The World According to Garp
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| Author | John Irving |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | E. P. Dutton, NY |
| Released | 1978 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 437 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-525-23770-4 |
- For other uses of the four-letter combination "GARP", see GARP.
The World According to Garp is John Irving's fourth novel. Published in 1978, the book was a bestseller for years; Irving has subsequently become one of the most "bankable" modern American novelists.
A movie adaptation starring Robin Williams was released in 1982.
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[edit] Plot summary
The story deals with the life of T.S Garp. His mother, Jenny Fields, is a strong-willed nurse who wants a child but not a husband (and has no interest in sex except as a means to conceive a child). She encounters a dying ball-turret gunner known only as Technical Sergeant Garp who was reduced to a perpetually priapic mental vegetable by a piece of shrapnel that pierced his head. Jenny has intercourse with the bedridden, uncomprehending, dying Technical Sergeant Garp to impregnate herself. Jenny raises Garp alone, taking a position at a boys' school.
Garp grows up, becoming interested in sex, wrestling, and writing fiction--three topics in which his mother has little interest. He launches his writing career, courts and marries the wrestling coach's daughter, and fathers three children. Meanwhile, his mother suddenly becomes a feminist icon after publishing a best-selling autobiography called A Sexual Suspect (referring to the general assessment of her as a woman who does not care to bind herself to a man, and who chooses to raise a child on her own).
Garp becomes a devoted parent, wrestling with anxiety for the safety of his children and a desire to keep them safe from the dangers of the world. He and his family inevitably experience dark and violent events through which the characters change and grow. Garp learns (often painfully) from the women in his life, struggling to become more tolerant in the face of intolerance. The story is decidedly rich with lunacy and sorrow, and the sometimes ridiculous chains of events the characters experience still resonate with painful truth.
The book contains some elements that appear in almost all John Irving novels: bears, wrestling, Vienna, New England, people who are uninterested in having sex, and a complex Dickensian plot that spans the protagonist's whole life. Adultery (another common Irving theme) also plays a large part, culminating in one of the novel's most harrowing and memorable scenes. There is also a tincture of another familiar Irving trope, castration anxiety, most obvious in the lamentable fate of Michael Milton.
[edit] Trivia
- Garp's school is based on the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire of which Irving is an alumnus. His stepfather was a faculty member.
- T.S. Garp's writing career resembles John Irving's own early career. Garp's first novel is about freeing animals from the Vienna Zoo, similar to Setting Free the Bears. Garp's second novel is about "wife-swapping", similar to The 158-Pound Marriage, with some similarities to The Water-Method Man. Garp's third novel is called "The World According To Bensenhaver," the novel's protagonist, and is about "lust" (according to Jenny.) Coincidentally Garp's third novel is a best-seller, like The World According to Garp itself. However, Garp (presumably speaking for Irving) ridicules the idea that his third novel is auto-biographical.
[edit] Quotes
- "Mom?" (Garp's first line)
- "Three quarters is not enough."
- "Beware of the undertoad."
- "In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases."
