40 years of GARP
Three rave reviews, one not so much
The only time I’ve ever been verbally accosted for reading a book was at a bus stop on the York University campus in the1990s. I had my nose deeply buried in a battered copy of John Irving’s The
World According to Garp when a respectable-looking blond woman in a skirt and trench coat, who had been agitated beside me, finally demanded: “How can you read such filth?” Or words to that effect.
As those with a diplomatic bent might note, sometimes silence is the best answer. I gave her a blank stare, turned my back and continued to read.
Which is all to say, the book now celebrating its 40th anniversary was eliciting passionate reactions long after it was first published in 1978. That, combined with the fact that it was on the bestseller lists for a couple of years and has more than 10 million copies in print, are signs it hit a chord.
Its author, now 76, has a similar story: he was on a plane with his son, Colin, who was about 14 at the time, and sitting across the aisle a woman was reading
Garp — the book and the character are almost always conflated into a singlename reference — and growing increasingly agitated. “At some moment over the Midwest when there was no escape, the woman crushed the book in her hand and stuffed it into the air-sickness bag,” Irving recalls, howling with laughter.
In a conversation in his comfortable Toronto office overlooking the city’s autumnal tree canopy, we speculate as to which part did her in.
Perhaps it was, well, the infamous car crash scene, where the titular T.S. Garp is in a car with his two kids, while his wife is in another car with the grad student
she’s having an affair with, her head in his lap, when Garp — accidentally but serendipitously — rams into the back of the car, causing her to bite off the student’s penis. In the crash, a child dies, another is blinded and readers were appalled — some horrified at what happened, some at themselves, that they could laugh at such terrible things.
“There’s a bit of a curse if you’re a comic novelist and that is you will be funny,” notes Irving, somewhat playfully. “And the more serious you are as a writer, you’ll always be funny at what some people will always see as inappropriate things to be funny about.”
He elaborates by way of comparison. “I didn’t want to be like Hemingway … I wanted to be like Dickens.” Which meant exaggeration. “The 19th century was full of making points and moments theatrically. To the modernist, postmodernist, minimalist sensibility I accept that, by those esthetics, I’m an overwriter.”
Not that the exaggeration, the sense of drama, has harmed Irving at all. Garp sold nearly 130,000 copies in hardcover in its first year, which sounds pretty good. But when the paperback version came out a year later, sales exploded with 2.6 million copies in print. That novel would allow Irving to write fulltime and cement his reputation, winning a U.S. National Book Award and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.
Not bad for a book that defied labels, with some calling it bizarre, some calling it formless and immature — and some calling Irving one of the most important writers in the country. A feminist novel featuring a woman who chose to be a single mother, with a cast that includes as a main character a transgender exfootball player who “suffered the vanity of a middle-aged man and the anxieties of a middle-aged woman,” and features a room full of women who have cut out their tongues.
“One thing I don’t hear much anymore is the ‘bizarre’ word,” Irving notes. “I find it completely unimaginative … violence isn’t bizarre, violence is what everybody is afraid of.”
That dark humour can help us through some dangerous times makes holding the mirror up to us more palatable. And if you’re taking a stand — against sexual discrimination, in favour of allowing abortion or excoriating the Vietnam war — you have to take the reader along with you.
“You have to be entertaining,” Irving says. “And the more rough you intend to be, the rougher the territory you intend to take the audience through, the funnier you have to be.”
In July, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, in awarding Irving a lifetime achievement award, said it was “in Garp that Irving’s artistic prescience had a powerful impact on our culture and all cultures. One could read Irving to get a sense of what the future would bring us — in 1979, his understanding that sexuality and its various evolutions, blendings and blurrings would become a central social, moral and political issue of our time.”
When he wrote Garp, Irving thought it was a “period” piece, so sure he was that things were going to change.
“It was almost a dialogue with some of my friends in the women’s movement, my mother included,” he explains. “I was saying, ‘Look, you talk about a sexual revolution, you talk about sexual liberation, gay and straight, but what happened? Not enough.’ Women are still treated as if they’re minorities. And the smaller minorities are treated even worse: gay men, lesbian women, transgender men and women.”
Irving thought Garp would quickly become “woefully out of date.” Yet it most certainly hasn’t.
It might be his best-known book, but it’s not, he says, his overall bestselling. First is A Prayer for Owen Meany; then Cider House Rules; then A Widow For One Year. Garp is “barely hanging on to fourth position.”
Fifth is A Son of the Circus, which, he says, has done very well in countries outside of the U.S. because its subject is immigration.
Still, the audience continues to grow. The 40th anniversary edition of Garp is now out — it came out in Europe earlier than in North America. Irving did a limited tour, visiting France and the Netherlands.
He recounts an interviewer in Utrecht, who suggested to him that the beginning of the book struck them as bizarre (there’s that word again) because nobody believed Garp’s mother Jenny when she said she was assaulted in a movie theatre — before she took a scalpel to her attacker. The interviewer didn’t think it realistic that nobody believed her. “I’m not kidding you!” Irving says indignantly.
“Less than a week later, at home in Toronto, I’m watching the freaking (Brett) Kavanaugh hearings and I wanted to go back to Utrecht and push this guy in the canal. What the hell has changed (since Garp)? And the president of the United States is mocking these women.”
Irving is also irritated at the way Donald Trump is managing to control the conversation. Because the president’s tweets are now news, “the watching, keeping of who the real legislators are and what they’re doing is less in the public eye than they should be,” he says.
When Irving first started writing, he studied and later taught at the storied Iowa Writers’ Workshop; one of his teachers was Kurt Vonnegut. “He was funny about things that drove people crazy,” says Irving. “‘You’re funny about the fire bombing of Dresden?’ Yes he was. He said, ‘I was there. I can be as funny about it as I want. I saw bodies this size when I came out of the meat locker.’” So, it’s not as if Irving wasn’t warned. “One of the things he said to me was, you know, ‘you’re very funny and you have to keep doing that but there are going to be people that hate you for the very things other people love you for.’”
Irving is proud of writing books that shake the status quo.
He recalls his mother’s reaction to Garp, the first of his political novels. “Oh finally you show signs of having a social conscience.”
He chooses his words carefully when he talks about the things we should or shouldn’t write about.
“I think so much of the things in the world that are socially disturbing, politically disturbing … because we’re understandably censorial of those things, we have to be careful not to be censorial of the imagination.”
That, perhaps, is the lasting lesson of Garp. Because if we censure the storyteller, who is going to tell the truth?