The World According to Greeple.

I started writing this blog 2 1/2 months ago and never finished. Now, it's been so long since I finished the book that I don't feel right trying to assess it until I re-read it. My brief observations here were growing to be something I was really proud to have written, but I fizzled. I wanted to go in-depth in ways I've not really done before - for personal growth, and to feel that my writing did this book due justice. So, I post this with some regret. But, if you've read the book, you might appreciate some of the things I'd gotten to address already. If you haven't read the book, I still spit a little vitriol at the movie version for your entertainment. Enjoy. - 9/23/08

Yes yes, I just finished The World According to Garp by John Irving. It's hard to say with certainty, but it may be my new favorite fictional novel. I haven't read anything so bizarre, yet so true to the American experience, that still holds as much relevance today (if not more, arguably) as it did over thirty years ago when it was first published. Upon completion, I felt shaken to the core, exhausted, awed. Barely stopped crying the last 8 pages. Don't think that's ever happened before. Eight pages.



For those unfamiliar, I don't want that to mislead - my tears were a reaction to some of the finest, most clear-headed prose I've read, along with the feeling of losing a companion (the book). Garp could be considered, regrettably, a tragicomedy. But that word makes me chunder in the back of my mouth a bit. When I think tragicomedy, I think 'bad Robin Williams movie like Patch Adams.' Fine - so the film The World According to Garp also stars Robin Williams. Sue me. But I hear the film sucks too. For example, the cover of the movie shows a plane crashing into a house. That just does not happen in the book. So fuck that movie.

Though no summary would suffice, The World According to Garp is about the life of the 'bastard' T.S. Garp and his one-time-only sexually active mother Jenny Fields. We meet Jenny in a movie theatre receiving flirtatious advances from a soldier during wartime, and Nurse Jenny reaches for her handy-dandy scalpel and sliced the guy from shoulder to wrist.

Summary stops here. And yeah, that's within the first several pages or so.

Incredible foreshadowing on behalf of Irving, establishing a central theme in the novel under circumstances so extreme that it's lost on the reader until Jenny announces her thoughts on lust. Guess what? They're rather negative. Lust plagues The World According to Garp. How ironic, then, that Garp grows to be a young-adult male obsessed with his Austrian prostitutes (during his trip to Austria with none other than Jenny Fields, who knowingly wanted to pay for a prostitute for Garp under the acknowledgement that boys can't help their lust), and then a married man obsessed with the babysitter (not to mention Alice (Alith)).

Lust is common, though. To not lust raises suspicion - an issue Jenny fought regularly after conceiving Garp. There was no husband, no courtship to the rest of the world. I'd argue that Jenny was courted by the invalid Garp, whom Jenny nursed (literally, occasionally) until his death. Garp's father, Garp, only attracted Jenny due to his complete inability to lust. He did lust, though (he wasn't actually nursing, obviously), but he lusted in a way that Jenny could interpret as a need for her nurturing.