I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was an instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.I'll leave the deep and thoughtful deconstruction of A Prayer for Owen Meany to other reviewers since it's been done often enough and well enough. Here's what I have to add: While listening to this on audiobook, the “wrecked voice” of Owen Meany was so incredibly annoying to me that I nearly gave it up. I understand that the text uses all caps whenever Owen Meany is speaking, and in an interview with John Irving after the book's conclusion, the author said that his intent was to annoy the reader: Owen Meany is a prophet and prophets are often considered annoying in their own time. And that's the thing about Owen Meaney: he's annoying but you can't ignore him.
More on my reading history with John Irving: When I was a teenager, I read some of his books (The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules) because of a very conscious effort to transition into more adult fiction than I had been reading, and although these certainly were adult books, they seemed very odd books to me, and I wondered even at the time if I just wasn't mature enough to really understand them. Then, while backpacking in Europe in 1986, I picked up a couple of English language paperbacks at an Italian corner store for a week on a Mediterranean beach, and one of them was Setting Free the Bears. I don't even remember now what it was about that book that annoyed me so much, but I finished that paperback, abandoned it on a bus, and vowed never to give Irving another shot. And for nearly thirty years, I didn't read any more of his books.
And then I decided to get to know Owen Meany. And his wrecked voice:
I don't want you to describe to me – not ever – what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.And, naturally, I found him to be so annoying. And at over 24 hours long, vast stretches of this book were so boring to me. Why all the repetition? Why so much detail about the Christmas pageant? Why span such a long time period when a heartless editor's pen could have tightened things up and gotten to the point so much sooner? And then, you know what happened? A Prayer for Owen Meany reached its perfect climax and every preceding scene came into better focus and I wouldn't have wanted to cut a word. If only we could all know ourselves as well as Owen Meany did.
LAST NITE I HAD A DREAM. NOW I KNOW FOUR THINGS. I KNOW THAT MY VOICE DOESN’T CHANGE – BUT I STILL DON’T KNOW WHY. I KNOW THAT I AM GOD’S INSTRUMENT. I KNOW WHEN I’M GOING TO DIE – AND NOW A DREAM HAS SHOWN ME HOW I’M GOING TO DIE. I’M GOING TO BE A HERO! I TRUST THAT GOD WILL HELP ME, BECAUSE WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO DO LOOKS VERY HARD.It took a very long time (nearly 24 hours of listening) before I started enjoying A Prayer for Owen Meany, yet in the end, it was a worthwhile experience. I just might get to know John Irving's work a little better. And in a bit of serendipity, I saw John Irving's eulogy for Günter Grass during the reading of this book and it includes some insight into its creation. (I had mentally compared the characters of Owen Meany and Grass' Oskar Matzerath without even realising that they had the same initials -- I was halfway onto to something there!)
I was old enough to have been aware of the Vietnam War and draft dodgers coming up to Canada while it was all going on, but even with this fine narrative framing it, I couldn't get emotionally drawn into this aspect of A Prayer for Owen Meany. Maybe it takes an American to understand the American experience of Vietnam? On the other hand, I did enjoy John Wheelwright's observations on Canada as an adult who had lived in Toronto for twenty years:
When I first came to Canada, I thought it was going to be easy to be a Canadian; like so many stupid Americans, I pictured Canada as simply some northern, colder, possibly more provincial region of the United States – I imagined it would be like moving to Maine, or Minnesota. It was a surprise to discover that Toronto wasn't as snowy and cold as New Hampshire – and not nearly as provincial, either. It was more of a surprise to discover how different Canadians were – they were so polite! Naturally, I started out apologizing. "I'm not really a draft dodger," I would say; but most Canadians didn't care what I was. "I'm not here or evade the draft," I would explain. "I would certainly classify myself as antiwar," I said in those days. "I'm comfortable with the term 'war resister,' " I told everyone, "but I don't need to dodge or evade the draft – that's not why I'm here."
But most Canadians didn't care why I'd come; they didn't ask any questions. It was probably the midpoint of Vietnam "resisters" coming to Canada; most Canadians were sympathetic-they thought the war in Vietnam was stupid and wrong, too.
I really had been thinking of other fictional mystical dwarves in fiction, and my mind had gone to Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum (and also Trudi Montag in Stones from the River), and never connected that Owen was an homage to Oskar (hinted at by the matching initials). On the other hand, when the adult Wheelwright was talking about preferring to teach Robertson Davies' Tempest-Tost over his Fifth Business, I made a conscious connection between Owen Meany's baseball and Dunstan Ramsay's snowball. In the interview after the novel, Irving said that German reviewers always catch the Tin Drum connection and Canadian reviewers always catch the Fifth Business connection, so it was gratifying to me to have been well-rounded enough in my reading history to have at least glimpsed the influences.
And, if Owen Meany is truly the modern classic of American literature that it seems to be, I'm happy to have it in my reading history now as well.
