I Read John Irving’s ‘The World According to Garp.’

Reading this book was quite an interesting experience for me. I’ve just freshly rounded the corner into my 40s and this book details the life of a person, a man who lives a vast and broad life all within the parameters and parabolas of several towns. The way it’s written details his family, his upbringing, the people in the spotlight and those that hang outside of it in such detail that I wonder if I, if we, all have a Life that is as illustrated and narratable as the life of TS Garp.

We look back at Garp’s childhood as adults, with 20/20 vision of what’s Right and what’s Wrong and what’s Weird and what’s Awful. There are shreds of the way that we get to learn what Garp is learning while he’s learning it, but also we are watching with a knowing eye of how he is being inoculated against the world’s evils by the habits and behaviors of his mother, and also exposed to greater joys and terrors by that same woman. We see his mother as a stalwart column of wisdom, though much of this is to scale with her own worldview in mind. Does he make it? Of course he makes it. I would say that most of us do. But we can see how the abrupt and impulsive nature of Jenny Fields gives Garp a harsh but fearless take on the world.

I very much liked Garp’s relationship with Helen, a girl he met in school who clouded his mind throughout his trip to Europe, a girl who he swore he would eventually fall in love with. Though I think while there’s a heroic and admirable sense of doing everything he can to “get the girl”, what he finally does when he “gets” her is so flippant. One of the main themes in the book is lust and its self-congratulatory nature, and we see many characters put so much on the line for what ends up feeling like disposable trysts with people. Both Helen and Garp find their ways into flirtations and full-on romantic affairs, and despite the fact that they stay together, in fact, stay In Love, it makes the core of their romance (in my mind) feel more of a necessity and a stability than it does that glowing and eternal bond which it seemed that they were forging. Maybe this is how Irving brings Human Life to Earth, leveling the sense of mysticism and fantasy that we build around our experiences and turns us into people, as normal men and women who are just trying to get by and following our instincts and desires, morality be damned.

I again wonder, as someone who is in the most mathematical of middle age: am I meant to discharge these fantasies as well?

There is a lot of death in this book (especially in the final third), and a lot of guilt (it hovers throughout). Both of these factors really rang true for what Life seems to be about. And I think Irving did a fantastic job of giving us a dose of humanity, whether we are born Male or Female and whether we choose to remain that way or otherwise. We are human if we are young and when we get old we are still embodied by the same senses, the same wants, the same questions, the same elusive truths. As we get older we just happen to know how to categorize them and when we are younger we just find newer things to chase. Our hunger always remains.

My favorite scene in the novel is one of death. It’s a paragraph long and it seems to touch on the way that one can hope to feel while one’s passing, however the claustrophobia and inability to communicate sounds like an absolute nightmare, one that feels impossible to express the billion emotions of grief and happiness that you’d want to communicate on the way out. It was written succinctly, perfectly. All things around it seemed to spiral and even though you knew it was coming, it still felt shocking when the act landed.

A good book! I don’t think I truly recommend it, but I’m glad that I got to it. This is one of those books that I’d meant to get to for some time as the opening credit scene of the movie is a pretty big part of my childhood, something my dad used to play for us on VHS because he had it recorded and my sister and I really loved the bouncing baby accompanied by the Beatles track. I wonder if that memory would make it into the narrative book of my life or the narrative book of my father or even that of my sister. I wonder how one decides what their book will contain.