Fear, Death, and Sexual Squalor
The World According to Garp
Overall, I did not like this book which makes me sad because John Irving is probably my favorite author. His ability to beautifully entwine comedy and grief has amazed me since A Prayer for Owen Meany. My disappointment with this book is due largely to the fact that it is riddled with sexual squalor, from the visitation of prostitutes, to husbands meddling with babysitters and wives with students, to the very disturbing rapes of two young girls-one of whom has her tongue cut out. Things like that didn't bother me until I got married, but suddenly reading about adultery is not as appealing.
Despite these feelings, I thought it was written well and contains many great literary elements-most notable is the ever-present foreshadowing of death. It seems that every line in The World According to Garp is moving toward its untimely end.
First the prostitute:
"The silvery gouge on her forehead was nearly as big as her mouth; her pockmark looked to Garp like a small, open grave."
Then with Garp's children:
"Garp watched Walt, and this calmed him. Garp relished having such close scrutiny of the child; he lay beside Walt and smelled the boy's fresh breath, remembering when Duncan's breath had turned sour in his sleep in that grownup's way. It had been an unpleasant sensation for Garp, shortly after Duncan turned six, to smell that Duncan's breath was stale and faintly foul in his sleep. It was as if the process of decay, of slowly dying, was already begun in him. This was Garp's first awareness of the mortality of his son."
"If Garp could have been granted one vast and naive wish, it would have been that he could make the world safe. For children and for grownups. The world struck Garp as unnecessarily perilous for both."
"There was so much to worry about, when worrying about children...especially in these throes of insomnia, Garp thought himself to be psychologically unfit for parenthood. Then he worried about that too, and felt all the more anxious for his children. What if their most dangerous enemy turned out to be him?"
Then at the end of his affair with another writer, who was unable to finish any work:
"You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else."
The book ends with this quote:
"A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases... In this world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases."
And what John Irving book would be complete without quotes like these:"Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions" "Oh, I didn’t know what shits men were till I became a woman!" This coming from a former Pro-football linebacker after her sex-change operation. And my favorite:"There is the faint, trapped warble from some televisions tuned in to The Late Show, and the blue-gray glow from the picture tubes throbs from a few of the houses. To Garp this glow looks like cancer, insidious and numbing, putting the world to sleep. Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits sometone who isn't reading."