm.
“Hilarious. Highly enjoyable stories with zany plots and unforgettable characters, made all the more readable by Irving’s silky smooth prose.”
—The Independent
A SON OF THE CIRCUS
“Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, reared in Bombay by maverick foes of tradition, educated in Vienna, married to an Austrian and long a resident of Toronto, is a fifty-nine-year-old without a country, culture or religion to call his own.... The novel may not be ‘about’ India, but Irving’s imagined India, which Daruwalla visits periodically, is a remarkable achievement—a pandemonium of servants and clubmen, dwarf clowns and transvestite whores, missionaries and movie stars. This is a land of energetic colliding egos, of modern media clashing with ancient cultures, of broken sexual boundaries.”
—New York Newsday
“A Son of the Circus is comic genius.... Get ready for Irving’s most raucous novel to date.”
—Boston Globe
THE IMAGINARY GIRLFRIEND
The Imaginary Girlfriend is a candid memoir of the writers and wrestlers who played a role in John Irving’s development as a novelist and as a wrestler. It also portrays a father’s dedication—Irving coached his two sons to championship titles. It is an illuminating, concise work, a literary treasure.
“The nearest thing to an autobiography Irving has written.... Worth saving and savoring.”
—Seattle Times
A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR
Twenty years after The World According to Garp, John Irving gave us his ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, about a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten. Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason. A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time.
Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.
“By turns antic and moving, lusty and tragic, A Widow for One Year is bursting with memorable moments.”
—San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
MY MOVIE BUSINESS
After two producers, four directors, thirteen years, and uncounted rewrites, the movie version of John Irving’s acclaimed novel The Cider House Rules at last made it to the big screen. Here is the author’s account of the novel-to-film process. Anecdotal, affectionate, and delightfully candid, My Movie Business dazzles with Irving’s incomparable wit and style.
“Writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.... This short, amiable book is John Irving’s personal history of seeing—or not seeing—his novels made into movies.... The book digresses charmingly and effortlessly into related subjects. There is a beguiling memoir of his grandfather, an eminent surgeon; a brilliant and passionate argument for the freedom of women to choose abortion … observations on the origins of his novels, and so on.... Irving remains cooly objective, and it is clear why: he is a novelist, first and foremost, and his attitude toward the movie business is informed by this security and certainty.... Irving has done us [writers] proud.”
—New York Times Book Review
THE FOURTH HAND
While reporting a story from India, New York journalist Patrick Wallingford inadvertently becomes his own headline when his left hand is eaten by a lion. In Boston, a renowned surgeon eagerly awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s first hand transplant. But what if the donor’s widow demands visitation rights with the hand? In answering this unexpected question, John Irving has written a novel that is by turns brilliantly comic and emotionally moving, offering a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change.
“A rich and deeply moving tale.... Vintage Irving: a story of two very disparate people, and the strange and unexpected ways we grow.”
—Washington Post Book World
UNTIL I FIND YOU
“According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor,
but Jack’s most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother’s hand. He wasn’t acting then.” So begins John Irving’s eleventh novel, Until I Find You, the story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several Baltic and North Sea ports; they are trying to find Jack’s missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can’t be found. Even Jack’s memories are subject to doubt.
Jack Burns is educated at schools in Canada and New England, but he is shaped by his relationships with older women. Mr. Irving renders Jack’s life as an actor in Hollywood with the same richness of detail and range of emotions he uses to describe the tattoo parlors in those Baltic and North Sea ports and the reverberating music Jack heard as a child in European churches.
The author’s tone—indeed, the narrative voice of this novel—is melancholic. (“In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us—not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”) Until I Find You is suffused with overwhelming sadness and deception; it is also a robust and comic novel, certain to be compared to Mr. Irving’s most ambitious and moving work.
“Bittersweet … moving.”
