thuridaV, September 7, 1978
daily 'nebraskan
'Garp' trapped in comictragic life
By David Wood
The World According To Garp by John Irving, Dutton,
$ 1 0 .9 5
John Irving's novels have all been" well received, in the
past, if even by small fringe audiences. But now, with his
fourth novel, the bestseller, The World According to Garp,
Irving, at age 36, is at last taking a place among the
dwindling number of critically notable American novel
ists. The story is about a writer, which is a popular career
nowadays for the protagonists of novels. T.S. Garp, like
John Irving, is author to four books. The plots have clear
ly been fashioned from his own experiences; but the
stories are not, Garp contests about his personal life.
book review
"Memories and personal histories - all the recollected
traumas of our unmemorable lives' - were suspicious
models for fiction, Garp would say."
Ordinary life
And says Irving, harmoniously, in a Times interview,
"I'm grateful for how ordinary my life is because I'm not
ever tempted to think that something that happened to
me is important simply because it happened to me."
Yet, as if mocking their mutual conviction against "the
phony mileage of personal hardship," the lives of Irving
and Garp share even more than that.
Alike in their age and the novels they have written,
both are happily married, reside in small-town New
England, each the father of two sons. Both have spent
formative years in Vienna. John Irving is an ex-Olympic
wrestler; Garp is a wrestling coach. So on and so forth.
This does not make Garp the autobiography of Irv
ing, however, because the book, craftily and artistically,
is not about Garp; Garp is just the continuity. Rather, the
portrait is of the world according to Garp.
Bum luck
Garp's is a world like ours, but that Garp has the bum
luck of meeting the latent random hazard of living in it
so often it becomes a current in his life's course. Murphy's
Law is an exaggerated symbol of the world according to
Garp; if something is to go wrong, it will, and at the
worst time,
i
Garp's is an ordinary life. He is full of faults, and living
among faulted humans. He experiences suburban trivi
alities and illusions of importance. Yet he shares a
Viennese awareness with Marcus Aurelius.
"In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his
being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body
a prey of worms, his sould an unquiet eddy, his fortune
dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as
coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and
vapors"
Snuffed out
Garp's world is as a caricature of at least one man's vul
nerability. And accentuated is the peril of living in our
modern world, that in a moment's chaos or in a quirk of
incidence can violently snuff out parts or all of him.
Walt, Garp's son, misheard his father, when Garp
warned him to be careful of the undertow in the ocean.
Walt would sit on the shore looking for the creature he
thought he had to look out for. The "underload" was for
awhile a joke among the family. After an accident,
though, the invisible monster stalked Garp's good family
the rest of the book.
A car wreck in which Walt was killed; another of Garp
Garp's sons lost an eye; one of his wife's students had his
penis bitten off; Garp lost his talent; the whacky timing,
the unrealness of the unexpected and the realness of the
loss, are written perfectly full-bodied with Irving's skill
for black comic clarity of realism.
We're all dead
Yet if the moral is an exaggeration, what Irving calls
"a truthful exaggeration", that "we are all terminal
cases", so is everything in The World According to Garp
exaggerated. It is Irving's charming craftsmanship, as
much as anything, his muted exaggerations, his lucidly
comic typicality, the guisiness of his phrases, that makes
his book a delight to read .
Says Irving of it, subtly, "I don't see comedy and trag
edy as contradictions . . .1 don't see that unhappy endings
undermine rich and energetic lives. There are no happy
endings; death is horrible, final and frequently prema
ture . . . That shouldn't strike anyone as a terribly new
idea . . . New ideas aren't a novelist's business; I leave
the new ideas to the clothing and automotive industries."
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