The World According to Garp Was Never Meant to Be This Timeless

November 21, 2018 2:31 PM

The World According to Garp Was Never Meant to Be This Timeless

In 1978, when Garp was published, I thought I’d written a period piece. Garp is an angry and a comic novel—a feminist novel and an ode to the women’s movement, which is at once exalted and satirized—but, above all (I thought), Garp is a period piece. I was wrong. The World According to Garp isn’t prescient, but sexual hatred hasn’t gone away. It’s not good news that Garp is still relevant. We should be ashamed that sexual intolerance is still tolerated, but it is.

John Irving's introduction to the novel's 40th anniversary edition.

In the early and mid-1970s, when I was writing Garp, I thought my country would never be as divided again as it was then. I was wrong. In 1968, Nixon had been elected on the promise that he would end the war in Vietnam. He didn’t get around to it right away. When Saigon fell, in 1975, President Nixon—facing impeachment—had already resigned from office. Nixon, of course, should never have been elected in the first place. Sound familiar?

Now (as of this writing) we have President Trump—a narcissistic vulgarian, a xenophobic blowhard, and a fascist bully. In October 2017, Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, ruled that transgender citizens were not protected from workplace discrimination; Sessions argued that Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination “does not encompass discrimination based on gender identity per se, including transgender status.” Yes, several federal appeals courts have ruled against the Attorney General’s war on the LGBTQ community, but President Trump and the Department of Justice are clearly hostile to LGBTQ rights. What would Roberta say?

posted by kirkaracha (34 comments total)

And the movie is 36 years old.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:31 PM on November 21, 2018

When I was a young novelist, I wanted to BE John Irving; his stuff is SO GOOD.
Garp, Hotel New Hampshire, Cider House Rules, and Owen Meany are 4 of my top ten favorite books.
I fell of the Irving wagon after that, but with a little encouragement, I could jump back on; maybe start with Son of the Circus and go from there.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 2:43 PM on November 21, 2018 [13 favorites]

I think all the time about how when I was a kid growing up in the 70's it seemed a given that the ERA would pass any moment and that everything had permanently changed, we would keep moving forward in the decades to come.
posted by bongo_x at 3:28 PM on November 21, 2018 [33 favorites]

> And the movie is 36 years old.

When we were kids my brother and I watched at least part of this movie on pay TV at our aunt and uncles' place because it had Robin Williams in it and I guess we figured it would be a wacky comedy. It was kind of a "BAR-TON FINK! BAR-TON FINK!" moment. I don't know where the grown-ups who should have put a stop to this were.
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:58 PM on November 21, 2018 [14 favorites]

The only Irving book I really like is A Prayer for Owen Meany. I don't think it's a coincidence that that is one of his very few books that doesn't have at least one rape scene shoehorned in somewhere. Seriously, SO MANY RAPE SCENES. Why so many rape scenes?!
posted by sarcasticah at 4:01 PM on November 21, 2018 [24 favorites]

He repeats subjects from book to book so much that there used to be a recurring plot device checklist on his wikipedia page.
posted by LionIndex at 4:12 PM on November 21, 2018 [19 favorites]

I fell of the Irving wagon after that, but with a little encouragement, I could jump back on;

Hello, I am a big Irving fan. I would skip forward to Until I Find You, read up to his latest, and then go back to A Widow for One Year, and then read the rest. But that's just me.

I encourage you to jump back on the wagon no matter how you do it!
posted by elsietheeel at 4:14 PM on November 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

sarcastica: Yes, Garp doesn't sit easy in my memory for treating a rape as funny and empowerment.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 4:15 PM on November 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

That was a feminist book? If so it was lost on me. I know I read 'em too young, but they seemed dated even in the '80s.
posted by Miko at 4:34 PM on November 21, 2018 [28 favorites]

So for those of trying to decide whether to read Garp...

Approximately how many rape and misogyny related spoons does this one cost? It’s sounding like “more than zero.”
posted by schadenfrau at 4:45 PM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

I will never forget "the undertoad," from Garp. That concept is a personal meme with me.
posted by Oyéah at 4:48 PM on November 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

I...would not start with Garp, for several reasons:

1. There was this style in the late sixties and seventies that hasn't aged well, with the wacky names and the "is it satire or not" and the emphasis on the grotesque and the sort of unevenness of tone and a variety of distancing techniques (lots of ironic humor, emphasis on the inappropriate, dark humor generally) used about violence and horrible things. You see this in Donald Barthelme, in Gore Vidal, in...oh, lots of left wing novels that are not in fact unsympathetic. I assume it's a response to mid-century tendencies in fiction, to the sixties and Vietnam, etc. But it's not a style that has lasted or aged well. If you really like, eg, the tone of Giles Goat-Boy or The Floating Opera (both of which are, unlike Garp, actually misogynist on purpose) you'll probably enjoy this style of writing.

2. Times have absolutely changed and norms have changed. Garp is very, very much a book of the seventies by a man sympathetic to feminism writing at a time when women novelists had much less cultural power. I admire the impulse. I think Garp has a lot of historic interest. I don't think that it has a lot to teach someone who, today, pays a lot of attention to feminist concerns, and I think that its limitations will stand out uncomfortably sharply.

3. This is just me spitballing, but: I think there was a period in the mid-late 20th century when it became possible to publish very "shocking" material for a mass audience without a lot of allusion and disguise, and a lot of people felt that it would be politically powerful to write all these horrible things, that it would shock society out of its complacency. I think this is a more defensible position if you grew up in the fifties, or if you were dealing with the Reagan eighties, where "let's be respectable and nice and keep sex and violence behind closed doors" was a really powerful position. Right now, grimdark and fridging and all that are just money-making tropes. They have no power to shock or move, and in fact are particularly limp in the age of Trump/Proud Boys/incels/etc.

So basically, I think that some folks are going to stumble across early John Irving and it will hit the right notes for them, but the books are pretty darn dated.

Schadenfrau, I don't think you'd like any of the Irving I ever read. Maybe try A Prayer For Owen Meany if you want to try one?
posted by Frowner at 5:15 PM on November 21, 2018 [107 favorites]

To be entirely frank, the justification for rape in the early chapters of Garp is a personal pain point, and not something where I can do much more than scream "WTF!!!!" What Frowner describes is exactly why I nope right out of most of the "litfic" I was supposed to grow into in the 80s and early 90s.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 5:38 PM on November 21, 2018 [10 favorites]

This was one of the defining books of my childhood. I was amused to (re?)discover that at least one other father (the author himself) considered it a not-terrible idea to hand the book to their 12 year old offspring.

I am sure I missed a lot of the content, and I really have no desire to re-read it 20 years later to see how it lands as an adult. My re-read list is full of written-by-women early-feminist-SF, thank you very much. Frowner’s description of literature meant to “shock society out of its complacency” resonates with me as an excellent description of the type of “classics” that my born-in-the-50’s father handed me. And I see it as totally distinct from more modern shock-the-reader Joe-Abercrombie-style dark and gore.

However, I definitely caught the feminism in Garp, on some level. I’m wondering now how much Jenny Fields impacted my until-recently-unexamined assumption that while a man wasn’t necessary, of course I’d have kids. (And even as a kid, I recognized that that scene was rape, and wrong.) Roberta didn’t make as memorable an impression, but then, I had a real-life role model for that.
posted by Metasyntactic at 5:44 PM on November 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

"We should be ashamed that sexual intolerance is still tolerated, but it is."

Reminds me of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance."
posted by phenylphenol at 6:57 PM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

Feminism was 140 years old when "Garp" was published, and even women's suffrage took 80 years, but OK.
posted by seraphine at 7:14 PM on November 21, 2018 [15 favorites]

I will never forget "the undertoad," from Garp. That concept is a personal meme with me.

I'm partial to "Gradual school is where you go to school and you gradually find out you don't want to go to school anymore."

Wasn't crazy about the book, but that line alone was worth the price of admission.
posted by she's not there at 8:38 PM on November 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

I read a lot of Irving as a younger man. And I loved him. He was like Vonnegut, only with more sex. And the early books, there’s all this weird sexuality going on... (hello Hotel New Hampshire)....but I tell you what. Anyone who reads The Cider House Rules and still thinks women shouldn’t have the right to choose? Well, there’s something wrong with that persons thinking machine. I dunno if Irving was a great novelist, or A+ feminist. But he taught this stupid kid that abortions are something that women should be guaranteed. So that’s pretty cool.
posted by valkane at 9:26 PM on November 21, 2018 [20 favorites]

I was never a big fan, but yeah, he completely changed my mind on abortion.
posted by night_train at 11:04 PM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

This book/movie along with A Prayer for Owen Meany are two of the texts that I most associate with my parents' generation. Their hopes and dreams, their desires and hangups, their efforts to lead meaningful lives and to push forward the cause of justice unencumbered by their parents' issues... a lot of it is reflected in these narratives.

At the same time, the ways in which Garp is problematic and in many cases falls short of its aspirations are also readily apparent in the world they left to us.
posted by theory at 11:13 PM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

I, too, grabbed the book out of Dad's bookshelf when I was 12. I loved John Irving for a long time but I'm giving him a break at the moment.

'A Widow for One Year' is very good and has one of my favourite last lines ever.

Thanks for posting, I was reading this at lunchtime and only got halfway through so you've saved me a search.
posted by h00py at 2:50 AM on November 22, 2018

1. There was this style in the late sixties and seventies that hasn't aged well, with the wacky names and the "is it satire or not" and the emphasis on the grotesque and the sort of unevenness of tone and a variety of distancing techniques (lots of ironic humor, emphasis on the inappropriate, dark humor generally) used about violence and horrible things. You see this in Donald Barthelme, in Gore Vidal, in...oh, lots of left wing novels that are not in fact unsympathetic.

Ugghhh. Tom Robbins, John Barth, Tom Wolfe, Dan Jenkins, Hunter S Thompson, later John Updike ...., SO MUCH spirit-breaking misogyny crammed into this edgy new writing that was lauded and applauded. I read it all far too young and without the critical distance that would have strengthened the support my arm needed to fling the book out the window.

Thank you, women’s movement, for working so hard to make a world where, among many other things, literature is more diverse, and critical distance/unwillingness to accept canon wisdom blindly are getting baked right into the system.
posted by jfwlucy at 4:48 AM on November 22, 2018 [34 favorites]

Favoriting Frowner and jfwlucy. That time period in fiction was one where authors were cavalier with the lives of their characters. I remember reading Nabokov's "Ada" (1969) and thinking there was something actually immoral in treating fictional characters so badly. And when I say "fictional characters" I primarily mean women. I remember reading a John Updike novel where the protagonist (undoubtedly Rabbit Angstrom) is rating his wife's friends for possible adultery and describes one as being ripe like a fruit just before it began to rot. I was young and naïve, and it stunned me that to a *great respected author*, that's all I was- a fruit that needed to be eaten before it went bad. But they were all like that- Heller, Roth, Vonnegut, Bellow, Barth. I had to acknowledge the good writing and accept that I wasn't even meant to be the audience. I enjoyed "Garp" at the time (particularly that story-within-the-story) and wasn't crushed by it, but I'm surprised to discover that it was "feminist". The first book I read with which I connected powerfully because it was describing a world recognizable to me was Doris Lessing's "Golden Notebook".

I read Irving for a while and stopped. I admire his ambition in taking on hard subjects, and I think the things that I don't like: excessive whimsy, Dickensian coincidences, etc., are what allow him to connect with more people. When I talk about books with people who obviously don't read a lot of books, their favorite book is often "Owen Meany". That's not a bad thing.
posted by acrasis at 7:23 AM on November 22, 2018 [16 favorites]

Trigger warning: violent plot point from Garp.
This is an amazing self-serving attempt to pretend Irving wrote a feminist novel that would still work now. What I most remember from reading it back then was the Ellen Jamesons, a ridiculous over the top satire of feminism (a group of feminists who literally cut their own tongues out because a rapist had done this to a victim). While he does say in this essay that he satirized the women’s movement, that statement really doesn’t do justice to the cruelty and rage at feminists apparent behind that satire.

When I was younger, I liked Irving, but I outgrew his obvious social lessons and got tired of trained bears, wrestling, and bizarre deaths.
posted by FencingGal at 9:08 AM on November 22, 2018 [12 favorites]

Also, when I read the book back then, I never thought Jenny’s feminism was meant to be positive at all. There was a strong belief by some people that feminists were Going Too Far and Ruining Everything, and Garp was part of that.

It’s nice that Irving has evolved, but I’m not willing to pretend this book was something it’s not.
posted by FencingGal at 9:15 AM on November 22, 2018 [12 favorites]

but I outgrew his obvious social lessons and got tired of trained bears, wrestling, and bizarre deaths.

something to do with deadly serious themes running up against quirk -- I actually go a little red in the face when I remind myself of how very into Irving's stuff I was for a while. Only two books really -- Garp and Hotel New Hampshire.

The turning point was taking a creative writing course, mentioning Irving was an influence and the prof audibly sighing in frustration. Later (after a few drinks) he explained to me that he'd never actually finished any of Irving's books but if the quality of fiction being submitted by those who claimed to love him was any indication, the man was recklessly destroying the art form. And then, on a more instructive note, he suggested that maybe the problem was how Irving played the point-of-view game rather like a 19th century novelist, hovering godlike over ALL of his characters, knowing their thoughts and motivations, which for him (the prof) was inherently problematic -- that the modern novel (this would've been around 1980) had come to realize that no individual can have that sort omniscience, that it was in fact a kind of lie to use it.

And so on.

Knowing me, I probably continued arguing my point for a while but eventually I did stop all attempts to emulate Irving in my fiction. And I stopped reading him.
posted by philip-random at 10:20 AM on November 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

Turns out, grazing the periphery of feminism and declaring it to be on the whole a force for good but ultimately undermined by the bits where women give in to their innate melodrama and go a bit too feminist, does not make one a feminist or constitute a contribution to feminism.
posted by seraphine at 10:27 AM on November 22, 2018 [9 favorites]

Cider House Rules - he made a very salient point early on in the book & then belabored it for another 200 pages. Son Of The Circus- WTF he murders everyone just as you get attached to them. I wanted to throw that book.

A Prayer for Owen Meany was a good & well-written meditation on the concepts of free will & predestination, doubt & faith, & is the one book of his I’ve read more than once.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:30 AM on November 22, 2018

A strong argument for death of the author given how many artists are the progressive heroes of their own imagination. Le Guin, in contrast, is a good example of an artist who looked back and identified her earlier work as less than ideal given what she learned over the years.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 10:45 AM on November 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Loved the movie as a kid. Read the book maybe a decade later, and really enjoyed it. A few years after that I saw the movie again, and hated it.

Sounds like if I read the book again now, I'll be disappointed.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 2:19 PM on November 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thank you, acrasis, but I have to defend Nabokov’s Ada a bit because it is so head and shoulders (and torso!) above everything else here, and because Nabokov in my opinion here is doing what he does in Lolita— consciously and deliberately seducing the reader through beautiful words and images into cruel and abhorrent moral positions. Nabokov himself described the book as a beautiful love story between two horrible people. He hates Van and Ada and how they treat everyone around them. I see them like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby; sexually magnetic, immensely wealthy, and lethally careless and indifferent They smash up things and people and leave them floating like Lucette, in the dark and complicated foaming waters of their wake.
posted by jfwlucy at 4:29 PM on November 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Well, I actually admire Nabokov greatly. And as symbols, I'm fine with Lolita and Quilty and Humbert. But there are some authors who clearly love their characters and empathize with them, and there are authors who use their characters as marionettes in cruel and exaggerated theater. Because the late 60s and early 70s appeared to those of us living them as cruel and exaggerated, we accepted that tone in literature. I wonder what literature has in store for us *these* days. I hope not more of the same.
posted by acrasis at 5:17 PM on November 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Because the late 60s and early 70s appeared to those of us living them as cruel and exaggerated, we accepted that tone in literature. I

I doubt it was a mindful reaction to times that were cruel and exaggerated, and would chalk it up much more to a normalized reaction to trauma originating in the generational effects of WWII PTSD and its associated production of social repression.
posted by Miko at 5:21 AM on November 23, 2018

I am baffled and horrified at the idea that anything Irving writes is supposed to be feminist. Honestly.
posted by sarcasticah at 9:38 AM on November 24, 2018 [1 favorite]