Parents might identify with Garp’s somewhat overbearing sense of worry, his desire to make the world safe.

There are a lot of different routes this book might take to get into a reader’s heart. And the tragedy is not so much a punishment for the actions of Garp or others as it is a consequence of the inevitability of bad things happening to people (good and bad). Both the comic and the tragic elements of the book are larger than life, as fiction tends to be. The comic characters of this novel-Fat Stew Percy (all the various nicknamed Percys, in fact), the incorrigably likable Dean Bodger, the reluctant Jillsy Sloper, et al-balance out the brutal nature of the events that happen to Garp and his family. Yet it’s accurate, for comedy is the genre that, through the absurd, reveals very important truths that we might otherwise overlook in everyday life. It’s more comedy than opera though.Ĭonsidering the depth of tragedy that happens in this book-car accidents, rape, assassination-calling it a comedy might seem … insensitive, at the very least. Some have compared this book to a soap opera, and I suppose there’s some truth to that. Indeed, the situations and events that plague Garp throughout his life range from the simple and believable to incredible or even ludicrous. Reading it now for the third time, I reflected to my dad that it seemed much more absurd to me. The complexity of the relationships and issues that Irving tackles in his books means that reading them at such different ages naturally leads to very different impressions.

I’ve read The World According to Garp twice before, once when I was young and once when I was younger than I am now. And I know it’s my dad’s favourite Irving work. Such books tend to float around the house, surfacing at the oddest moments and in the weirdest places. It was one of that corpus of books that lives in your parents’ house before you’re even born, precedes you into the world and (with any luck) will survive your passage out of it.

A somewhat imposing mass-market paperback of it lives somewhere in my dad’s house. This is the first Irving novel I ever encountered. So I took a look at what the library had to offer for Irving, and I thought this would be a good time to re-re-read The World According to Garp. I’ve been re-reading War and Peace over this Easter break, but I wanted to take a break between each book within the novel and read something else. I have been meaning to revisit John Irving lately.

Author of the world according to garp