The World According to Garp
Ratings159
Average rating4
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.
I wish they allowed half-stars...it's not a five-star book, but it's not a four-star book, either. I love this book. The movie was very good, too. Irving is a great writer.
这是一次酣畅淋漓的阅读体验，不同于《神秘大道》不停的镜头切换，《盖普眼中的世界》更加偏向线性的叙事，我更喜欢这种方式。这是一本少有的男作家写出的关于女性主义的小说，有一些“限制级肥皂剧“的部份，总体而言不错。
Great novel. It's of course ironic that it's *this* novel that made John Irving famous.
“Sólo la intensidad de la memoria mantiene al muerto vivo para siempre; la tarea del escritor consiste en imaginarlo todo de un modo tan personal que la ficción es tan vivida como nuestros recuerdos reales.”
Thematically there's a lot to unpack here, including gender roles, writer's creativity and sexuality. Tonally it is a little all over the place, sometimes struggling to make a smooth transition between absurdity and tragedy. Yet the book is an interesting character study on Garp himself, showing how life events can change a person like his son Walt's death. The story is ambitious, showing a person's story from conception to death. Irving has cited his admiration for Dickens before, and I can definitely see the narrative parallels.
It didn't always work for me, but after reading 30% of Hotel New Hampshire and finding it insufferable, not to mention A prayer for Owen Meaney was largely dull in its execution, meaning Garp is probably my favourite of Irvings so far.
Thematically there's a lot to unpack here, including gender roles, writer's creativity and sexuality. Tonally it is a little all over the place, sometimes struggling to make a smooth transition between absurdity and tragedy. Yet the book is an interesting character study on Garp himself, showing how life events can change a person like his son Walt's death. The story is ambitious, showing a person's story from conception to death. Irving has cited his admiration for Dickens before, and I can definitely see the narrative parallels.
It didn't always work for me, but after reading 30% of Hotel New Hampshire and finding it insufferable, not to mention A prayer for Owen Meaney was largely dull in its execution, meaning Garp is probably my favourite of Irvings so far.
J'ai failli être déçu par ce roman tout le monde dit tant de bien. Le début m'a bien plu, mais la suite m'a un peu ennuyé, avant que les derniers chapitres me laissent une excellente impression. C'est un roman peut-être un peu trop long, non pas par le nombre de pages, mais parce qu'il s'égare parfois. Mais le résultat vaut le coup.
T.S. Garp is a somewhat known writer with a peculiar mother who is a more famous writer than he is. Jenny Fields, his mother, was a nurse who was strong-willed and she enjoyed caring for folks but didn't have a desire to be in a relationship with anyone. She saw herself as asexual. When the desire to be a mother overcame her, rather than foster a relationship she didn't want, she copulated with a mentally injured soldier who died soon after inseminating her. Jenny raises Garp on her own, in her own peculiar way, instilling an interest in wrestling and literature into her boy. The first quarter of the book about Jenny raising Garp and his awkward adolescence is the best part of the entire book; the quirky premise of an asexual, feminist nurse raising her son at an all-boys school was a promising start for this novel.
When Garp graduates, the book segues to Jenny and Garp traveling to Europe together where Garp befriends a hooker and Jenny doesn't get out much to sight-see. Jenny declares a desire to write a book about herself even though she's never written before and Garp is inspired to write because of his time walking the streets. One of the themes Jenny harps on in her book is lust and her lack of having it. She both emasculates and sympathizes with her son for lusting after women, foreshadowing later events with Jenny's “fans” and their perception of Garp and his place in Jenny's life.
Garp and his mother return to the U.S. having both completed a manuscript: Jenny's autobiography A Sexual Suspect and Garp's short story with the awkward title of The Pension Grillparzer. Jenny's book gets published through the first publishing contact she makes (really?) and her book becomes a huge bestseller. She becomes nationally known as the asexual feminist who wears a nurse's uniform wherever she goes. Garp's short story is published with little fanfare. The bulk of the rest of The World According to Garp follows young Garp into adulthood as he marries his wrestling coach's daughter, Helen, and the two have children. Garp stays at home with their kids and is a doting father who worries tremendously about his kids. Garp writes a couple of novels that are mediocre and not very successful; his readership is considered small yet astute. He and Helen have consensual affairs with another couple. And the novel goes on and on, not giving much insight into any of these plot points. Even though Garp is described as a doting father, he gives very little insight into being a parent. Although Garp is a writer, he gives very little insight about the process of writing or pursuing writing as a career (Irving as narrator does offer a zinger or two about the process of writing, though. I'll get to that later). And the consensual affair seems to neither strengthen nor diminish their marriage; it ends simply because Helen tires of it and their marriage carries on.
Mostly, that's the way the entire novel goes, by just carrying on. Irving introduces quirky characters and premises but does not really dive into the quirkiness of the characters and premises very deeply. It's like he is creating a laundry list of interesting ideas then leaving us simply with the list. Asexual nurse and single mother who miraculously becomes a bestselling author? Check. A football player that becomes a transsexual and Garp's best friend? Check. A college student, Michael Milton, who has an affair with Helen then whose penis is bitten off by Helen in a car accident? Check. It all sounds more interesting than it plays out with very little insight into these weird characters' motivations or feelings or desires other than to say “Look at these loonies! Next.” For being such quirky characters, the interactions and conversations between them are a real drag. Their lasting love or friendship for each other through one bizarre event to another mundane event seems to be the only thread through the entire book; their lives are entwined simply because they held on together and that's it. As Garp states, “Life ... is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead, an ending occurs when those who are meant to peter out petered out. All that's left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.”
Sadly, that's what this novel does: peters out. All the characters summarily die off, their lives ending in mundane fashion, except for Garp and his mother, who are both murdered for being famous writers. The rest of them just live on, then die, as is life. The youngest of Garp's children–Jenny– outlasts them all. She finds a career in medicine, just like her grandmother. The novel ends with young Jenny's observation, “But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”
Duh.
Not very insightful, if you ask me. I can tell Irving has a knack for dropping an occasional zinger or two but I really wanted more of that from him. Lines like “A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories” were so few and far between that I was left wanting. Irving's novel was just teasing, just flirting, not really following through, then it petered out.
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.
Davvero un libro bellissimo, con una storia che ti prende dalla prima all'ultima pagina. Quello che colpisce di questo libro, non è tanto lo stile, peraltro buono, dell'autore, ma la storia, la sua originalità e il fatto che malgrado gli straordinari eventi (in certi casi addirittura esilaranti) che accadono ai personaggi, li ho sentiti molto umani e simili a me.