30 Books in 30 Beach Days Day 16: "A Prayer for Owen Meany"
- Aug 8, 2017
- 2 min read
After a few days in New Hampshire, back to our regularly-scheduled programming!
Hiking through the White Mountains in New Hampshire this weekend put John Irving's fanciful and yet distinctly human stories on my mind. Today's review is of my favorite Irving piece: A Prayer for Owen Meany.
If you've seen and liked the movie Simon Birch, which is loosely based on this novel, you are in for a treat, because A Prayer for Owen Meany is much, much better. Narrated by the titular Meany's best childhood friend John Wheelwright, this tells the story of a special, brilliant boy with a small stature and a screechy voice. The novel promises heavy, grand themes in its first sentences; it starts: "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 the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." That's a lot to unpack right away: disability, premature maternal death, possibly murder or at least manslaughter, and theology. The novel does as it promises, tackling each of these issues head-on. Written by almost anyone else, it would be melodramatic, too sappy, overdone. But written by Irving, it maintains an element of the absurd that keeps the reader in stitches even as she wades through heavy material. In Irving's deft hands, Owen Meany becomes almost slapstick.
It's a deeply funny but also deeply moving book with lovable main characters who illuminate their small New Hampshire town and who burrow deeply into the reader's heart. If you pick up an Irving book, make this the first.
Rating: 5/5
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