The World According to Garp

John Irving's The World According to Garp, published in 1978 and a National Book Award winner, is one of the great American novels of the late twentieth century and the book that turned Irving into a household name. Garp is the unlikely son of Jenny Fields, a fiercely independent New England nurse who decides during World War II that she wants a child without bothering to want a husband. The man she chooses, a brain-damaged ball turret gunner with a single repeated word in his vocabulary, gives Garp his last name and dies almost immediately afterward. Garp grows up in the dormitories of a New England boarding school, becomes a wrestler, and follows his mother to Vienna, where they both begin to write. From there the novel carries Garp through marriage, fatherhood, literary fame, and the long slow argument between his life and the lives that women around him are trying to build, all set against a country in which sexual violence and the politics of the body are inescapably present. Irving writes with comedy, tenderness, and a tragic sense of how arbitrary catastrophe can be. Garp is funny, devastating, generous, and unmistakably itself.