A Prayer For Owen Meaney

A Prayer For Owen Meaney
by John Irving
c. 1989
Random House: New York
617 pages

I picked this one up Barnes & Noble about a week ago. It was on the "Summer Reading" table. Someone, I don't remember who or when, told me that I would like John Irving, and I am seriously susceptible to the impulse book buy, so I picked it up. You have to love it when an impulse buy works out this well.

This is a beautiful, powerful, wonderful novel. It's tragic, but parts of it are extraordinarily funny. The characters are real, beautifully developed, flawed, lovable. They, more than anything, are what makes this book. I couldn't put it down, which means that it was a very good thing that I was left in the Oklahoma City airport for about seven hours on Sunday, because this took much longer to read that I imagined when I started. But it's wonderful and well worth it.

So now, added to that already lifetime long list of books that I want to read, is more Irving. If someone (maybe even the person that recommended him in the first place) would like to direct me to one that they think I would particularly enjoy, that would be ideal. It seems that there are a fair number of options. The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp being the ones that I recognize, which doesn't really make them more or less likely to be next. (Unless they happen to be on a display table at Barnes & Noble.)

Basic overview of the story, John Wheelwright, our narrator, is a New Hampshire native, the illegitimate son of a woman who can trace her lineage back further than the founding fathers of their small town, all the way to the Mayflower. (Or at least his grandmother can, his mother doesn't seem to care overmuch.) John's best friend is Owen Meaney, the only child of a couple that owns a granite quarry, something like the family from "the wrong side of the tracks." Owen is an extraordinarily bright boy, with an even more extraordinarily strange voice, and his own unique set of ideas about the world around him, particularly religion. The book follows the two of them from around age 10 through their twenties, from the 50s to the early 60s. We hear about their exploits in the form of flashbacks, from John, now living in Canada in the late 80s.

This book deserves better than spoilers, so I'm not going to give you any, even things that happen in the beginning. But if somebody would please read it, or direct me to somebody who has, that would be great, because I would love to talk about it.

A couple of things that this book made me think about:

The one thing that pissed me off at the beginning of the novel was the author's tendency to tell you something about a character related to an event that is yet to happen in the narration, and follow it with some form of the phrase "as you shall see..." I suppose that the fact that this bothered me so, (I remember thinking, "I hope that he doesn't do THAT for the entire novel.") reveals my general attitude about foreshadowing as a literary device, which is basically that about 80% of the time, it sucks.

My thought on foreshadowing is this: there is a difference between foreshadowing and a self inflicted spoiler, but in my experience, few authors seem to know it. I don't want to know what's going to happen 100 pages too early, and if I do, I don't always see the point in continuing to read. I mean really, leave something to be discovered. (This is different than books where you know the ending, but you want the backstory. The "how did we get from THERE to HERE?!" kind of novel. Those are occasionally wonderful. This book has some elements of that in it as well, and that aspect is well done. You have to know what's coming, but you just don't see how.)

I think that well done foreshadowing should be transparent only after the event that it was suggesting takes place. The kind of writing that makes you look back at the earlier text and think, "My GOD! I totally should have seen that coming!" not, "Yeah, I totally saw THAT coming."

This book is not really guilty of that. There are a couple of things that I saw coming a mile away, and some things that I didn't see coming at all. Either way, the "as you shall see" bothered me, and got me thinking about that, so you get to read it since I'm not giving up any plot.

Another thing that annoyed me at first, to represent Owen's very odd voice, everything he every says is written in caps. I mean really, is that necessary?

Turns out, yes it is. It stopped pissing me off pretty quickly because I found myself able to hear him in a way that I never could have otherwise. Able to imagine how much the things he said must have stood out, how startled people would have been the first time they heard his voice. So annoying at first, but turns out perfect. Another reason, when reading and writing, to give something a try, even if it seems wrong initially.

I'm going to wrap up here with a passage. The point is that there are some really beautiful passages in this book. Thoughts on faith and God and America and a number of other topics that made me stop and think: just beautiful and elegant collections of words. Here's one of them, Owen Meaney (in his caps) on the death of Marilyn Monroe,

"'SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY - NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING - I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE - JOE DIMAGGIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK HOW GOOD THEY SEEM! LOOK HOW DESIRABLE SHE WAS! THAT'S WHAT SHE WAS: SHE WAS DESIRABLE. SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY - AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY... MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN - MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY, MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED, OVER AND OVER AGAIN - SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY- THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY'RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT'S WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME,' said Owen Meaney. 'WE'RE GOING TO BE USED.'" (page 431)

There are others, some maybe even better, although that one particularly struck me. Anyway, it's a beautiful book, and if you've read it, let's talk about it. If not, it's worth the time to read it, even if it takes longer than you think, even if you don't have a whole day to spend reading in the sunny OKC ariport. Right.