BOOK REVIEW: A Prayer for Owen Meany
Author: John Irving
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publication Date: April 14, 1990
ISBN: 978-0-3453-6179-0
Book obtained by in-store purchase
Books like A Prayer for Owen Meany take me a while to figure out. The sheer quantity of its pages (619, to be exact), the weaving currents of narration, the plot twists –all of this causes a backup in your literary digestive tract. I had intended on starting another book right after A Prayer for Owen Meany but I seem to be stuck in an incongruous time period: 1960’s New Hampshire of all places. I’ve been here longer than expected.
A Prayer for Owen Meany is the story of Johnny Wheelwright, but the parable of Owen Meany. Johnny’s narration starts from the days of his youth, as he simultaneously teases and forges a sibling-like bond with diminutive Owen Meany. Meany is small in stature but carries a big stick, most characterized by his voice, which is irritatingly poised at the crescendo of a shout. Irving employs the unsettling device of the caps-lock for all of Owen’s ideas, whether spoken or not—a ploy which at first almost caused me to throw the book across the room. Soon, you simply recognize the work of a masterful writer who has succeeded in having his main character’s persona virtually jump off the page; towards the end of the book, Owen’s IDEAS compulsively draw your eye to when you will next hear from him.
One ill-fated (or simply FATED, according to Owen) day, a foul ball at a Little League game strikes Johnny’s mother dead. The batter is Owen Meany and the incident puts an idea in his head that the death of Johnny’s mother, one of the most beautiful people in town and Owen’s treasured love, had to have been part of some larger plan and Owen, the instrument chosen to carry it out. The childish notion that senseless death could not actually be senseless leads to a faithful fervor that only gets stronger as Owen gets older. What might have been a tireless theme and a Christ figure overload is instead an incredibly moving treatise on faith that takes us from a youthful baseball game to the crushing tragedy of the Vietnam War. When faith gets harder to sustain, it seems Owen’s caps lock truisms are more infuriating to the characters, but ultimately more poignant.
Irving does this book both an enormous favor and an incredible disservice in the very first sentence:
“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.”
If you are a voracious reader, you might recognize the above quote as a truly stellar first sentence and the mark of an adept storyteller. It is my humble opinion that the first sentence of a novel has prevented many a crap book from being written – even if you have a story to tell, only talented writers know how to start one. This is obviously the favor. The disservice is the theme that Irving presents so nakedly here, which is one person’s path to faith and Christianity. The sentence reads almost like a religious tract, a souvenir from a Times Square prophet. At this point, many a reader will stop, put the book back on the bookstore shelf and walk away and I admit that I was once one of them. It appears Owen Meany is a religious hero, one of the hardest archetypes to pull off without damaging readers’ raging political sensitivities. It helps that Johnny’s adult narration from the perch of an ex-pat life in Canada includes multiple rants on the moral turpitude of Reagan-era politics in the United States: this is not a conservative book. While the story does revolve around Owen’s innocent assertions of religious enthusiasm and his belief that he was put born to carry out a number of fated tasks, the Christianity here spans all institutions, does not settle on any one talking point and works to remind us that religion, in lieu of starting wars and alienating people, might actually be a way for us to be better people.
It would take a caustic soul not to feel emotionally connected to Owen Meany and Irving’s vivid cast of characters. The takeaway from a novel like this is of an intensely personal nature and its message—whatever it is—will surely take a while to digest.
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