The Life and Times of T.S. Garp

Surprisingly, this is probably the least smutty book you'll ever find that's largely about sex.

No, that's not really fair. John Irving's The World According to Garp is really about the life of T.S. Garp . (It's just T.S. It doesn't stand for anything.)

But a lot of it has to do with sex.

Right off the bat, you meet Jenny Fields , Garp's mother, who assaults a randy soldier for trying to make a move on her in a movie theatre. Jenny's a nurse who doesn't have the time or the need for a man. But she does want a baby and as soon as that idea gets in her head, she sets out to make it happen.

Conveniently, there happens to be a mysteriously injured ball turret gunner named Technical Sergeant Garp, who's been reduced to a vegetable, leaving him capable only of saying his name over and over again and sporting an extremely large erection.

Jenny helps herself to Garp's abundant ejaculation and before you know it, she finds herself with child --- a one T.S. Garp, Jr.

She moves to the Steering School, an all-boys' school where she's been offered the job of head nurse. It's there that Garp spends his formative years and meets Helen Holm, the bookish daughter of the wrestling coach.

Helen declares she'll only marry a writer when she grows up, so that settles things for Garp: he's going to be a writer.

To his immense frustration, though, it's his mother who cranks out a bestseller (called A Sexual Suspect ) that turns her into an internationally renowned feminist leader.

It's really no wonder that all Garp will ever amount to is a struggling writer, 'cause you get a chance to read some of his stuff in certain chapters and it's utter crap. They're the most boring segments of the book and you're better off advised to skip those parts altogether.

But even if Garp's writing is boring, his character is delightful. He marries Helen and has a little family of his own. He becomes this wonderfully neurotic and overprotective father who's constantly on the lookout for perverts and child molesters. (He even saves a little girl from a pedophile, which for a time turns Garp into somewhat of a celebrity. He runs around the park and yanks down an old man's pants to "sniff out" the pedophile. It's laugh-out-loud funny.)

And between being a doting dad, a gourmet chef of sorts, a housekeeper and writer, you watch as Garp struggles through his marriage. He slips a couple of times and indulges in a couple of dalliances with other women (including the mother of one of his son's friends --- a woman he's convinced will burn the house down while his son is sleeping over at her home). But the biggest hurdle he has to cross is when Helen has an affair of her own with one of her students.

All the while, poor Garp has to contend with his editor, his transsexual friend, Roberta Muldoon (who constantly calls in the middle of the night to cry over another failed love affair) and living in the shadow of his enormously famous mother.

Also, enter in the Ellen Jamesians a cult of women who have cut off their tongues in support of a little girl who was raped and then had her tongue cut off by her attackers. Garp has a fractious relationship with these women, which ultimately leads to his own demise.

This isn't so much a story as a portrait of all these fantastically absurd people that Irving's imagination has given birth to.

It's not exactly the kind of story that kept me up late at night, turning page after page in nail-biting suspense to find out what happens next. This book actually took me over two months to read. I liked to pick it up every now and then to read another chapter. And every time I did, it was like coming back to visit these wonderfully eccentric, crazy friends I'd known all my life.

The only other Irving book I've read so far is The Cider House Rules and I enjoyed it so much that I went out and bought several other books by Irving.

I decided to tackle The World According to Garp second because I've actually seen the movie before.

It starred Robin Williams as Garp and Glen Close as Jenny. It was a horrible, disjointed story to watch, but while I was reading the book, I kept picturing Williams and Close as Garp and Jenny.

Reading the book was a delightful experience. The best way to describe how I felt is to say that it tickled me. It charmed me.

Sure, the characters are silly and the things that happen to them are outrageous and out of this world, but at the same time you really feel like you know these people as the story progresses. And in the end, they almost seem real.

As Mark Twain once said, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.