A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Sorry that it has taken so long to update. This semester had a rocky start to it, and I've only recently started finding time in my schedule for extra-circular reading. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up with this from here on out.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is pretty much just as good as I had been lead to believe. It's one of those books that gets assigned in High School English a lot (although not my English class) and also one of the few that most students walk away from having enjoyed. I can see why. Its themes are very present and obvious, but it still manages to be a little edgy without crossing the line into offensive territory. It is also very comforting to those who desire to believe that God has a purpose for them. While I am not one of those people (and will actually be tearing down that aspect of the novel in a few paragraphs), I still recognize the appeal. Despite any theological reservations I have about the book, I still enjoyed it. Spoiler-free until I note otherwise.

The story is told by one John Wheelwright, the son of a single mother in a small New England town in the 1940's. He befriends a boy named Owen Meany. Owen Meany is small (although I don't believe he's supposed to have dwarfism, as he seems to in the very loose, barely-counts-as-an-adaptation Simon Birch) and has a strange voice and a borderline fanatical devotion to God. This devout religious belief is the center of the narrative. All action occurs to support this theme. As life happens to our protagonists and tragedies and mysteries occur, they all tie into what Owen claims is God's plan for him. All of these events are what give our narrator his faith in God, as he tells us recounting the story in 1987.

One of the things that Irving does very deftly with this narrative is jump around in time. He goes back and forth from the time period of the late 40's through the late 60's (not to mention the novels “present day” of 1987) without ever getting confusing. Every backtrack, every jump forward makes sense when it happens and you never really lose track of where you are. However, there is something a little strange about the “present day” parts of the story. The novel was published in 1989, so I can only assume the current events John refers to (and he refers to them a lot – Reagan, Iran-Contra, Oliver North) were current when the novel was written. I think this has dated the novel in a way Irving probably didn't factor in when he wrote it. It doesn't have much to do with the central theme about faith, but rather ties into the secondary theme – the tired idea that America was somehow “innocent” before Vietnam and then lost its innocence during that war. It's an idea that seems to have been created by Baby Boomers for Baby Boomers. I doubt many “Greatest Generation” members would buy the narrative, having lost their own innocence early due to the Depression. In any case, I don't really feel like addressing that theme beyond saying that it's obviously a dumb one to anyone with any sense of historical perspective.

Irving is also quite good at painting characters. Every aspect of his characters, from their appearance right down to their personalities and tastes is vivid and realistic. However, it is also troubling at times. The story is told from a very privileged POV, which isn't troubling in and of itself necessarily. In fact, the rich characters in the story run the gamut from good and virtuous to ill tempered and selfish. However, this spectrum of behavior falls away when the novel deals with lower-class characters. Owen and Lydia (the Wheelwrights maid) being the only exceptions, the rest of the poor characters are portrayed as dumb, crazy, evil, or some combination of all three. The worst hand, however, is dealt to Owen's parents.

(Spoilers begin here).

Owen's parents are regarded by the other characters (including Owen himself) as dumb. John and his step-father Dan are quite candid about their suspicion that Owen's mother is mentally retarded (a claim not really supported by her behavior). And when they reveal to John that Owen was the result of a virgin birth, John gets quite irrationally angry at them for being either stupid or liars. I say irrationally because this comes on the heals of Owen's chief miracle: at the climax of the novel he gives his life to save some children from a grenade, just as he had premonitions about for years before, and the details were exact, right down to the date. This event gave John faith in God and that Owen's life was guided by divine fate, but even after all of that he couldn't accept that Owen's parents might be telling the truth about his virgin birth? It doesn't make any sense. Nor does Owen's cruelty towards his parents. At a Christmas pageant where Owen plays baby Jesus, he yells at his parents to leave the church because their presence there was blasphemy. And at Owen's funeral John thinks back to this event, concluding that Owen would feel the same way about his parents presence at his funeral. Why? No explanation for this treatment is given or implied. Owen's parents are dumb and poor, that's all we really know.

What's really sad about the treatment of Owen's parents is that I find their reaction to Owen's virgin birth much more believable than the reactions of Joseph and Mary in the nativity myth. If such a thing were to really happen, I imagine the parents would be terrified of their child and would become withdrawn and would have a hard time dealing with the rest of the world.

The biggest holes in the novel are around its central theme. There are two main arguments for faith that it presents. I'll get the easy one out of the way first. It quotes Thomas Aquinas' “First Mover” argument. The idea is that because an object in motion requires an agent to put it into motion, the universe itself needs such an agent, and that agent is God. The problem inherent in the argument is that then God needs a “first mover” himself, and the question just gets kicked further back, on and on. If you accept that God doesn't require a first mover, then why does the universe need a first mover? These are cosmological questions that still have not been answered, but to simply said “God did it” and leave it at that isn't a sufficient answer. If anything it raises more questions than it answers.

The other argument for faith that the novel presents is the existence of miracles. Owen's whole life is said to be a miracle, and the proof is in how he dies. He works for the army, helping with the funeral arrangement of dead soldiers coming back from Vietnam. The family of one soldier in particular is full of evil nutcases (who are poor, of course) and after Owen confronts the brother of the soldier about being more respectful, the guy follows Owen to an airport to kill him. Owen is asked by a nun to take some Vietnamese children who she has helped into the country to go to the bathroom. Once there the crazy brother throws a grenade at John, who passes it to Owen who then jumps into John's arms as he pushes Owen up towards a high window, where Owen “dunks” the grenade in a move they had practiced time and again as children with a basketball. The grenade goes off in time to kill Owen, although the children are saved. Owen had been having premonitions about this event his whole life, right down to the date it would occur on. It is what led him to join the army (because he believed he had to be in Vietnam from the presence of the children in the premonition). The event is presented as evidence that Owen's life was divinely guided. However, this notion falls apart at one simple fact: if Owen hadn't been born, none of this would have happened. The crazy guy wouldn't have been at the airport to throw the grenade. John's mother would be alive. In fact, in many ways, everyone would be better off. The entire “miracle” is completely contrived.

(End Spoilers).

It sounds like I didn't like the book, but I actually did. The prose is good, and it is quite funny and moving at different points. I would recommend it to others, and will most likely read some more John Irving at some point.

Up next: On Being a Christian by Hans Küng.