A Prayer for Owen Meany

I bawled when I got to the end of this book. I had fallen in love with with the tiny, squeaky-voiced Owen Meany who SPEAKS IN A CAPITAL LETTERS, and it was heart-breaking to feel like you couldn't do anything to help or the change the way it was going to end.

What is it like to know the day that you would die? Is it how Christ felt like when he told his disciples, "They will kill me, and after three days I will rise"? What is it like to have the burden of having to suffer and die so that you could redeem the world, and no one, not even your closest friends, have any idea? I have never thought of it this way. No wonder Jesus cried in the Garden of Gethsemene.

Owen Meany is a Christ figure. Unlike Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Owen is not just the ideal Christian -- loving, submissive, and kind. Suprisingly, almost blasphemously, Owen is described to have the authority of Christ. The nativity scene in this novel brings new meaning to the last line of the Christmas carol Silent Night: "Jesus, Lord at thy birth". I don't think I can sing this line the same way again.

In many ways, this novel is an UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE, as Owen would put it, because it is blasphemous, seething with anger and a sense of impending doom. All of this is embodied in `Hester the Molester'. Yet, when Christ was born on earth, isn't that exactly how it is? An UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE?

Go read the book. At points it gets tedious, but it is worth it in the end. This book comes in number one spot with The Cider House Rules for me. The plot is less interesting, but Owen Meany, as a character, is riveting.

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The Hotel New Hampshire

This is the seventh John Irving novel I've read since November 2004. That would be an average of 1 Irving novel a month, not counting the other books I've read in that period.

I know a friend who thinks I'm reading way too many of his novels, but when you've come so far, it is almost a matter obsession to finish all of them. I am a little tired of the depressing plot -- when in the middle of his long novels I think to myself that this will definitely be the last one I read -- but the stories end with such an oomph and a strong sense of hope that I think another one by Irving won't hurt. I now know the essential ingredients of a best-selling novel -- they are faith, hope and love, and that's all there is to it.

The Hotel New Hampshire is about a family who moves from hotel to hotel because of the father's big dreams for the future. There are four hotels altogether -- the Arbuthnot-by-the-sea where the parents fall in love, the Hotel New Hampshire they run in Dairy, the Hotel New Hampshire in Vienna where they spend seven years, and the fourth and last hotel, the hotel truly built on dreams, back at Arbuthnot-by-the-sea.

By the end of the novel, the family is ravaged by the father's need to dream. When Lily died, and Frank was blaming himself for her death, Win Berry said, "But who is the dreamer of the family? She just wasn't big enough to meet her own expectations, and she inherited that from me." Sorrow the dog was put to sleep for the plans of the very first hotel, and he returns to haunt the deaths of Iowa, Mother, and Egg -- all sacrifices on the altar of the father's dreams.

Despite the tragic effects of Win Berry's illusion, Irving in no way condemns this dreaming, but in fact endorses it with a kind of power to redeem. At the end of the novel, Win Berry becomes the best rape therapist on site, despite the fact that he is completely in his own world, blind to reality, subsisting on illusion. Irving seems to say that there is a power in dreaming, a power in stories from the past, and a power in fiction.

As Frank would say to John, "Keep passing the open windows." And somehow, things will work out.

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A widow for one year

I liked it. A lot.

I was mildly uncomfortable the first few chapters of the book. Irving has the knack of telling you what is going to happen before telling you how it happens. His books are never like horror movies with things jumping out at your from behind corners; instead, they are like peep show -- you know what you will eventually see, but the adventure is in the unrevealing. (Hmm, there must be a better analogy than a peep show!)

Anyway, I was mildly uncomfortable the first few chapters cos I knew what was going to happen and I didn't want to read about it. But I got through the parts I didn't want to read about, and as it unfolded, I felt increasingly drawn by the characters and their life story. It was refreshing having a female protagonist too, and at some points, the dysfunctional love between mother and daughter made me tear.

I liked this novel second only to The Cider House Rules. Even though I'm getting tired of Irving's repeating theme of sex (too much!) and over-anxious parents, it was funny, heartwarming, and chock-full of eccentric characters.

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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

I finished another book by John Irving, this time a compilation of short stories titled Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. His short stories are interesting enough – I read the entire compilation over two days – but after reading four other full-length novels by him, his short stories are, well, too short. I’m usually left with the thought, “What! Is that it? What happens to so-and-so after his long drive to Iowa? What did that entire dinner conversation mean?” There were some stories where I didn't have a clue what Irving was trying to get at.

This compilation includes The Pension Grillparzer, previously found only in The World According to Garp. The title is derived from the first story of the compilation, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. In a way, this story is an explanation of how and why Irving became a writer. It is a bit like jumping into cold water to suddenly have Irving as Irving address you – refreshing, different, intriguing. This was my favourite story of the compilation (not counting The Pension Grillparzer), and it starts thus:

“A fiction writer’s memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely exactly what happened; the most truthful detail is what could have happened, or what should have… Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just as carefully imagining the truth you haven’t the opportunity to see. The rest is the necessary strict toiling with the language…”

And he goes on to tell a fantastic and believable story.

In another strand of thought, remember what I said concerning dreams in The Fourth Hand? I was wrong in thinking that dreams and premonitions were a new theme in Irving’s latest novel because there is a story all about dreams in this compilation titled “Other People’s Dreams”. In this story, the main character has the gift (or curse?) of dreaming other people’s dreams when he sleeps in their bed. In the last two paragraphs, there is a hint of premonition as well, which is how dreams feature in The Fourth Hand. So there, mystery solved.
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The Fourth Hand

So I’ve finished my fourth book by Irving, The Fourth Hand. This is his latest novel (2001). Interestingly, I noted in his acknowledgements a mention of a few assistant writers. I wonder how much they actually write for him.

Anyway, back to the book, The Fourth Hand is full of sex. It is not like the sex in The Cider House Rules which is passionate, intense, and pivotal. This sex is farcical and in large amounts. It comes from having a handsome playboy as the main character. Patrick Wallingford, a news reporter who lost his hand to a lion, isn’t capable of saying no to women. He is described as physically irresistible, yet in the long run, forgettable. His ex-wife likened him to the flu – when you are down with it you feel like you will die, but when you are well again you forget he even exists. He is extremely attentive to women, but also so shallow that he is capable of “losing himself” in any woman at all.

So this novel is about how he rises from his self-created stereotype by falling in love for real, for once. It also involves four hands. Coincidentally, its content is similar to another book of Irving’s I read, The Water Method Man. Both feature a male protagonist; both characters are on journeys of self-discovery and formation. An illuminating difference though is that intrinsic to Patrick’s journey is a strong will to change, which Trumper in The Water Method Man does not exhibit.

This novel also touches briefly on premonition, dreams and destiny. This is the first time I’ve encountered this theme in his books (then again I’ve only read four) and it looks like an interesting development. In The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp, and The Water Method Man, life is chaotic, hilarious, brilliant, tragic, completely human. In this novel, there is the barest hint of destiny. Long before Wallingford met Doris, he had already dreamt of the ending. While this destiny has to be worked for (Wallingford has to will himself not to sleep with the sexy make-up girl and the powerful colleague), the very fact that it exists is quite something as it runs contrary his earlier worldview. Perhaps Irving himself is changing?

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The Water Method Man

I finished another book by John Irving this weekend, The Water Method Man. This novel was written in 1972 and was the second book Irving published. It is less ambitious in scope than either The Cider House Rules or The World According to Garp – while the latter novels span between two and four generations, The Water Method Man is about one character’s journey to find himself over a span of 10 years or so.

I don’t really care for the main character Fred “Bogus” Trumper. His personality doesn’t come across strongly, but that is the point of the novel. He barely knows who he is. There are a lot of bits in it that is recognisable in his later novels, like throwing the snails into the water, or a woman having to make a choice between two men, etc. In this novel, Biggie chooses the other guy (Couth); in The Cider House Rules, Candy chooses both.

You can tell it is written by the same author. The themes are the same – growth, change, sex, children, vocation, relationship, etc. – but this novel doesn’t engage life the way The Cider House Rules does. In The Cider House Rules, the physiological parallel is the abortion and birthing process, a procedure that envelopes life and death; in The Water Method Man, it is a crooked urinary tract, paralleling Bogus’ navigation between truth and shades of truth in his path towards self-discovery.

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The World According to Garp

I finished The World According to Garp by John Irving today. It is a compelling and well-told story, but it leaves the reader fretful about the world. Irving paints a world sharply divided, senselessly violent, and fundamentally unsafe. Although there are comic elements throughout the story – for example the case of poor Michael Molton – the tragedy always overwhelm the comic, leaving a bitter aftertaste.

So I prefer The Cider House Rules, simply because it is cheerier.

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stuck in parentheses

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parenthesis. - John Irving, The Cider House Rules, 453.

What an excellent, true and perfect quote. I told LQ that I never compare myself to the characters I read in books, but I have to take it back, 'cos I do, and I'm doing it now.

Looking back at my life, I almost wonder if I'm in the business of collecting brackets. I hope not. Someday I hope all the brackets will fall away.

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can't put it down

A dead body ups the comic effect quite drastically.

I'm reading The Cider House Rules by John Irving right now and it is laugh-out-funny at some points. I am at the part where the gorgeous Wally and Candy drive to the orphanage. There is a dead body on the bed in the dispensary; outside, one of the orphans is sytematically scooping jelly and honey into his mouth; there is a dead featus reaching out of the enamel dish; a gleaming white cadillac among the squalar; Curly Day is having "a bad day" cos he wants to be picked by the pretty couple; Melony, the mean and biggest girl, does the first generous act in her life when she steals a book for Homer; the first quarrel between father and son; at the same time, an abortion and a live birth. Excellent stuff. It is like a crashing of life, ambition, hope and fear. Irving is a master at creating suituations full of pathos and intensity, but with just enough hilarity to tip it over so that it doesn't get overwhelming. It is somewhat like Angela's Ashes I suppose - that delicate balance. I just can't can't get enough of it.

If I taught English, I would set this chapter as prac crit.

I also read Bridget Jones' Diary over the weekend. Am reading so much cos trying to compensate for not being able to find a plot for NaNoWriMo - sulk. That was funny too - more light-hearted and irreverant. Her calling Daniel Cleaver and leaving a message she regretted, then homosexual friend Tom saying that he could call the number to get the code to delete the message, calls Daniel's place 12 times before figuring out the code, and on the 12th ring, Daniel picks up and Tom hangs up, making Daniel think that she called him obsessively, left a cheesy message, AND hung up when he picked up. Ha!

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