John Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany"

I don't like buying modern fiction unless it's specifically recommended to me by someone I can trust (extra points if the person is an English major). Turns out my fellow teacher Carly is one such person. On our first excursion to What the Book, a famous foreigners' bookstore in Itaewon (a spot of the city famous for its Muslim community and appeal to foreigners), she told me how much she loved A Prayer for Owen Meany. She's read it three times, and it began her love of John Irving's writing. She's read several of his books, and there was even a period of about 3 months when that was all she would read. I bought the book on the spot. Always take the passionate advice of an English major.

So glad I did. It is an exquisite book.

John Irving, himself, writes in the Afterward about the significance of the first sentence, which reads something like this:

'I am doomed to forever remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he made me believe in God---I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.'

Irving has written a wonderful portrayal of adolescence which goes far beyond the tragic irony of A Separate Peace (not sure if you ever had to read that in high school--I did). The narrator, a New Hampshire-born expatriate living in Canada, tells the story of his best friend, Owen Meany, the only son of a granite quarryman. Owen Meany, a tragic and lovable character, believes in God's purpose for his life....and death. Spanning their boyhood in the 1950s, the hopeless war years of the 1960s, and the narrator's retelling of the story in the late 1980s, A Prayer for Owen Meany, weaves together historical events and fictional moments of love, friendship, and grief to perfection.

On a scholastic note, if you have ever been confused about the meaning of symbolism or allusion or foreshadowing, Irving offers a textbook of examples in this novel. It's an absolute gift for the intellectual reader.

I hope you all get a chance to read it some day. It's a thing of beauty, and totally worth the two hours of sobbing at its conclusion. Highly recommended!