Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 672 pages
- Published by: Modern Library June 4, 2002
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0679642595
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0679642596
-
Book Dimensions:
8.1 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
- Weighs: 1.6 pounds
Product Review
Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie
Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since
Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the
Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as
Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting
A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he
was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.
The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's
Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel,
Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's
The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment,
Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God.
--Tim Appelo
--This text refers to the
Mass Market Paperback
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Although he is convincing in his appraisal of the tragedy of Vietnam and in his religious philosophizing, "Irving's storytelling skills have gone seriously astray in this contrived, preachy, tedious tale of the eponymous Owen Meany, a latter-day prophet and Christ-like figure who dies a martyr after having inspired true Christian belief in the narrator Johnny Wheelwright," warned PW . Author tour.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Mass Market Paperback
edition.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: A Prayer for Owen Meany (Mass Market Paperback)
"A Prayer for Owen Meany" is NOT your typical book. Of course, that could be said about any of John Irving's novels; his is one of the most unusual voices I've ever read. But this one is especially unique. Owen Meany is probably the most memorable character that I've ever come across in a book of any genre. A dwarf with a voice so striking and strange that his dialogue is WRITTEN IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, he also believes (rightly!) that he is an instrument of God. It is sometimes confusing to follow the jumps in time; the narrator, Owen's best friend Johnny Wheelwright, alternates the story of his growing up with Owen with anecdotes from his "present" life in the late 80's. Predestination, faith, doubt, politics, love, hate, family, friendship...these are all themes that make appearances in this book. Furthermore, it is a page-turner that is impossible to put down, right from the start. I read the entire second half of the book in one marathon reading session, wasting an entire morning because I couldn't bear to stop, knowing that more revelations were in store. I've read some of Irving's other novels, and loved them all, but I think "A Prayer for Owen Meany" has been the best so far.
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