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A Prayer for Owen Meany (Paperback)
by John Irving
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John Irving’s masterpiece, in which he has created an awe-inspiring character of Owen Meany, a funny little guy with a big heart and a brave soul. A tale of faith, love and life. |
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Author: John Irving
Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reissue edition
Pub. in: April, 1990
ISBN: 0345361792
Pages: 640
Measurements: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.0 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00494
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- Awards & Credential -
#1 International Bestseller |
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- MSL Picks -
"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."
What can be said about this literary masterpiece? There's a reason this book has been popular for over a decade and is still a top seller. Despite its length, the plot will grab the reader and suck them in to the world of the one-of-a-kind Owen Meany and the people who were touched by his short time on earth.
The narrator of this book, John Wheelright, tells the story of Owen in flashbacks from the vantage point of his current adult life in Canada. The present and the past converge at the end of the novel--John talks about the last month's before Owen's death at the same time as he talks about the funeral and Owen's communications from beyond the grave. The novel climaxes and concludes with Owen's death, which the reader has been told is coming from the very beginning of the novel. The reader is fully prepared for the death, and even has rough foreshadowing of how it will take place, but it will still sock you in the gut, after having spent so much time watching Owen Meany grow up. As soon as the book finished, I missed Owen's style of EMPHASIZING IMPORTANT THINGS through the use of capital-letter-speech.
But for those who are not compelled to read a book simply for its structure, the book proves to be a heartwarming tale that explores Irving's question of what a modern day miracle would look like. Its readers are moved to cry, yet will find that there are just as many times in the book where they couldn't help but laugh out loud because of the witty lines and situations that Irving throws out at you. Readers will find it hard to not fall in love with the title character. Furthermore, this is the kind of book that will keep you on the edge of your seat, constantly wanting to know more as the story unveils itself. It was always a battle for me to put the book down.
For those who want to explore more, there are themes of religion, political undertones, endless recurring symbolism, and much foreshadowing to be studied. This story can be enjoyed on many different levels, and it is up to the reader how deep they want to look into it.
Assuredly one of the best novels ever written, a book that stands on the strength of its characters, A Prayer for Owen Meany is a riveting master- piece that shows Irving at his best; it's engaging, heart- wrenching and is definitely worth the read.
(From quoting Jessica Baumann and Nick, USA)
Target readers:
General readers
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John Irving published his first novel at the age of twenty-six. He has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation; he has won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award, and an Academy Award. Mr. Irving lives with his family in Toronto and Vermont.
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From the Publisher:
Diminutive Owen Meaney, the social outcast with the high, pinched voice, has an enormous influence on his friend Johnny Wheelwright - not least because the only baseball Owen ever hits causes the death of Johnny's mother. But as Johnny claims, "Owen gave me more than he ever took from me… What did he ever say that wasn't right?" Spookily prescient, convinced that he is an instrument of God, Owen intimidates child and adult alike. Why Johnny "is a Christian because of Owen Meaney" is the novel's central mystery but not its only one: Who, for instance, was Johnny's father? Untangling these knots, the adult Johnny pauses to consider his religious convictions and distaste of American politics in passages that are neither especially persuasive nor effectively integrated into the book. And though Owen is a compelling presence, his power over others is not entirely convincing. Still, readers will be drawn in by the story of the boys' friend- ship and by the desire to see some resolution to Johnny's mysteries.
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1 The Foul Ball
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. I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ - and certainly not for Christ, which I’ve heard some zealots claim. I’m not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament, and I’ve not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church. I’m somewhat more familiar with the passages from the Bible that appear in The Book of Common Prayer; I read my prayer book often, and my Bible only on holy days - the prayer book is so much more orderly.
I’ve always been a pretty regular churchgoer. I used to be a Congregationalist - I was baptized in the Congregational Church, and after some years of fraternity with Episcopalians (I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, too), I became rather vague in my religion: in my teens I attended a “nondenomi- national” church. Then I became an Anglican; the Anglican Church of Canada has been my church - ever since I left the United States, about twenty years ago. Being an Anglican is a lot like being an Episcopalian - so much so that being an Anglican occasionally impresses upon me the suspicion that I have simply become an Episcopalian again. Anyway, I left the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians - and my country once and for all.
When I die, I shall attempt to be buried in New Hampshire - alongside my mother - but the Anglican Church will perform the necessary service before my body suffers the indignity of trying to be sneaked through U.S. Customs. My selections from the Order for the Burial of the Dead are entirely conventional and can be found, in the order that I shall have them read - not sung - in The Book of Common Prayer. Almost everyone I know will be familiar with the passage from John, beginning with “… whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” And then there’s “…in my Father’s house are many mansions: If it were not so, I would have told you.” And I have always appreciated the frankness expressed in that passage from Timothy, the one that goes “…we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” It will be a by-the-book Anglican service, the kind that would make my former fellow Congregationalists fidget in their pews. I am an Anglican now, and I shall die an Anglican. But I skip a Sunday service now and then; I make no claims to be especially pious; I have a church- rummage faith - the kind that needs patching up every weekend. What faith I have I owe to Owen Meany, a boy I grew up with. It is Owen who made me a believer.
In Sunday school, we developed a form of entertainment based on abusing Owen Meany, who was so small that not only did his feet not touch the floor when he sat in his chair - his knees did not extend to the edge of his seat; therefore, his legs stuck out straight, like the legs of a doll. It was as if Owen Meany had been born without realistic joints.
Owen was so tiny, we loved to pick him up; in truth, we couldn’t resist picking him up. We thought it was a miracle: how little he weighed. This was also incongruous because Owen came from a family in the granite business. The Meany Granite Quarry was a big place, the equipment for blasting and cutting the granite slabs was heavy and dangerous-looking; granite itself is such a rough, substantial rock. But the only aura of the granite quarry that clung to Owen was the granular dust, the gray powder that sprang off his clothes whenever we lifted him up. He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times - especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon).
His vocal cords had not developed fully, or else his voice had been injured by the rock dust of his family’s business. Maybe he had larynx damage, or a destroyed trachea; maybe he’d been hit in the throat by a chunk of granite. To be heard at all, Owen had to shout through his nose.
Yet he was dear to us - “a little doll,” the girls called him, while he squirmed to get away from them; and from all of us.
I don’t remember how our game of lifting Owen began.
This was Christ Church, the Episcopal Church of Gravesend, New Hampshire. Our Sunday school teacher was a strained, unhappy-looking woman named Mrs. Walker. We thought this name suited her because her method of teaching involved a lot of walking out of class. Mrs. Walker would read us an instructive passage from the Bible. She would then ask us to think seriously about what we had heard - “Silently and seriously, that’s how I want you to think!” she would say. “I’m going to leave you alone with your thoughts, now,” she would tell us ominously - as if our thoughts were capable of driving us over the edge. “I want you to think very hard,” Mrs. Walker would say. Then she’d walk out on us. I think she was a smoker, and she couldn’t allow herself to smoke in front of us. “When I come back,” she’d say, “we’ll talk about it.”
By the time she came back, of course, we’d forgotten everything about whatever it was - because as soon as she left the room, we would fool around with a frenzy. Because being alone with our thoughts was no fun, we would pick up Owen Meany and pass him back and forth, overhead. We managed this while remaining seated in our chairs - that was the challenge of the game. Someone - I forget who started it - would get up, seize Owen, sit back down with him, pass him to the next person, who would pass him on, and so forth. The girls were included in this game; some of the girls were the most enthusiastic about it. Everyone could lift up Owen. We were very careful; we never dropped him. His shirt might become a little rumpled. His necktie was so long, Owen tucked it into his trousers - or else it would have hung to his knees - and his necktie often came untucked; sometimes his change would fall out (in our faces). We always gave him his money back.
If he had his baseball cards with him, they, too, would fall out of his pockets. This made him cross because the cards were alphabetized, or ordered under another system - all the infielders together, maybe. We didn’t know what the system was, but obviously Owen had a system, because when Mrs. Walker came back to the room - when Owen returned to his chair and we passed his nickels and dimes and his baseball cards back to him - he would sit shuffling through the cards with a grim, silent fury.
He was not a good baseball player, but he did have a very small strike zone and as a consequence he was often used as a pinch hitter - not because he ever hit the ball with any authority (in fact, he was instructed never to swing at the ball), but because he could be relied upon to earn a walk, a base on balls. In Little League games he resented this exploitation and once refused to come to bat unless he was allowed to swing at the pitches. But there was no bat small enough for him to swing that didn’t hurl his tiny body after it - that didn’t thump him on the back and knock him out of the batter’s box and flat upon the ground. So, after the humili- ation of swinging at a few pitches, and missing them, and whacking himself off his feet, Owen Meany selected that other humiliation of standing motionless and crouched at home plate while the pitcher aimed the ball at Owen’s strike zone - and missed it, almost every time.
Yet Owen loved his baseball cards - and, for some reason, he clearly loved the game of baseball itself, although the game was cruel to him. Opposing pitchers would threaten him. They’d tell him that if he didn’t swing at their pitches, they’d hit him with the ball. “Your head’s bigger than your strike zone, pal,” one pitcher told him. So Owen Meany made his way to first base after being struck by pitches, too.
Once on base, he was a star. No one could run the bases like Owen. If our team could stay at bat long enough, Owen Meany could steal home. He was used as a pinch runner in the late innings, too; pinch runner and pinch hitter Meany - pinch walker Meany, we called him. In the field, he was hopeless. He was afraid of the ball; he shut his eyes when it came anywhere near him. And if by some miracle he managed to catch it, he couldn’t throw it; his hand was too small to get a good grip. But he was no ordinary complainer; if he was self-pitying, his voice was so original in its expression of complaint that he managed to make whining lovable.
In Sunday school, when we held Owen up in the air - especially, in the air! - he protested so uniquely. We tortured him, I think, in order to hear his voice; I used to think his voice came from another planet. Now I’m convinced it was a voice not entirely of this world.
“PUT ME DOWN!” he would say in a strangled, emphatic falsetto. “CUT IT OUT! I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. PUT ME DOWN! YOU ASSHOLES!”
But we just passed him around and around. He grew more fatalistic about it, each time. His body was rigid; he wouldn’t struggle. Once we had him in the air, he folded his arms defiantly on his chest; he scowled at the ceiling…
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| View all 13 comments |
Stephen King (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
John Irving, who writes novels in the unglamorous but effective way Babe Ruth used to hit home runs, deserves a medal not only for writing this book but for the way he has written it… A Prayer for Owen Meany is a rare creation in the somehow exhausted world of late twentieth-century fiction - it is an amazingly brave piece of work… so extraordinary, so original, and so enriching… Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] richly textured and carefully wrought world. |
Los Angeles Times Book Review (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
Roomy, intelligent, exhilarating and darkly comic... Quite stunning. |
Perry (MSL quote), Canada
<2007-01-09 00:00>
I was hooked from the 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."
This is a fantastic book of just over 600 pages, with not a dull moment! There is something for everyone it seems, from politics to religion to philosophy to education. John Irving, the masterful storyteller, has created wonderfully compelling three dimensional characters who are as real as your own family. You'll care so deeply about the characters that you'll hold your breath and hope they are safe.
The main character, Owen Meany, has seared a place in my heart and mind for eternity. Owen the teacher, philosopher, leader, loyal friend, mediator, comedian, sage, and Voice for the underdog. In spite of his diminutive size, Owen's presence is prodigious and he is admittedly at times manipulative. I promise you though, you will fall in love with him and you will carry him around in your heart forever.
I wish I could give this book ten stars… but alas, there are only five. Look closely at one of the brightest stars, and you will see Owen.
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Angela Hack (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
This is the best book ever written. Period. Nothing compares. A Prayer for Owen Meany begins with the most beautifully written first line: "I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice...” Marvelous! The only downside is that it is a writer's nightmare!!! I fancied myself a writer until I read this book, then I laid it down and surrendered. I would rather gorge myself on the work of GREAT writers, like Irving, then spend a day writing mediocre fiction. I read this book at least twice a year (for the last 10 years) and I am never disappointed. BUY THIS BOOK. And if you love your friends buy them copies, too. You will laugh out loud, you will sob uncontrollably, you will start rereading it the minute you finish it. |
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