For a few months in my life, John Irving was my great escape, opening up a new and exciting and exceptionally readable world that released me from my daily pressures. After Garp, Hotel, Cider, even Water-Method Man, and 158-pound Marriage, I was still under his spell, reading nonstop. Then I read A Prayer for Owen Meany. It was one of only a handful of books that I really despised, perhaps because of disappointment. I will not bash on it here too much, seeing that it is a beloved favorite of many to this day. But I found it incredibly repetitive, thinly plotted, and constantly telegraphing its punches (or, more precisely, punch) throughout. I will not go on about it. Either you know the plot, or you don't, and I don't want to play the spoiler.
So it is pungently ironic that I would like to pay tribute here to the lasting influence of Owen Meany on my world of ideas. For, apart from the actual slog of reading the book, the idea of fulfilling a destiny has never been hammered home so deeply as in Owen Meany. And it is strange that I recognize, in what I am writing now, some kind of heavily transmuted version of what is essentially an Owen Meanyesque story in the framework or skeleton underneath. A story that has been reskinned or armored into something that is hopefully unrecognizable as kin.
No comments:
Post a Comment