Nihilism with A Heart: The World According to Garp

I was turned off to John Irving's writing due to an irrational prejudice developed several years ago based upon seeing snippets of the horribly castrated movie version of the novel presently under review, and after seeing and loathing the film, The Hotel New Hampshire.

Moreover, advertisements for A Prayer for Owen Meany, and a review I read in some newspaper or magazine when that novel was first published, further agitated my spite for Irving, who appeared to me to be a voice of mockery and derision, a jaded humorist creating superficial and absurd characters merely for the sake of making fun, spitefully, of human nature. As a dedicated "Dosteovskian," I'm more stimulated by the mystery of the human creature, and tend to gravitate towards literature that approaches the phenomenon of personality, though flawed and complex and often behaving absurdly, seriously on a presuppositional level.

So for years, captive to this shallow and false vision of Irving the writer, I refused to read his work.

Yet, as I was going through my paperbacks a few days ago, I picked up a copy of The World According to Garp, never read by myself and purchased by my ex years ago, and flipped, critically, past the laudations the first few pages ("Hilarious!", "Humorous!", "Superb!") to chapter 1, titled Boston Mercy, and began to read. "Garp's mother..." I read, then stopped, and consciously shook an image of Robin Williams out of my head. Begone with Mork, I told myself, be fair with Irving. I tried again:

"Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater. This was shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and people were being tolerant of soldiers, because suddenly everyone was a soldier, but Jenny Fields was quite firm in her intolerance of the behavior of men in general and soldiers in particular. In the movie theater she had to move three times, but each time the soldier moved closer to her until she was sitting against the musty wall..."

Already, I was captured, Irving clutched me by my wrist, the conflict laid down in a couple of sparse sentences, just one of the themes that inheres within Irving's eloquent and masterful text--the lust of men and anger of women, the confused twentieth century ideological scuffle and shuffle about gender. More immediately, I wanted to see why she was arrested, how she handled the randy soldier, and so I was hooked, and one page folded over into the next so easefully and without difficulty that I wrote to someone that I'd been "swallowed up" by the novel--not merely occupied or entertained, but engulfed, enraptured, captivated.

Irving writes in a contemporary style of reflection, his narration jumping hither and thither rather than in a strictly linear fashion. In the early pages, as we learn of Jenny and Garp, Irving uses what I thought to be an initially astonishing method of quoting from his characters in order to reveal something of them to us. This falls into place later when both Jenny Fields and her son, Garp, are revealed to be rather successful writers. Both have odd idiosyncracies, which are highlighted through a strange series of circumstances and revelations.

Gender confusion and ideological warfare surrounding men and women and their relation and/or lack of communication between each other is merely one level of thematic exploration Irving humorously but heartfully analyzes. On its most fundamental level, The World According to Garp is simply about death, without romanticizing it as would the sprawling Victorian novelist, nor pining away in its penultimate shadow. Yet, the acts and nonactions, romances and flings, fighting and lovemaking, fears, worries, and tragedies of life are all embellished sublimely by the ultimacy of death's egalitarian presence. That is not to say that this is a morbid novel; it isn't. Rather, the presence and action of death grants both meaning and irony to the stumblings and desires of Irving's outrageous characters. I discovered, with joy, that Irving does not create insipid and absurd characters in a spirit of mockery, spitting bitterly towards hades; rather, his fictions are embellished with toothful and richly textured irony, thus establishing poignancy, meaning and the possibility of expressing something that is true.

Often, the irony is expressed in situations that are truly hilarious, and I found myself laughing out loud more than once. The comic element in this novel is rooted in a true appreciation of comedy--not the trivial, shriveled one-liners and put-downs that often passes for the "comic" in our era, but rather comedy that flows from a world view that genuinely values the subject of comedy, the human person. This is comedy of Shakespearean proportions, yet tinged with what is truly absurd, the oddness, the misunderstandings, and the stupidity of modern life.

Twice we are treated to sections of Garp's own writing, something I would think difficult for Irving to successfully pull off. Yet, he does. The first chapter of Garp's third novel, however, what his editor describes as "an X-rated soap opera," is a little difficult to muddle through, especially since the point is that it isn't great writing on Garp's part.

Throughout The World According to Garp, some of the turns in plot are a small stretch to digest, particularly a season of sexual swapping. Moreover, the planned moments of irony are occasionally obviously contrived, yet not unbelievable--most truly ironic moments in life seem contrived in retrospect--but the writing, even in a few difficult passages, is always itself exquisite. This is appropriate to the plot, since Garp himself is a writer, and like so many contemporary novels, this is also a novel about writing. I would suggest that this is more a novel about writing than it is about gender, though the gender issues are more prominently displayed. The subtextual inter-relationships between the art of writing, the imagination, memory, fiction, truth, the present text of the novel itself, understanding and the nature of misunderstanding, are all delicately and eloquently examined.

Moreover, in the belly of Irving's fiction, since (as I've already pointed out) there is humor in irony--whereas I see very little true humor in absurdity, or in the structural pyrotechnics of anti-artists such as Barth or Pynchon--with ironic humor we arrive at compassion. One comes to care about his characters, even the very weird ones; people one wouldn't, in the real world, likely invite to dinner, we end up inviting into our hearts, and the last fifty or so pages are some of the most moving I have ever read.

Finally, though, there is something of a nihilistic undertow slipping in and out of the pages of Garp's textual world, a finality with which I do not agree with in the abstract. Yet, it isn't a nihilism of destruction, desecration, nor self-absorbed solipsism; if Irving is a nihilist, he is a nihilist with a heart, and I'd readily recommend this book to anyone.