The World According to Garp

This book is really good.

It feels current. It feels every bit as contemporary as when the author wrote it and - as he put it himself forty years later - that feels incredibly disturbing. Because if this was all so clear to John Irving 40 years ago - and we still ended up here, now - well it makes you wonder about the whole endeavor of knowing things at all and whether such behavior yields results of any form. If John Irving wrote a book that explains division and intolerance - and it’s devastating effects on both sides of that division and on both ends of that intolerance - if he wrote that book forty years ago and here we are still divided and more intolerant than ever - and in much the same way - well then he wasn’t so much describing a moment in American history as he was describing America. And possibly humanity.

But the book is not just big ideas. It’s really a small story of a truly independent woman - Jenny - and an everyman - Garp.

Let’s start with Garp.

Garp begins the book a clueless child grasping at adulthood without any idea how to find it and matures into an independent, combative, impulsive adolescent man. Marriage and fatherhood don’t so much remove these impulses as transform them; as a new husband he takes up adultery. As a new father he ‘is so concerned to protect his children from harm that he ensures it.’ As a successful writer he picks fights needlessly and against all good advice and those fights get him killed. But as a mature husband he struggles to be more responsible and forgives his wife’s adultery. As a caring parent he moves on campus to ensure his son receives a good education. As a seasoned writer he eventually apologizes for his offensive editorial. He tries to embrace some of his mother’s spirit while remaining stand-offish toward feminism. He tames his ordinary flaws without aspiring toward or even acknowledge extreme virtue. He gradually, as a writer, loses creative possibility while he adds an ability to capture humanity. He trades his ambition for tradition, comfort, familiarity. In short, if Garp becomes better over the course of this book but it is not the result of a quest or a potion or some deep understanding he wants to bring back go the world - it is because he has bumped his head against the walls of lifes maze and moved forward instead of stopping. He embodies this gradual, inevitable, even worn down type of understanding that comes with time and can come about no other way. He is all of us men.

So what does that make his mother, Jenny.

Well Jenny does not change, really. She begins the book a caring, thoughtful, insightful, strong and independent woman and she ends the book that way. We are introduced to her stabbing an aggressive young male who attempted to sexually assault her. And we see her die when she is shot by an aggressive middle aged male who is upset with her for inspiring his wife to leave home, so he would stop physically assaulting her. And along the way? She seems to live her whole life for the benefit of her child and women who need help. She works as a nurse in her youth, curing first soldiers and then the children of her son’s boarding school and then - after she has derived great wealth from writing her autobiography - she houses women in her large home by the sea, providing respite to their souls. She has won no new knowledge, completed no quest, learned nothing mysterious that she must bring back to humanity. Instead she lives by a simple code and she lives by it consistently from the first time we meet her to her violent death. She reflects these core human values: caring, nurturing, selflessness, and also protectiveness. If she changes at all, it is only to allow these values to extend from her son to all women.

Is if over-simplistic to call Garp an ideal type of a particular maleness - its characteristic arc from brash independence to calmed belonging and Jenny one of a particular femaleness - its consistent, unflappable humanity. Probably.

So why don’t we care more when they die? Was I the only one who experienced this? Walt’s death devastated me. I could barely keep reading. But Jenny’s death felt inevitable. Coldly foreshadowed and somehow necessary. Garp’s almost like an afterthought - a quick playing out of the inevitable consequences of that aggression that we see him put on display in various forms thru the book. And that’s sort of where the little story and the big story meet, I think. The little story: Walt’s death is tragic because we know the individual motives of every actor: these are decent people caught up in a terrible Rube Goldberg that we have to watch play out to its inevitable, jarring conclusion. But Garp and Jenny are players on a violent stage - the big world of division and aggression. As players on that stage, violence seems not jarring or shocking but a matter of course. Jenny steps onto this stage thru her writing and then participation in a community and Garp thru his writing and then attacks on a community. These are people to whom violence can happen. It is only remarkable what crime gets each killed. Garp dies because of his aggression - his badness or at least actions he regrets - even tries to undo, Jenny dies because she cared for someone who could not care for herself. She dies for her goodness. And that honestly feels like the most predictable part of the story.


I loved this book,
FIVE STARS

I first read this as a teenager and didn't fully appreciate it. At the time, it just seemed really weird and overly sexual. Which it is. But wow, there's so much happening in this novel, both on the surface and in a literary way. And dear lord, the under toad. I hear you, Irving. And I see the toad everywhere.