The World According to Garp
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Average rating4
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."
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Like Herman Melville, I thought John Irving was a srs bsns author and I wouldn't want to read anything he wrote, and like Melville, I was wrong. This book, at least, reads a lot like Vonnegut with the wackiness turned down. The beginning was great and the ending was very satisfying (by making the book better than the sum of its parts), but maybe the 2nd quarter was not my taste, and I almost stopped reading, but I'm glad I didn't.
Great novel. It's of course ironic that it's *this* novel that made John Irving famous.
An old favorite, reread for the first time in like 15 years. This book taught me so many hard truths about the world when I was like 14.
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