A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of those books that turns up on those 100 great books of the twentieth century lists. It’s a book you’ve seen mentioned so often you wonder if you’ve actually read it and completely forgotten what it’s about. Except I don’t think you’d easily forget some of the images in this book.

John Irving reportedly said that the opening sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany was the best opening sentence he had ever written. It certainly packs a lot in one sentence.

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wreaked voice, not because he is the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”

This is not a book for speeding through and enjoying the plot. This is a book where you sometimes have to slow right down and unpack a sentence. And if that final clause puts you off – I am a Christian because of Owen Meany – I respectfully suggest you do a bit more unpacking.

Johnny Wheelwright is the character beginning the story. This is Johnny Wheelwright as a fusty old man teaching in an obscure all-girls school in Canada. The young Johnny Wheelwright grew up in an obscure lumber town in New Hampshire. After a few of these paragraphs of fustiness tinged with wry humor (“When I die, I shall attempt to be buried in New Hampshire–alongside my mother–but the Anglican Church will perform the necessary service before my body suffers the indignity of trying to be sneaked through U.S. Customs”) the narrative switches to the past:

“What faith I have I owe to Owen Meany, a boy I grew up with. It is Owen Meany who made me a believer.”

White space, then…

“In Sunday school, we developed a form of entertainment based on abusing Owen Meany…”

What follows is a hilarious description of Owen Meany, Sunday school in small town America and the behavior of children left to their own devices. It’s hilarity mixed with pathos and barbarism.

“We tortured him, I think, in order to hear his voice; I used to think his voice came from another planet.”

His voice, and his attitude that he is a chosen one, is truly annoying and to emphasize just how annoying it is Irving has Owen speak in block capitals throughout the book.

“PUT ME DOWN...CUT IT OUT! I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. PUT ME DOWN! YOU ASSHOLES!”

It is not until the end of this Sunday school scene that you learn that the narrator is a Wheelwright, not until a few family history diversions later that you learn he is John and it is not until after a lot of family history, and town history, diversions that he comes out as ‘little Johnny Wheelwright, father unknown,…”.

This meandering style is maintained throughout. When the narrator is the older Johnny it’s just that, meandering, contemplative and philosophical. When it’s the younger Johnny you are immersed in the meandering life of the small town by the Squamscott river.

“Owen and I were throwing rocks in the Squamscott, the saltwater river, the tidal river­­­­­­­­­–or rather, I was throwing rocks in the river; Owen’s rocks were landing in the mud flats because the tide was out and the water was too far away for Owen Meany’s little, weak arm.”

This 1950s small industrial town in New Hampshire is as alien to me as any book written about India by Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy or Rohinton Mistry. Irving makes it real. And "little, weak arm"? The word order is wrong. In English adjectives have an order: weak, little arm. The weirdness of Owen Meany percolates through the language used to describe him.

Henry James described nineteenth century novels as “large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary”. A Prayer for Owen Meany is one such large, loose baggy monster, but it’s a baggy monster that hits hard. Johnny and Owen are the Vietnam generation. The tentacles of the great war machine reach into their lives, and the consequences are huge and disturbing. Irving is not Dickens, even when his book is north of 1000 pages in a print edition. His moral stance is far less polemical and far more satirical. It has overtones of the great satirical works coming out of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, which is not surprising given that Irving studied under Günter Grass. That being said, give me Dickens over Henry James any day.