John Irving, The World According to Garp (1978)
The World According to Garp was an enormous hit novel that won a National Book Award in 1980 and became a hit Robin Williams movie in 1982. What that means, if you’re in a Kathmandu bookshop and looking for something to take with you into the Himalayas, is that here is a book that promises to be both readable and not entirely stupid. And at 542 pages, it will keep you busy for many an evening, but fortunately it comes in convenient mass paperback format.
It’s an odd book to take on a Himalayan trek. In fact, it’s just an odd book. All the way back in 1978, one of its main characters is a feminist and another is a trans woman, and it delves, albeit a little ham-fistedly, into issues of male rage and reactionary feminism. There’s also some child rape for good measure. And, because this is John Irving, Vienna and a bear.
Garp is a self-indulgent novel — Irving throws in a long short story and the opening chapter of an entirely different novel, both written by the titular Garp, who’s a novelist — and I felt too often that characters were aggregations of characteristics rather than fully realized people. Its gender politics are out of date, understandably, but I’m not sure how well meaning they were even in their own time. There are also themes of death and parental fears of losing a child, which mean a little more to me now that I’m a parent of an eight-year-old than they did when I was a twenty-three-year-old trekking in the Annapurnas without much consideration for any fears my parents might have had.
What should have stuck with me then, when I was a young aspiring writer with no clue what to write and no great gift for creating either plots or characters, were the parts of the novel about how to be a writer. But when I came back to it, the only things I could remember were the mutilations: the women who cut out their own tongues as a kind of protest in support of a girl whose tongue is cut out by a rapist, and then the horrifying scene where Garp’s wife bites the cock off one of her college students during a car accident.
Does any of this make Garp a good novel today? I’m not sure. I wouldn’t put it high on my list of books anyone should read, but if you’re going somewhere far away from all available entertainments for a period of weeks, where you’ll be physically exhausted and need something diverting before you fall asleep or to pass the time on a rest day by a hot spring, you could do worse.