John Irving is sometimes dismissed by literary snobs as merely a “popular” writer—like a Stephen King, say, or a Dan Brown. Unsurprisingly, King himself reviewed A Prayer for Owen Meany, supplying a blurb for the front cover: “Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] highly textured and carefully wrought world.” Irving does rank among the top twenty best-selling American novelists (he’s 16th), and one whose novels translate comfortably into popular films as well. His fourth novel, The World According to Garp (1979), won the National Book Award and turned him into a well-known novelist, and the popular film version of the novel in 1982, starring Robin Williams and Glenn Close, helped build his following. The Cider House Rules (1985) proved a popular success as well, and the 1999 film adaptation earned $88 million and garnered Irving an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, and Michael Caine a Supporting Actor Oscar. So yes, Irving is a popular success, but a writer whose work has been appreciated on the artistic level as well.
But for me, like King, Irving’s talent is most manifest in his seventh novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), a novel I began with few expectations and set down only with great reluctance, having had one of the great reading experiences of my life. For me it was a no-brainer to include Owen Meany as number 48 (alphabetically) on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.” The novel is Irving’s all-time best-selling book, apparently not only in English but in all its translated versions as well. But some critics have found Irving to be overtly sentimental, to present exaggerated cartoon-like characters, and to rather blatantly push moral lessons in his novels. These are three characteristics that are undeniably present in A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving can hardly be accused of subtlety. And these characteristics are not particularly welcome among serious writers or literary critics in the current environment. But I have to thank whoever was the first reader to compare Irving with Dickens. One might be describing David Copperfieldwhen talking about sentimentality, cartoonish characters, and moral lessons. Dickens was tremendously popular in his own time, and remains loved today, for precisely these faults. And Owen Meany is a popular novel for the same reasons.
When Modern Library did its “Greatest English Language Novels of the Twentieth Century” compilation in 1998, Owen Meany did not make the list. It did not make Time magazine’s greatest novels “since 1923” list either. Some later “top 100” lists have picked up on the regard in which many readers hold Irving’s novel, and in 2018, when PBS conducted a survey to find “America’s best loved book,” A Prayer for Owen Meany came in at number 26. On the 2019 BBC list of “100 Books to Read Before you Die,” Owen Meany came in at number 28. We might conclude that the book was too recent to have been considered for those earlier lists.
It isn’t just the Dickensian qualities that make Owen Meany an admirable novel. Irving studied at the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writer’s Workshop in the late 1960s with Kurt Vonnegut, and there is an unmistakably Vonnegutian (I just made that word up and hope it catches on) flavor to the humor in Owen Meany. As for the characters in the novel, the protagonist, Owen Meany, is a person of diminutive size but enormous presence, a dwarf-like boy with a distinctive, raspy voice. Irving has verified that Owen is a kind of homage to another literary dwarf with a large personality, Oskar Matzerath (note the O.M. name), the protagonist of Nobel laureate Günter Grass’s best known novel, The Tin Drum.Grass was another author Irving knew personally and admired.
Irving could not have personally known F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died more than a years before he was born, but has modeled his other major character, the book’s narrator John Wheelwright, on Nick Carraway, narrator of The GreatGatsby. Like Nick, Johnny stays largely in the background in telling a tale of a friend he sees as larger than life—all the time commenting on what America means. John tells the story largely in retrospect, speaking from the novel’s “present” of 1987, when he is teaching literature at a Canadian college (you will probably form a strong idea of why he is now a Canadian, but prepare to have that opinion blasted), and talking mainly about growing up in the small town of Gravesend, New Hampshire, in the 1950s and 60s. Perhaps ironically, one of the novels John teaches his students is The Great Gatsby. Another is Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy being another of Irving’s favorite nineteenth-century novelists.
A Prayer for Owen Meany opens in John Wheelwright’s voice, speaking what is probably Irving’s best known sentence:
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God: I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
The story focuses on best friends Owen and John in their school days. In the first chapter, Owen, an eleven-year old boy in a five-year old’s body, hits a line drive in a baseball game that kills John’s mother. Owen is devastated—John’s mother was also a mother figure to Owen, and had promised to pay Owen’s tuition to the prestigious Gravesend Academy where John goes to school, the Wheelwrights being patricians of Gravesend and Owen’s family poor working class townsfolk.
At school, Owen is intellectual superior not only to John but to the rest of the class. Physically, though, he is underdeveloped and challenged. Spiritually, however, he is self-confident and even dogmatic. The fact is, the incident with the baseball has convinced Owen that he is God’s instrument on earth. And this gives him an inflexible, authoritarian attitude about proper behavior and morality that often annoys others, including readers, but the fact is he always tends to be right in his opinions—opinions which are, to emphasize his “ruined” voice, always printed in capital letters. And honestly, aren’t God’s chosen prophets sometimes equally annoying? I’m reasonably certain that Elijah, for instance, was not popular in the court of King Ahab.
Owen’s strident certitude is often ludicrous given his diminutive stature and his grotesque voice. One memorably comic scene occurs when Owen, small as he is, is given the role of the Christ child in the Episcopal Church’s annual Christmas pageant. In his hands, the Christ child comes off as a crotchety and imperious kid, and when Owen’s own parents walk into the church to watch their son in the starring role, Owen sits up in his manger and confronts them. As John Wheelwright narrates, “‘WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING HERE?’ the angry Lord Jesus screamed.”
But Owen is not always just amusing. In a later school year, cast as the Ghost of Christmas Future in the Gravesend Players’ production of A Christmas Carol, Owen sees, or imagines he sees, his own name and the date of his death carved on the tombstone he reveals to Ebenezer Scrooge. Shaken as anyone would be, Owen interprets this as a sign directly from God: knowing the date of his own death, he can plan his future in a way that will make his death meaningful. When he later has what he considers a prophetic dream about his own death, the conviction becomes even stronger.
One curious motif in the novel is Owen’s obsession with basketball. Obviously far too small to be an effective player, Owen nevertheless insists that John practice with him, over and over again, a particular play in which John lifts a dribbling Owen into the air to allow him to make a perfect slam dunk. Owen gets so good at this that the basketball team begins calling him “Slam-Dunk Meany,” and even the coach jokes “I may use you in a game, Owen”—to which Owen replies testily “IT’S NOT FOR A GAME.” And our narrator comments guardedly that Owen “had his own reasons for everything.” The reader finds out what this particular behavior was about only much later, and in a way that demonstrates Owen’s apparently uncanny ability to foresee future events.
As Owen and John come of age during the 1960s, the Vietnam War becomes the chief concern of their imaginations. While they both agree that the war is a huge mistake, Owen insists that he must join the army and be sent to Vietnam in order to fulfill God’s purpose for him. While he does everything he can to insure that John is not sent to the war, he works even harder to persuade the army to take him despite his diminutive size.
The end of the book brings all of these things together in surprising ways, which I won’t discuss to avoid spoilers. But they work out in a way that causes John Wheelwright to praise Owen Meany as a prophet and hero and, as the novel’s first sentence says, the reason John is a Christian. Don’t get me wrong, A Prayer for Owen Meany is not an evangelical book—though it may be the kind of story that a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth might have told long after the crucifixion, after he’d had time to put it all together to make sense of things in his own mind. Owen’s story does push readers to consider the universal ideas of fate, chance, and providence, and the question of which, if any, of these things determine one’s life. And, of course, the novel forces the reader to consider where faith actually comes from, and whether it is a logical response to events.
The narrator’s repeated bitter rantings when the novel veers back to the “present” of 1987, rantings that consistently berate the United States government, not only for the conduct of the Vietnam War, by now ancient history. But consistently through the 1980s, for such issues as the Iran-Contra affair and the “Teflon” President Reagan. The newly Canadian John, admittedly angry at the government that sent Owen Meany to a needless war, sees a direct line from the 60s through the 80s of the gullibility of an uninformed electorate too naive to realize how badly their elected officials are using their own ignorance against them in order to promote policies directly opposed to the voters’ own self-interest. This is the aspect of the novel that original reviewers of the book found the least appealing. Given recent events, however, this is perhaps the most relevant part of the book for current readers. I can’t recommend this book more highly. Give it a read!